This story is one of two about the state of nonprofit theatres based in communities of color. You can find the other here.
Before founding Pregones in 1979, Rosalba Rolón considered a job in marketing for Miriam Colón at the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT). Rolón, then in her 20s, recalled that she was nervous in Colón’s presence. She looked up to the iconic actress and director, who had paved the way for Latine theatremakers by founding PRTT in 1953 as one of the first Puerto Rican theatres in the U.S., and the only one in Manhattan’s theatre district. When Colón offered Rolón the marketing gig, Rolón accepted, but with a disclaimer.
“Yes, but I don’t want to disappoint you,” Rolón recalled saying to her mentor, wary of letting Colón down. “You should know that I’m starting my own company.” Colón asked Rolón in detail about her ideas for the company that would become Pregones, an ensemble-based theatre in the Bronx. “That’s what you need to do,” Rolón remembered Colón saying in response, after some conversation. “Do that. Start your own company. I’m here if you need me.”
More than 30 years after that conversation, in 2014, Rolón’s Pregones and Colón’s PRTT merged into one company, and Rolón took the helm as artistic director, in which role she remains to this day. Pregones/PRTT maintains locations in the Bronx and in Manhattan, creating and presenting original theatrical work with the aim of “championing a Puerto Rican/Latinx cultural legacy of universal value.”
Pregones/PRTT is one of 18 arts organizations included in a new report by the Social Science Research Council, funded by the Wallace Foundation. “Building Trust, Sustaining Art: Cross-Case Findings from the Arts Research for Communities of Color Fellowship” documents both the challenges faced by community-based arts organizations, and the strategies these organizations have developed to meet these challenges and create well-being and sustainability.
Each of the 18 organizations participating in the Wallace Foundation’s Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative—ranging from theatre organizations to cultural centers to museums across the U.S.—was paired with an Arts Research for Communities of Color (ARCC) research fellow with whom they collaborated to develop research on organizational history, practices, and obstacles. The report details the central shared finding that “arts organizations rooted in communities of color operate at the intersection of artistic ambition and structural disadvantage, while producing extraordinary work with significant artistic, cultural, and civic value.”
The ARCC fellows boil this reality down to four challenges:
1. Trust among the marginalized communities these organizations serve is not assumed.
2. Challenging dominant narratives in the field demands ongoing labor, in addition to the labor of running the organizations themselves.
3. Negotiating cultural excellence is a constant tension.
4. Balancing local, national, and international orientations requires strategic choices.
These broader challenge categories break out into sub-challenges like burnout, overwork, limited funding, and governance issues.
The report further identifies a range of strategies the organizations employ to address these challenges. These include building trust and legitimacy; archiving and cultural memory; labor, care, and governance; and collaboration and placemaking. I recently discussed the report, its subject, and membership in the Wallace Foundation’s Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative cohort, with Rosalba Rolón and her managing director at Pregones/PRTT, Arnaldo J. López. For the study, Pregones/PRTT partnered with ARCC fellow Raquel Jimenez, who conducted in-depth multi-part interviews with Rolón and associate artistic directors Alvan Colón Lespier and Jorge B. Merced, and held regular meetings with López. The collaboration offered opportunities for inquiry, learning, and growth for Pregones/PRTT staff members and for Jimenez, with López calling the work “very heartful.”
López said he sees the theatre company’s work most meaningfully reflected in the report in its examination of building and sustaining community trust, challenging dominant narratives, and negotiating artistic excellence. For Pregones/PRTT, these concerns are inseparable from one another, as are the organizational strategies for addressing them. López and Rolón navigate these areas by building counternarratives, privileging collaboration and plurality, and engaging in field leadership, all of which could be considered subcategories under the broader four strategies outlined in the report.
As some of the earliest organizations in the U.S. focused on Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Latin American theatre, Pregones and PRTT have long navigated achieving recognition within an industry defined by the mainstream establishment while making work rooted in specific marginalized experiences. For decades as separate organizations, and now as one, amid ever-changing political, economic, and social forces, Pregones and PRTT have balanced reflecting uniquely Puerto Rican stories and working to expand the worldviews of audiences outside of the Puerto Rican community.
Back when Miriam Colón was working to establish PRTT in the 1950s, the challenge was creating spaces that did not yet exist in the New York City theatre scene—“kicking down the door,” as Rolón put it. “I think some very large and important parts of our industry, if you want to call it that, have evolved,” Rolón said. “Others are a bit like standing on a treadmill. A lot of these practices have been inherited by new generations. We are members of the theatre alliance of 10 Latino theatres with venues that have been working together for more than 10 years. Have things changed? Absolutely; we couldn’t have had that 20 or 30 years ago. But we had the seeds.”
