In 2021 A group of architecture students from the City College of New York collaborated with a local community group called Estacion Cultural to build a civic performance venue for a local community group. Over the course of their work, they gained greater insight into the politics of public space–how it is administered, maintained, shared, and policed.
Estacion Cultural, the collective with whom we partnered, got its name from their grassroot efforts to restore, maintain, and revitalize the early-20th-century railway station of Tapachula. It was once a great emblematic space for Huacalera culture before it fell into disarray after it was devastated by hurricane Stan in 2005. For years, the station was treated as a public dumping ground. The owners of the property, the Mexican government, showed no intention of rehabilitating the space. So, in 2018, local volunteers at Estacion Cultural, frustrated by their Government’s inaction, reclaimed the station for themselves. They transformed it into a community space that provided a creative outlet for locals and migrants, promoting cross-cultural programming in the arts. In 2020, after the collective renewed the public’s interest in the station, the Mexican government decided use this new cultural venue as bid for reelection and invested in a complete renovation of the station.
Unfortunately, after the renovation they pushed out the Collective who had been caring and controlling the space for the last 2 years but negotiated with the Government to designate a separate space for the new theater adjacent to the station for the collective to conduct their programming. Together with the collective, an NGO of migrant workers, and a group of Tapachula architecture students we co-designed and co-built a new Estacion Cultural Theater.