In 1995, the City of Houston granted $980,000 to Talento Bilingue de Houston, a Latinx arts nonprofit dedicated to a mission of education through year-round arts programming that has presented, promoted, and celebrated Latinx culture since 1977 (Tallet [Sept. 2019]). With this funding, TBH would convert a grocery store in the Second Ward into their new home. Despite its unconventional architectural origins, the Talento Bilingue building has since become a central institution in Houston’s Latinx arts scene, as TBH and other organizations have filled it with engaging programming and lively audiences. Driving by the TBH theater, you can see its vibrant murals proudly displaying Latinx faces and intricate designs; one mural boldly proclaims the phrase “yo creo,” meaning I believe or, fittingly, I create.  TBH efforts have grown in popularity and impact, to the point where in one recent year, TBH’s visitor/audience count reached close to 60,000 (East End Houston). In 2019, however, Talento Bilingue lots its nonprofit status, received only $5,000 from the city of Houston, and was, according to the Chronicle, “on the verge of insolvency” (Tallet [Sept. 2019]).  Through TBH, Houston’s Latinx arts community has claimed space in a city that often forces them to the margins: losing such a valued cultural resource is a very serious blow.

In response to community concerns about the gap left behind by the now-defunct Talento Bilingue nonprofit, the city worked with stakeholders in the Latinx literary/arts scene to preserve TBH’s historic facility as well as its legacy of fostering cultural literacy and celebrating the arts. Talento Bilingue’s crisis of funding cannot be classified as an isolated incident: rather, it serves as an indicator of profound disparities in Houston’s literary infrastructures. In a city that is more than 44.9% Latinx, Molly Glentzer of the Houston Chronicle asks a seemingly simple question: “[w]hy is there no major Latino cultural center in Houston?”  Glentzer’s observation points towards the structural inequalities in Houston’s literary/arts infrastructures at the root of Talento Bilingue’s insolvency: when it comes to funding distribution and state support, certain “mainstream” organizations are always favored, while others are deemed expendable, or fringe. Working to better understand the challenges faced by Talento Bilingue will not only reveal these racialized hierarchies of financial and political power, but will also demonstrate the passionate work of the Latinx community to create a more equitable arts future.

For over 40 years, Talento Bilingue helped to create an environment that celebrates and supports Latinx creative achievement.  Founded in 1977, originally under the name “‘Teatro Bilingue de Houston’ (Bilingual Theater of Houston),” TBH expanded its programming over the years to include not only theater but also “music, video and film production, [and] dancing” (East End Houston, HoustonPress). From “original plays with Latino twists” to interactive workshops and kids’ summer art camps, Talento Bilingue celebrates Latinx culture and creativity in many forms (Tallet [Sept. 2019]). Located in the historically Latinx East End, the venue has hosted hundreds of readings and workshops over the years, reflecting TBH’s long-standing collaborations with arts organizations across Houston: from Tony Diaz’s Nuestra Palabra ¹ to the Houston Grand Opera and Opera in the Heights (Tallet [Sept. 2019], East End Houston).

Despite this history of achievement and prominence in Houston’s Latinx community, organizational finance issues in recent years have halted the momentum of the nonprofit and placed the venue’s future in jeopardy. After failing to file their 990 to the IRS for three consecutive years, Talento Bilingue de Houston lost their nonprofit status and is now defunct. The historic building has survived, however, and remains owned and managed by the City of Houston. MECA²,  a long established Latinx arts organization in the city, has stepped up to temporarily oversee programming at the facility, which they are now calling MECA @ TBH (Tallet [Dec. 2019]). On the surface, Talento Bilingue’s dire straits may seem to reflect simple problems of management: former Executive Director Javier Perez, who oversaw the nonprofit in the years when 990s went unfiled and has been accused of sexually harassing a volunteer, was recently fired by the TBH board (Tallet [Sept. 2019]). However, Adán Medrano of the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC) asserts that the problem of “bad administration” can be traced back to “the funding agencies” that give to organizations like Talento Bilingue:

We have strong legacy organizations that are very hard to sustain because we have been blocked from the financial capital. It means that we don’t have the ability to hire good finance officers, development officers, grant writers or administrators that can keep bookkeeping and other tasks in line the same way that mainstream organizations with money can do (qtd. Tallet [Sept. 2019]).

