Houston community leaders call for Latino cultural center
They ask why a city with 45% Hispanic population lacks major facility
By next fall, more than $700 million in building projects that have transformed Houston’s Museum District during the past decade will be complete. Near the Theater District, Stages’ new Gordy complex opens next weekend, further burnishing the city’s reputation as a cultural mecca.
But will Hispanic Houstonians see their culture represented in these new spaces consistently and profoundly?
Some community leaders think not, even though the city’s Latino population is 44.9 percent, a number that is expected to grow with the 2020 census.
Those leaders wonder why a city with such a fierce appetite for new parks, public spaces, museums and theaters has not invested in a major facility that acknowledges their significance. Why doesn’t Houston have a Latino cultural center on the scale of, say, the Asia Society Texas Center?
“Houston’s arts are ethnically and economically segregated,” said Nicolás Kanellos, a University of Houston professor and the
founder/director of Arte Público Press, the nation’s top publisher of Hispanic literature. The city’s major arts supporters, including individuals and philanthropic foundations, “have put all of their money into cultural centers for the wealthy and marginalized Latino cultural arts,” he said.
A number of other cities with burgeoning Latino populations are either already supporting their culture with multi-disciplinary arts centers or planning new ones. Dallas, Austin and San Antonio have had multimillion-dollar Latino centers for years. California’s Riverside Art Museum will open its Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture & Industry next year, and there’s a campaign underway to build the Latino Cultural Arts Center in Denver.
The point isn’t just to erect another building. A well-funded center could help to equalize and elevate local Latino visual, performing and literary arts groups that have been perennially underfunded or little known in Houston.
Tony Diaz, founder of the 21year-old literary organization Nuestro Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, was among those alarmed in September when the long-struggling performing arts organization Talento Bilingue de Houston, a bilingual English-Spanish theater group, lost its nonprofit status and folded. He also felt the failure was inevitable.
“It’s appropriate that the Talento Bilingue building used to be a supermarket,” he said. “Basically, the community was given a building that wasn’t built for art and told to have at it. There’s never been enough money to run the place, so every administration that’s been there was set up for failure.”
The Talento Bilingue Center is owned by the city and managed by Houston First, a local government corporation that promotes the city and oversees more than 10 city-owned buildings and properties. The building holds a theater, large studios and community rooms — making it Houston’s most comparable facility to Latino cultural centers elsewhere.
The city tapped the legacy group, MECA, Multicultural Education and Counseling through the Arts, to operate the Talento Bilingue Center while it creates a long-term plan for the building. Continuing to operate the building it owns in the Sixth Ward, MECA will offer its first dance, music and art classes at the TBH Center starting Jan. 21.
“Things are still up in the air about exactly what the community wants,” said MECA founder Alice Valdez.
City Council Member Robert Gallegos, whose District I includes the TBH Center, admires Valdez’s work. The community needs both the MECA and TBH centers, he said, but he believes Houston also has room for something bigger and better. “As our population grows, we will need a larger facility,” he said.
He already has a vision for what that might be. Gallegos worked with Mayor Sylvester Turner last year to commit $1.5 million in future capital improvement funds toward buying land for a Hispanic library and archive building in 2024.
He would like to see that idea develop into a building with a theater and an art gallery as well as a library, calling it “a Hispanic cultural arts and archive center … a multi-service center for the arts that is also a tourist attraction.”
Financing such a place would require the full-philanthropic press of a major capital campaign. But what might be possible if Houston embraced the idea?
Albuquerque’s gem
The 20-acre campus of the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque’s Barelas neighborhood is the gold standard.
Its five simpatico buildings contain a museum with three exhibition spaces and a collection of more than 3,000 objects; a threetheater performance hall; a library and genealogy center; an education building and two restaurants.
The architecture is on display, as well, designed by local firms to reflect the diverse history of Hispanic design. There are visual lessons in the powerful geometry of Mesoamerican pyramids, the curves of Spanish-inspired barrelvaulted ceilings, the grace of Spanish-Pueblo Revival style and the drama of modern Latin minimalism.
The brainchild of local artists in the late 1970s who wanted space to show their work because mainstream institutions ignored them, the campus was ultimately built in 2000 by the state of New Mexico.
Construction begins this spring on a welcome center surrounding the chapel-like tower that holds artist Frederico Vigil’s monumental concave fresco “Mundos de Mestizaje,” a star attraction that depicts the history of pre-Hispanic and Hispanic civilization.
The National Hispanic Cultural Center sees about 280,000 visitors annually. About 70 percent are local, although acting executive director Alberto Cuessy and his staff would like to attract more out-of-towners.
“Like every arts and culture organization, we struggle for money,” Cuessy said. “We have 32 staff for 20 acres, five buildings, 700 events a year. It’s incredible what these people can do on a shoestring.”
The center operates on an annual budget of about $2.2 million, appropriated by the Legislature mainly for operations and staffing. The NHCC Foundation provides funds and support for its many programs through grant opportunities and sponsorships.
“We are always looking at our programs for ways to reach new audiences,” Cuessy said.
Tey Marianna Nunn, the NHCC museum’s director and chief curator, sees opportunities to grow. “Mainstream institutions are clamoring for Latino subject matter because they don’t have the expertise, and we do,” she said. “So there are ways to leverage. But I don’t think one center can do it all because there are so many differences and nuances, layers and complexities to Latino communities and culture.”
