Las Imaginistas

How can the radical act of dreaming center an artistic movement on equity and justice bring historically disenfranchised communities into dialogue with their city’s legislative policy sector?

Overview

Las Imaginistas is a female-led art collective in Brownsville, Texas that empowers residents through artistic expression and legislative change. Brownsville’s close proximity to the US-Mexico border means the community is both bilingual and binational. Through two projects, Taller de Permiso and Hacemos la Ciudad, the artists of Las Imaginistas challenge individuals and communities to dream - allowing for powerful levels of capacity building and civic change.

Community Narrative

The historic city of Brownsville, located at the southernmost tip of Texas, is nestled between Matamoros, Mexico and the popular Texas beach town of South Padre. Despite the community’s 175 years of existence, Brownsville is the poorest city in the nation with an average annual household income of $15,030, which is ¼ the national average.

Las Imaginistas, made up of activist-artists Celeste De Luna, Nansi Guevara, and Christina Patino Sukhgian Houle, are a collaborative team that uses the strength of art, and the “radical act of imagining” as tools in the building of just and equitable futures within Brownsville. The trio works to empower the Brownsville community by daring residents to dream of an equitable city that embraces its bilingual and binational identity.  Las Imaginistas utilizes the arts to build bridges between the traditionally gentrified policy sector and the city as a whole. In these simple yet powerful acts of dreaming, residents become co-creators in the shaping of their city and their lives.

The Vision

Despite a near 95% Hispanic or Latino population within Brownsville, the city’s municipal staff has a primarily white composition. As a result of this inherent structural divide, voices of immigrants are often absent from both the built environment and city legislation. This has lead to many challenges for Mexican-American residents to prosper within the city. Las Imaginistas aims to serve as a practical cultural, linguistic, and artistic link between the community and the policy sector.

The Project: Taller De Permiso

For the Buena Vida neighborhood, the city’s most economically disadvantaged area, street vending exists as a financially accessible form of micro-entrepreneurship and independent financial stability. For many, it is a known form of work in the countries they emigrated from and a flexible method of integrating themselves into the local economy. However, prior to this project street vending was not permitted in the Buena Vida neighborhood in Brownsville.

The Taller de Permiso project sought to create a more equitable community by streamlining Brownsville’s permitting process for street vendors to allow more Brownsville residents to participate in the food vending industry.

Street vending is a great launching point for micro-entrepreneurship. Buena Vida’s predominantly low income residents do not have the economic means to start their careers in the food industry with food trucks or brick and mortar restaurants, but can afford a small cart. Knowledge of the permitting process empowers communities to both advocate for the change of unfair legislation and to work within the legislation that already exists. The Taller project included the composition of an accessible mobile library that houses materials explaining the permitting process as well as access to physical materials such as street vending carts and a location for vendors to sell their wares.

Taller de Permiso consisted of three sections:

• Permission to Dream. The Dream Parade saw Buena Vida residents march with visual depictions of what they wanted to achieve through the project.

• Permission to Know. Participants conducted interviews with city officials and gathered information from government publications and newspapers to gain knowledge about the permitting process.

• Permission to Act. Community members built a mobile library to contain information gathered about the permitting process. Las Imaginistas worked with city officials to designate a market area as the physical space for micro-entrepreneurs to sell their goods, which would also act as a symbolic space in their community. Vendors selling goods in the market attended a ten-week seminar on starting a micro-business.

The Project: Hacemos la Ciudad

Brownsville is a city on the US / Mexico border. City officials have often funded community development projects to make the city more inviting to outsiders, but are often challenged to bring the same attention to quality of life issues for Brownsville residents themselves.  Las Imaginistas believe that all Brownsville’s residents deserve a strong quality of life and that the city must dedicate significant time and resources to revisioning its built environment before the problem can be solved.

Like in the Taller de Permiso project, Las Imaginistas wanted Hacemos la Ciudad to intermix legislative change with artistic expression. Las Imaginistas envisioned residents’ wishes, community activists’ labor, and government officials’ power would intersect in the creation and adoption of a comprehensive plan to reform the city’s built environment.

Hacemos la Ciudad helps Brownsville residents to understand how their built environment impacts their lives and celebrates residents’ dreams of a decolonized, sustainable, and resilient city.

Over the project's course, Las Imaginistas organized 10 events (engaging roughly 300 people) centering around imagining the future of equity and justice in Brownsville. Like Taller, Hacemos began with a parade which invited residents to sing, dance, dream, and donate chucherias (knick-knacks) lying around their homes.