Medrano clearly distinguishes “mainstream organizations” that cater to broad general and often majority-white audiences from organizations like Talento Bilingue.  He highlights an important divide in the Houston literary/art world that is founded in racialized hierarchies of power and reinforced through funding. In the words of Tony Diaz, “[t]here’s never been enough money to run [Talento Bilingue], so every administration that’s been there was set up for failure” (qtd. Glentzer). TBH’s history of achievement and engagement proves that community arts can flourish in spite of persistent money problems: being “set up for failure” does not guarantee that failure will occur. Nevertheless, bouncing back from administrative incompetence or misconduct, such as that of Perez, is much easier from a place of financial security. When an organization is already walking the tightrope, with no safety net to break their fall, there is no room for mistakes.

In fact, the funding shortage faced by TBH reflects a wider problem of resource allocation to Latinx literary/art groups throughout Houston. Most of the city’s arts funding comes from the Hotel Occupancy Tax, or HOT Tax. Of the HOT Tax’s revenue, only a portion is dedicated to the arts, and of that portion, an even smaller amount is actually available to arts nonprofits and community groups, through Houston Arts Alliance (HAA); the rest is funneled into the Museum District, Theater District, and Miller Outdoor Theatre (“Distributions”). HAA’s mission is to support local arts groups through grant distribution and arts policy implementation. On their website, they note that “Houston does not yet have the tourism economy of New York City or Los Angeles,” and their mission is to create Houston as an art tourism destination by cultivating the city’s image as “diverse, large, and community-driven” (“About HAA”). However, HAA’s efforts to market “diversity” as an economic draw fail to manifest in any significant support of diverse artistic projects; a recent NALAC report revealed that from 2010 to 2015, HAA provided just 7% of its funds to Latinx art/culture organizations, compared with the 81% given to “white/mainstream” organizations. In the same period, of the $110 million given to the arts by four of Houston’s main philanthropic foundations from 2010 to 2015 (the Houston Endowment, the Cullen Foundation, the Powell Foundation, and the Albert and Margaret Alkek Foundation), Latinx arts/culture groups received just 1% (NALAC).

George Yúdice’s work The Expediency of Culture provides an important conceptual frame to understand the new role “culture” has played in global economic development in urban spaces over the last twenty years.  Yudice demonstrates how capitalism and globalization have remade culture to be “a valuable resource to be invested in, contested, and used for varied sociopolitical and economic ends” (Duke University Press). Yúdice argues that “the measurement of utility” has become an “accepted legitimation for social investment” in our society (16). In the context of 21st century cities, the measure of cultural “utility” lies in its impacts on tourism; urban spaces can strategically manipulate cultural capital to fuel the tourist industry and in turn increase the city’s cosmopolitan clout. As a result, cultural institutions that can demonstrate tourist appeal — what Yúdice describes as a “return to investors” — will always be prioritized, while the justification of “‘culture for culture’s sake’” will continue to fall short and be under-resourced(14-15). We see this pattern play out in Houston’s own arts resource distribution, as funding continues to favor “large institutions in the Museum and Theater Districts that attract tourists” (Glentzer). With reliable state support, museums thrive, bolstering the city’s “high culture” reputation: a valuable investment return for governmental stakeholders, for whom the perception of Houston as a cosmopolitan tourist attraction is vital to capital development and rising real estate values. Meanwhile, Talento Bilingue and other marginalized nonprofits continue to scrape by with next to nothing. Thus, the cycle continues, as financial security prompts “mainstream” organizations’ success, and this success in turn reinforces the capitalist system that underpins their funding sources (Yúdice 12).

This pattern of selective investment has ultimately produced and fed a “museum industrial complex,” in which the museum itself becomes a state-supported producer of cultural “profit” that can be used for tourist attraction and urban development, all while smaller organizations are further pushed aside. The concept of the small nonprofit overshadowed by the big museum, however, is somewhat one-dimensional. Houston’s arts funding is dramatically skewed towards larger, more established groups, but it is also dramatically skewed towards organizations associated broadly with white audiences; Nicolás Kanellos, a professor at the University of Houston and the founder/director of Arte Público Press³, describes Houston’s literary/arts scene as “ethnically and economically segregated” (Glentzer). The language used in NALAC’s report, labelling the recipients of most HAA funding with the conjoined descriptor of “white/mainstream,” reaffirms Kanellos’s statement. By making the term “white” effectively synonymous with “mainstream,” NALAC reflects the racialized biases of Houston’s investment choices and Talento Bilingue’s own funding problems. When audiences associated with whiteness are consistently labelled “mainstream” and black and brown audiences are “niche,” organizations that fall into the latter category are structurally sidelined by funders because they are not seen as relevant or attractive to the general majority: in other words, they lack the perceived “utility” that Yúdice argues is fundamental to receiving the support of the state.

