Rushing Waters, Rising Dreams

The Northeast San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles is the second largest community of Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States with 500,000 people. Yet, until 2001 the Northeast Valley had no trade bookstores, movie houses, art galleries, or decent cultural spaces. That year Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural opened its doors, first as a cultural café, which in ten years has provided workshops in music, visual arts, dance, theater, writing, and indigenous cosmology--along with an art gallery, a poetry press, a youth empowerment project, and the only annual outdoor literacy and performance festival in the area, "Celebrating Words: Written, Performed & Sung."