Moving forward, the tasks are sustainability, adaptability, and evolution, with López, Rolón, and their team at Pregones/PRTT continuing to water those seeds in ways the report captures in its discussion of leadership and working conditions. López and Rolón practice collaborative leadership, with Rolón, for instance, including López in artistic decision-making. She also enjoys the collaboration and expertise of two long-time associate artistic directors, whom she consults often.
“One of the things that makes you stronger is staying plural, [being a] multi-voiced organization,” López said. “Maybe that’s my bias too, because I’m working and flourishing in a space that is ensemble-informed and ensemble-practiced, so there’s a lot of consultation and dialogue.”
This collaborative and adaptive leadership style is key to organizational health and success, but easier to practice than to capture on paper.
“When Raquel was looking for, ‘What’s the main story? What’s the throughline?’ I said, ‘Raquel, it has to be plural. And if anything, it’s a counter-narrative,’” López noted of his research collaboration with Jimenez. “We’re constantly clarifying and building a path that honors the other path, but also doesn’t presume that somebody has figured it out better. Because that ‘better’ is usually not for us.”
López and Rolón’s work at Pregones/PRTT is further strengthened by engaging in field leadership, mentoring emerging leaders, and collaborating across arts organizations at the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC) institute. (Rolón also led a workshop on mergers at TCG’s annual conference in Puerto Rico in June.)
“It’s a space that provides us not just the interlocution of others, especially but not limited to emerging and up-and-coming leaders in the field and artists, but an opportunity to put the Pregones/PRTT hat on the side and look at ourselves,” said López of their recent time at the NALAC institute. “What’s the pedagogy, and what’s the practice, and how do we bring those things together?”
Of course, the overarching challenges reflected in the report structure many of these strategies for well-being.
“The field feels cyclical,” López said. “The challenges are sticky. We know how undercapitalization reproduces itself. Challenges in capacity in the organization, whether it’s the size of staff, or the level of compensation, or how competitive it is, or how many hours there are, and what’s manageable, and what’s the right balance—all of those questions are recurring, and we’re always answering them with minimum capacity, making more with less, and stories of extraordinary achievement.”
Still, the ways Pregones/PRTT, like other organizations outlined in the report, respond to these challenges highlight strengths that are unique to arts organizations serving communities of color. Their strategies for resisting “structural disadvantage”—whether that means platforming counternarratives about the buried histories of communities of color, building archives to recover cultural memories of displaced communities, or using art as a tool for widespread political education—are critical interventions in an oppressive status quo. These interventions benefit not only their own organizations, the communities in which their organizations are situated, and the field, but the world as well. Critically, it’s a definition of excellence that transcends many received notions of excellence in the field.
For Rolón, when discussing arts organizations rooted in communities of color, it’s as important to celebrate the unique gifts they have to offer the field as to reckon with the challenges they face.
“Can we talk about successes once in a while?” she said. “That is the narrative that I want to insist on. Can someone take an idea and think about how it could benefit the field if people knew about it?”
The report and our conversation about it raise many rich questions. I’m left thinking about deficit frameworks—i.e., the trap of defining arts organizations led by and in service of communities of color in terms of what they lack, or the scarcity they face, rather than what they offer the field. How do we discuss challenges around artistic excellence as defined by the field without legitimizing or reproducing those oppressive, limited definitions of excellence? What possibilities for further research arise when we position value and excellence not in tension with community-based work, but as defined by it? What happens when we position community-based work as excellent in ways mainstream or establishment art is not?
I’m left with many of the same larger questions the ARCC fellows asked in their report as opportunities for further research. How do we move from navigating structural disadvantages to dismantling them? How do these organizations manage survival, while also envisioning and creating possibilities for a more abundant future?
For Pregones/PRTT, an organization still led by one of its founders, questions about the future loom large.
“We are at succession inflection,” López said, referring to the need to mentor the next generation of leaders within the organization. It’s process, he said, that involves “onboarding those who already bring a tremendous level of skill and passion, and then making sure that they hear about what this history is, and that they hear what we are looking to honor forward. Then, eventually, it’s up to them.”
Citlali Pizarro is a writer, theatre producer, and PhD student based in New York City. Her work can be read in American Theatre, 3Views, and Howlround.