Serving Dallas community
Dallas’ 16-year-old Latino Cultural Center is community-focused, home to two resident theater groups. It’s also used by several other Latino performing-arts organizations.
Designed by Mexican modernists Ricardo and Victor Legoretta, the 27,500-square-foot facility contains a distinctive and colorblocked L-shaped building around a plaza. Inside are a 300seat theater, a community room and a gallery space.
One of four community centers overseen by Dallas’ Office of Arts & Culture, the LCC was financed with a mix of public and private funds and built for just shy of $10 million. General manager Benjamin Espino believes that without land and a lead gift of $250,000 donated by the Meadows Foundation — one of Dallas’ oldest private philanthropic organizations — the concept could have languished indefinitely.
The city recently found $4.8 million to expand the center, eliminating a public-private funding rule, so it could activate an improvement bond for the project that voters approved in 2003. Those funds will add a black-box theater.
Finding what Houston wants
Alice Valdez, MECA’s founder, gets angry when people say Houston has no Latino cultural center.
A former professional musician, she started Houston’s oldest and largest Latino cultural organization 42 years ago. MECA’s multi-story historic structure in the Sixth Ward — the former Dow School, built in 1912 — is nowhere near state-of-the art but will soon be upgraded.
The city awarded MECA $800,000 in Hurricane Harvey relief funds to repair roof damage and leaks. After a two-year private fundraising effort with major support from the Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts, the Brown Foundation and the government of Qatar, MECA also is replacing its makeshift theater with a new auditorium and installing elevators. Construction begins next summer and should be complete in 2021, Valdez said.
MECA presents art exhibits and performances but focuses on out-of-school programs and social services as a United Way agency.
When people talk about a Latino cultural center, they can mean many different things, said Debbie McNulty, director of the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs. “Whatever is in your head right now, 10 people will have 10 different ideas.”
Arté Publico Press, University of Houston’s Center for MexicanAmerican Studies, the Hispanic Forum and the Mexican Institute of Greater Houston are all well-established and respected; they, too, could be considered cultural centers. So might the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s International Center for the Arts of the Americas. But none of them offer programs akin to the centers in Dallas and Albuquerque.
McNulty’s office is seeking public input about the future of the TBH Center. The East End Houston cultural district and the East End District TIRZ (Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone) also have a stake in the property, which is tantalizingly close to the convention center. Hispanic community leaders want it to remain in the hands of a Hispanic organization.
‘Hispanic cultural capital’
Houston has an abundance of what Diaz calls “Hispanic cultural capital.”
That was clear last spring when the University of Houston hosted the international Latino Art Now conference. The mayor declared it a spring of Latinx arts, and for several months virtually every arts institution in the city showcased Hispanic talent, much of it local.
“The stereotype is there’s not enough interest or talent. That’s not true,” Diaz said. “But there
“The stereotype is there’s not enough interest or talent. That’s not true.”
Tony Diaz, founder of the literary organization Nuestro Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say
are a lot of structural barriers to Latino art institutions prospering.”
According to a study commissioned by the community and released in late 2018 by the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, only 7 percent of Houston’s hotel-motel tax funds — the biggest local source of public funds for the arts — were awarded to Latino organizations from 2010-2015. Houston’s four largest philanthropic foundations scored even worse: Less than 1 percent of a total $110 million they gave to arts during that period went to Latinos.
Funds from Houston’s hotel-motel taxes are still skewed toward large institutions in the Museum and Theater Districts that attract tourists. In December, the city approved approximately $128 million of those funds, to be distributed by the Houston Arts Alliance through 2024. McNulty’s office and the arts alliance have recently improved the transparency and fairness of the grants processes, resulting in a dramatic increase of applications from all over the city, especially from individual artists — and more competition for the funds.
MECA typically receives the most of any Houston Latino organization — about $75,000 a year — which is less than onetenth of its annual budget.
“Let’s put it in context,” Diaz said. “In San Antonio, two of the three highestfunded nonprofits are Latino: the Guadalupe Theater is getting $500,000 this year, and the Esperanza Center, which does hardcore community activism, is also in the six-figure range.”
Arte Público flourishes because the University of Houston gave it a home, said Kanellos, the founder of Arte Público. Through a partnership with the Smithsonian Institution, he is able to present literary programs and exhibits around the United States; but Arte Publico stopped working with its hometown schools after local funding for those programs was cut.
A dearth of Hispanic political power at City Hall and a lack of awareness don’t help, said Kanellos.
If a new Latino center were to materialize, it should be built in the Museum District, where it could be prominent and not a
“poor stepchild,” he added. “It would be a phenomenon.”
McNulty noted that in Houston, such facilities typically arise through public-private partnerships driven by philanthropists who see a need, build consensus, raise a lot of money, put something in place and then donate it to the city, collaborating with government entities on sustainability and longterm operations. The parks renaissance of the past decade is a perfect example.
“There’s certainly a large number of Latinos in Houston, and a lot of Latino wealth,” she said. “If a group of Latino civic leaders and funders, high networth people, wanted to get together and say, ‘We need a cultural center,’ we’d have one. I think that’s the question: Is a certain amount of need being satisfied (already), or have people just not thought of this before?”
Diaz doubts that a new building will solve all of the inequities he sees, but he is optimistic about changes that more awareness will bring. “I think there’s a lot of goodwill. I think everyone wants to help,” he said. “We just haven’t looked at it this way.”