The ideas residents shared about a reimagined Brownsville culminated in the creation of a physical city model constructed from the chucherias that was unveiled at the Festival de Construccion in November of 2018. In this way, the reimagined city model was physically made from a part of its community members, bearing witness to the power they hold in creatively and actively daring to dream. For example, residents dreamed of a Brownsville that embraced its binational status and replaced its border wall with a plethora of walking bridges: a potent symbol of the transnational and transcultural identities that serve as the city’s foundational strength.

The thoughts gathered during the initial research portion of the project also served as the basis for “Plan de Arte Cívico del Pueblo Entero:” three books on how Brownsville must change:

1. Body. A book for residents of Brownsville.

2. Thought. A book for self-identified thought and culture leaders.

3. Land. A book for the city’s elected and appointed government officials.

These books act as a link between the built city and the dreamed city by identifying actionable ways the city can merge the two entities into one. Las Imaginistas worked with community partners over the course of six months to compile and create the “Plan de Arte Cívico del Pueblo Entero.” The organization planned on launching reading groups in 2020 so that residents would have the opportunity to read through the proposals with others.

Critical Success Factors

• Sueños no son fantasías. Las Imaginistas empowers the community it serves by validating all ideas and dreams for the future.

• Celebrating a community in the present. Las Imaginistas uses a strengths-based perspective to support socio-economic development.

Funding and Budget

• ArtPlace America. Taller de Permiso received a $350,000 grant from ArtPlace America.

• A Blade of Grass. Las Imaginistas received $20,000 in unrestricted funding as 2018 Blade of Grass Fellows.

Roles and Partners

• Educators. Las Imaginistas invited industry experts to share their knowledge of urban planning, architecture, and business with Brownsville residents during both projects.

• City Government. City officials aided the legislative portion of both projects and participated in all of the community celebrations Las Imaginistas hosted.

Artists’ Role

Taller de Permiso artists helped vendors create marketing campaigns and graphics to put on their carts.

Performance artists at the Festival de Construccion eased residents, activists, and government officials into the dreaming portion of the event. Their performance allowed attendees to lean into their imaginative side and explore the potential of Brownsville’s built environment.

In general, the artists’ role was to create community engagement spaces that are:

• Nonhierarchical, valuing different forms of civic expression

• Accessible across language barriers, childcare needs, and transportation costs

• Centered on deep listening

Impacts and Outcomes

• Legal street vending. Legal street vendor permitting was written into Brownsville’s policy. The pilot market space continued beyond the end of the project as well.

• Actionable arts plan. Las Imaginistas and community partners created the “Plan de Arte Cívico del Pueblo Entero” to identify actionable ways that the city can merge the built city and the dreamed city of its residents.

• Collaborative street vending ecosystem. Taller de Permiso has built a strong, interconnected network of vendors who have the ability to work collaboratively towards the success of upcoming markets, raise important questions regarding taxation and business income as it relates to social security, and organize their inclusion as street vendors in annual celebrations of bi-nationality.

• Re-envisioning the policy process. Both projects actively worked to expand the types of intelligence needed in equitable policy planning to include the somatic, spatial, social-emotional, and narrative intelligence practices vital to artistic engagement.

• Re-engagement with space. The projects allowed individuals across sectors to engage deeply on the ways in which inequality is physically built into the environment, how modern history is often a continuation of a colonial legacy, and how community members might then develop the power to intervene in those systems of power.

Lessons Learned

• Practices rooted in artistic methods become not only powerful, but necessary components of cross-sector, cross-cultural engagement in urban planning.

• Empowerment is not simply the holding of power. It is equally an understanding of how power is distributed across systems, and an ability to actively position oneself within those dynamics.

References

“Census Profile: Brownsville, TX.” Census Reporter, Knight News Challenge.

Clark, Steve. “Brownsville Targeting Unauthorized Vending.” The Brownsville Herald, 27 Apr. 2020.

“Hacemos.” LAS IMAGINISTAS.

Halio, Grace. “A Blade of Grass Announces 2018 Fellows for Socially Engaged Art.” ARTnews.com, 18 Nov. 2019.

Miller, Jesse. “Las Imaginistas' Hacemos La Ciudad.” Texas Architect Magazine, Texas Society of Architects, 11 May 2020.

Patino Houle, Christina. “A Radically Different Planning Process in Brownsville.” Shelterforce, 25 Mar. 2020.

“Three Artist-Activists Help a Neighborhood Dream about, and Develop, Its Economic Future.” Edited by John Spayde, Forecast Public Art, 13 Dec. 2019.

“U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Brownsville City, Texas.” Census Bureau QuickFacts, US Census Bureau.