San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Lifting up Chicano, Indigenous voices
Ballí serves as executive director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center
Growing up in Brownsville on the tip of Texas, Cristina Ballí never considered working in the arts.
After graduating from Our Lady of the Lake University, she became a social worker, including a stint as case manager at St. Peter-St. Joseph Children’s Home — affectionately known as St.PJ’s — in San Antonio.
But feeling burned out after nearly a decade of social work, she returned to the Rio
Grande Valley and accepted a job with RGV Educational Broadcasting in Harlingen. It would change her life.
Her work as operations manager and as a producer evolved into her covering the arts beat, taping public service announcements for all arts events in the Valley, conducting interviews and preparing documentaries.
“That’s where my passion for the arts grew,” Ballí said. “I had never considered that but it eventually led to a career in arts administration.”
Ballí is now executive director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, a job she took seven years ago.
Before that, she worked as director of the Narciso Martinez Cultural Arts Center in San Benito.
Born in Reynosa, Mexico, Martinez lived most of his life near San Benito. Considered one of the best musicians of the conjunto genre, he died in 1992.
“The cultural arts center named after him is a small but mighty arts organization modeled after the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center,” Ballí said.
She also worked for the City of San Benito and at Texas Folklife in Austin.
Since joining the Guadalupe in September 2016, Ballí has brought consistency to an organization that faltered for several years.
“Other directors were courageous in their own way but in terms of staying true to the mission and staying connected to the community and stabilizing and expanding programming, she has been stellar,” said Carmen Tafolla, author of more than 30 books and former
poet laureate of Texas and of San Antonio.
Ballí, added Tafolla, has “stayed true and strong to the commitment to keeping the Guadalupe a place where Chicanos and Indigenous voices have a place to develop and be heard.”
Before Ballí took over the Guadalupe, there were periods of turmoil where community support wavered and funding was inadequate.
Today, the arts organization receives funding from the Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the City of
San Antonio Department of Arts & Culture, H-E-B, Texas Commission on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
And there are several projects in the works that are revitalizing the area, including the designation last year of a cultural arts district, a bookstore that features works by Latino writers, the remodeling of the Guadalupe Theater and a master plan that will bring nine buildings owned by Guadalupe into a cohesive campus.
Ballí said she was fortunate to have been mentored by Pedro Rodriguez, who served as executive director from 1983-1998, during her first year with the Guadalupe.
Rodriguez died in December 2022 at age 86.
“What I learned the most from him was how fierce an advocate for the arts he was and how important it is for us to serve the community,” she said.“Now the best part of my job is when I see the reaction of people attending a play at the theater or sitting in the plaza enjoying a mariachi concert.”
The center is slowly returning to normalcy after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down all programming and canceled annual events like the Tejano Conjunto Festival, Ballí said.
Sold-out performances at the Guadalupe Theater, large crowds at the three-day conjunto festival held last month at Rosedale Park, and summer events for children and teens are routine again for the arts organization that since its founding in 1980 has been preserving and promoting Chicano/Latino and Indigenous dance, music, literature, theater, film and visual arts.
Some events returned in 2022 but with many folks, including Ballí and several staff members contracting covid, attendance was not as strong.
“There was no live programming for an entire year
and that was very odd,” said Ballí, 52.
Like everyone else, the Guadalupe turned to virtual programming, presenting classes and the conjunto festival via Zoom.
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom, Ballí said. In 2021, the Guadalupe Latino Bookstore opened, and the center received a large and unexpected gift from a nationally-known philanthropist. The $1 million donation was from MacKenzie Scott, former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
“We took screen shots of our bank account because we couldn’t believe it,” Ballí said.
In October, the bookstore opened in what used to house the Progreso Pharmacy.
The bookstore features books by U.S. Latino authors with a large focus on writers from Texas, a children’s section, bilingual books and books in Spanish.
On the second Friday of each month the bookstore hosts the Texas Author Series.
“Latino Leadership Lessons” will be presented June 9 at 6 p.m. at the bookstore, 1301 Guadalupe St., with Leticia Van de Putte, Laura Barberena, Frankie Gonzalez-Wolfe and Patricia Mejia. Moderator will be Delia Garcia, who edited the book “Latina Leadership Lessons: Fifty Latinas Speak.”
Last year, the Texas Commission on the Arts designated a new state cultural district, the Westside Cultural Arts District.
“Cultural districts,” notes the commission’s web site, “are special zones that harness the power of cultural resources to stimulate economic development and community vitality.”
Besides the Guadalupe, others in the Westside Cultural Arts District are SAY Sí, Museo del Westside, San Anto Cultural Arts, Esperanza
Peace & Justice Center, American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions and the National Association of Latino Arts & Culture.
Other cultural arts districts in San Antonio are the King William, Old Spanish Trail and Zona Cultural.
Post-pandemic, the Guadalupe is working on modernizing the Guadalupe Theater as well as a master plan to turn several buildings into a cohesive campus.
Also in the works is a partnership with the University of Texas at San Antonio’s College of Liberal and Fine Arts and the UTHealth School of Public Health for a study on the impact of arts and culture on the well-being of seniors, Ballí said.
The theater, which had to add additional shows when it presented “Crystal City 1969” and “Chato’s Bridge” earlier this year, is slated to close
Sept. 30 for renovations. “It needs to be modernized and brought into the 21st century,” Ballí said.
Construction could begin before the end of the year or in early 2024. OTJ Architects, the Washington, D.C.-based firm already working on San Antonio’s Sunken Garden Theater and the Alameda Theater, has been hired to design the master plan.
“We own nine buildings that we’d like to see integrated for programming specific to the facilities,” Ballí said. She hopes the melding of all the buildings into one campus will be her legacy.