SAN DIEGO, Calif. – July 11, 2023

Centro Cultural de la Raza, one of the nation’s longest running Chicana/o, Mexican, Indigenous and Latina/o/x cultural centers, has received half a million dollars from the Mellon Foundation, the country’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities.

This funding will support the Centro in its mission to “create, promote, preserve, and educate about Chicano, Mexican, Indigenous and Latino arts and culture.” Spread across two years, it will include financial support for developing Centro’s organizational capacity, infrastructure and programming. Over the better part of the last thirteen years, the Centro has been primarily a volunteer-run organization, with only occasional part-time staff. This has meant many ups and downs, including a low point where previous leadership lost the space’s non-profit status. However, over the last six years, new leadership and renewed energy from a committed group of volunteers turned the page on the  Centro’s previous woes. The Mellon Foundation took notice and the funding will now support the transition to paid staff, including the hiring of an Operations Manager, Executive Director, and part-time Events Coordinators. Currently celebrating its 52nd  anniversary in Balboa Park, in one of two former water tanks that once serviced the Naval hospital, the funding comes at an historic and opportune time for the Centro. 

While the Centro’s  five decade milestone was marked with a virtual celebration  during the pandemic, it is 52-year cycles in many Mesoamerican calendars that signal times of renewal, notably through “new fire” ceremonies. Accordingly, the grant comes at a time coinciding with the 52nd anniversary exhibit, Toltecayotl Fuego Nuevo en Aztlán, the first California solo show for Taos, New Mexico-based artist Guillermo Chávez Rosette. Rosette, previously of San Diego, was part of a collective of artists, the Toltecas en Aztlán, who were among the cofounders of the Centro Cultural de la Raza. His solo show on the occasion of Centro’s own new fire, alongside this infusion of

financial support, symbolizes a new era for the local multidisciplinary arts, dance, exhibit, music, and crafts venue. 

“The Mellon funding reflects its increased research and investment in the Borderlands and as such will also support extending the Centro’s programming, with a four-part multi-year series of exhibits titled Borderlands Visions. The effort will feature a retrospective show on the creative work of 1980s-90s transborder arts collective that worked largely out of the Centro: the Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo. A second exhibit will focus on what scholars and artists alike are increasingly referring to as an Indigenous Borderlands. This will be followed by a show highlighting a comparative lens at borders across distinct geographies, from our own border 15 miles south of the Centro, to Mexico’s southern border, the Mediterranean, and the liquid borders of the Caribbean. The last exhibit in the series will convene artists and futurists to collectively imagine Anti-border Futures. Each of these four exhibitions will seek to draw on the extensive human, artistic and imaginative resources of artists, scholars, writers and other transborder residents to stimulate dialogue on the roles and limitations of borders in the structuring of our social worlds.

Dr. Roberto D. Hernández, the Centro Cultural de la Raza’s Board President since 2021–a  longtime volunteer and associate professor of Chicana/o Studies at San Diego State University–notes that the Centro Cultural de la Raza is first and foremost a community-based cultural arts center. “We here at the Centro have long held the belief that the Centro belongs to everyone. As a community space, the Centro is what we collectively make of it. The support from the Mellon Foundation goes a long way to acknowledge the autonomous self-activity of our border community and reinforces the long trajectory of commitment to artistic creativity and human beauty that was and continues to be the anchor of our collective work.”

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About the Centro Cultural
de la Raza

San Diego's Centro Cultural de la Raza was founded in 1970 as a Chicano Community Cultural Center and functions as an alternative space that encourages and facilitates artistic growth and cultural exchange in the San Diego/Tijuana border region. The Centro provides classes and features a dynamic interdisciplinary schedule of events which includes exhibits, musical performances, installation art, readings, receptions, Azteca dance, Teatro Chicano, Puerto Rican Bomba, film screenings and other events.

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.