This supposed lack of utility, of course, compounds the problem. With less money, Latinx arts organizations and other non-“mainstream” groups are pushed further into the economic margins and contribute, as the Talento Bilingue case shows, to structures of disadvantage which include financial vulnerability. Arts nonprofits thus find themselves in an impossible bind. Without funding, they struggle to make improvements that could attract broader audiences, and without attracting broader audiences, they lack demonstrable “widespread appeal” that incentivizes donor support. Moreover, even when organizations possess widespread appeal — recall, before its demise, Talento Bilingue’s visitor count recently reached nearly 60,000 per year (East End Houston) — they still may be spurned by funders because they don’t attract as many visitors from certain groups: typically, the white and relatively more affluent. In short, the loss of the Talento Bilingue nonprofit is not the singular fault of Javier Perez and the board that hired him, but rather a result of a system that is structured to overlook the needs of the Latinx arts community in favor of supporting whiter arts ventures that have been deemed more “profitable”.

Within Houston’s segregated arts system, the future of the Talento Bilingue theater remains on uncertain ground. Following community meetings with Mayor Turner and the city’s Hispanic Advisory Board, MECA has assumed responsibility for “management and programming” in the Talento Bilingue theater, with a budget of $80,000 (Tallet [Dec. 2019]). However, even this agreement has its problems. MECA’s administrators claim that their budget is insufficient to adequately implement programming at TBH, and the uncertainty surrounding long-term responsibility has made it more difficult for them to fundraise: “‘[w]e need some guarantee of permanence,’” said Alice Valdez, MECA’s executive director and founder, “‘because it’s not easy to raise funding if you are not sure you are going to be there’” even for the next few months (Tallet [Dec. 2019]).

Beyond these struggles with funding, MECA and TBH face significant questions about the future directions of the venue. Debbie McNulty, director of the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, distributed a community survey “to gather input to shape the future of Talento Bilingue” in early 2020, indicating that the city may play a larger, longer-term role in the project than anticipated (Tallet [Dec. 2019]). Although the survey’s results were set to be presented in a public forum in February, there have been no updates from such a meeting, due to the crisis of COVID-19. Amid this confusion, many have expressed concern that the building could “be passed to a non-Hispanic organization” (Tallet [Sept. 2019]). With the city of Houston effectively in control of Talento Bilingue’s building and future, these concerns come as no surprise; as NALAC’s research shows, the city has rarely made significant efforts to support Latinx arts/artists or even to affirm their importance.

That history may be beginning to change; the Chronicle reported in fall of 2019 that Houston “has improved funding for Latino art and cultural organizations,” and a spokesman for Mayor Turner expressed that this trend will continue (Tallet [Sept. 2019]). Further, the University of Houston recently announced that its Center for Mexican American Studies would serve as the new headquarters for the Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR), a move that could sustain obvious interest in our city’s Latinx culture and history (Herrera). One of IUPLR’s yearly conferences, Latino Art Now!, was hosted in Houston in 2019, and Mayor Turner’s communications director “noted an investment of $265,000 in artist grants” at the event (Tallet [Sept. 2019]). These steps are necessary and important.

To ensure truly sustainable change, however, Latinx leadership must be part of the process. Currently, only one of 16 City Council members is Latinx, and Houston has never had a Latinx mayor; in the rooms where important arts decisions are being made, Latinx voices are largely absent (Jones). If organizations like Talento Bilingue are ever to be supported with the resources and respect they deserve, and if Latinx citizens of Houston are to be taken seriously as full civic and artistic participants, Houston must bring Latinx priorities into leadership decisions about the political future.

Given current obstacles, striving for a more equitable arts future is a daunting task; nevertheless, it is necessary work. Yúdice affirms that within marginalized groups, cultural and arts practices often archive history and memory and become “communal strategies of survival” (22). Further, in her book Subtractive Schooling, Angela Valenzuela reveals the necessity of such survival strategies in light of the pressure to assimilate so often baked into the American education system and its attitudes towards Latinx students. In her research, Valenzuela uncovered the institutional efforts of one Houston high school to “de-Mexicaniz[e]” its students, encouraging “de-identification from the Spanish language, Mexico, and Mexican cultural practices” (Stanton-Salazar 211). These pressures towards acculturation are in no way isolated to one high school’s campus, but rather reflect a systemic trend towards the devaluation of Latinx culture.  As long as “white” is equated with “mainstream” and as long as both are seen as prerequisites for funders to invest in the arts, the skewed Houston art economies will remain segregated.  On a radio interview with Nuestra Palabra founder Tony Diaz regarding the future of TBH, the Chicano activist Daniel Bustamante said of community art and artists:”[t]hey carry a message of survival, of respect, of dignity, of pride… these are the things that empower people, children especially, to grow and do great things” (“The Fate of Talento Bilingue de Houston”).   Latinx arts can push back against the erasures of subtractive education, teaching communities how to create and perform versions of themselves and cultivate communal aesthetic visions.

Houston’s recent efforts to empower and invest in the Latinx arts scene are steps in the right direction. Nonetheless, what is most conspicuous are the remaining, underlying problems. The preservation of the Talento Bilingue building and cultural history is a crucial beginning to addressing those issues.  Without it, Houston lacks a Latinx cultural center.   Further, without more Latinx elected representatives — a mayor, or elected officials to bring insider’s knowledge to Latinx representation — the City’s Latinx people suffer neglect of issues they define.  Moreover, funding going to the arts still disproportionately disadvantages Latinx artists. Community leaders like Tony Diaz and Alice Valdez know this: they strive towards systemic change, in the hopes that one day these inequalities in funding and representation will be historic relics rather than contemporary truths. We who care about these issues must join them. Although Talento Bilingue’s doors will likely open once again when the crisis of COVID-19 has passed, thanks to community efforts, the systems that led them to close in the first place are unchanged: and without change, they face not-bright futures. The open doors should not confuse us: their future is precarious. We must do our parts to ensure that TBH’s doors stay open and usher in a new era of Houston arts.

 

Works Cited

“Distributions of Hotel Occupancy Tax in the Houston Area.” Houston Arts Alliance, https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiPlZTrnpPqAhXjna0KHadzADAQFjAOegQICBAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fhoustonartsalliance.com%2Fimages%2Fuploads%2Fmain%2FPress_Kit_-_HOT_Distributions_v1.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1b3TSGzgjApD3oT0995y3s.

“The Expediency of Culture.” Duke University Press, https://www.dukeupress.edu/The-Expediency-of-Culture.

“The Fate of Talento Bilingue de Houston & Houston Legacy Arts Groups.” Nuestra Palabra Radio. KPFT, Houston, 2019, https://soundcloud.com/tony-diaz-727211483/savetbh-special-art4hhm-the-fate-of-talento-bilingue-de-houston-houston-legacy-arts-groups.

Glentzer, Molly. “Why is there no major Latino cultural center in Houston?” Houston Chronicle, 13 January 2020, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/article/Why-is-there-no-major-Latino-cultural-center-in-14966634.php.

Herrera, Olga U. and Pamela A. Quiroz. “The IUPLR and History of Houston’s Latin Art Now! Conference,” Houston History Magazine, 21 March 2019, https://houstonhistorymagazine.org/2019/03/the-iuplr-and-history-of-houstons-latin-art-now-conference/.

Jones, Mark P. “Near absence of Latinos and Asians undermines legitimacy of Houston City Council,” Houston Chronicle, 17 December 2019, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Near-absence-of-Latinos-and-Asians-on-city-14913555.php.

Stanton-Salazar, Ricardo D. Review of Subtractive Schooling: U.S. – Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring by Angela Valenzuela. Contemporary Sociology, vol. 30, no. 2, March 2001, pp. 210-211.

“Talento Bilingue de Houston.” East End Houston, http://www.eastendhouston.com/place/talento-bilingue-de-houston/.

“Talento Bilingue de Houston.” Houston Press, https://www.houstonpress.com/location/talento-bilingue-de-houston-6784886.

Tallet, Olivia P. “Talento Bilingue de Houston is on the verge of insolvency. Latino leaders are determined to save one of the arts and culture group,” Houston Chronicle, 2 September 2019,  https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Latinos-demand-government-support-to-save-14405775.php.

Tallet, Olivia P. “Future of Houston’s troubled Latino arts center still in question,” Houston Chronicle, 12 December 2019, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Future-of-troubled-Latino-arts-center-still-in-14901570.php.

Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S. – Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany, State of New York Press, 1999.