How We Support Communities
At the Southwest Folklife Alliance, cultural organizing means using art, culture, and folklife practices to connect and uplift communities. We recognize residents as the primary agents in shifting harmful legacies and building the future for their communities. Culture is not separate from economic life or civic life; it is the connective tissue that makes both possible. The programs below reflect that belief in action.
Building Community Power Through Folklife
Since 2017, SFA and Regeneración have engaged more than 300 southside Tucson residents annually through asset-mapping workshops, story-sharing gatherings, and community design sessions, while SFA’s Folklife PAR model has trained more than 100 intergenerational community members to document local knowledge and contribute to solidarity-based economic strategies. With the acquisition of Louis’ Market now anchoring a three-phase renovation, the Center for Cultural Organizing is projected to directly serve between 600 and 1,500 residents each year in a neighborhood of approximately 9,000 people.
We are growing!
Our new Disability Cultures Folklife initiative will map disability cultures across the Southwest and build relationships with disabled individuals, organizations, and communities who have been historically underserved by mainstream cultural institutions. Led by Disability Cultures Folklorist, Alisha Vasquez, and in partnership with the Disabled Ecologies Lab at UC Berkeley, SFA is proud to bring innovative approaches to disability that are led by disabled people.
Historian and 5th-gen Tucsonense
How WE Cultural OrganizE
Folklife PAR
Folklife PAR is SFA’s participatory action research methodology — a framework for community-led inquiry that brings a folklorist’s lens to the research process, centering the creative and expressive practices through which communities already make meaning together as both data and driver of change.
Louis’ Market
In partnership with Regeneración—an intergenerational grassroots organization based on Tucson’s Southside—and neighborhood residents, the Southwest Folklife Alliance is transforming Louis’ Market, a historic property at 4001 S. 12th Avenue, into a permanent Center for Cultural Organizing in La Doce.
Disability Cultures
Disability Cultures Folklife is building something that hasn’t existed before in our region: a sustained, community-rooted investment in the cultural knowledge and creative life of disabled people.
Past Programs
Yoeme/Yaqui Culinary Resistance
SFA worked with Yaqui and Yoeme communities in Sonora and Arizona to explore connections between the cultivation and preparation of wheat and the tribe’s resiliency and cultural preservation. We assisted communities in developing a strategic plan for its economic recovery using oral histories, test planting sites, and artisanal cooking workshops.
La Doce Barrio Foodways Project
La Doce Barrio Foodways Project was yearlong project along the food corridor of Tucson’s South 12th Ave—known as “La Doce.” It revealed the importance of local knowledge and food heritage to community cohesion and health and the potential for future community-based economic development and local governance.
VozFrontera
VozFrontera was a program for youth engagement, leadership, and local arts incubation in Nogales, Arizona. It offers documentary arts mentoring with youth, artist- and scholar in-residence programs, and co-working lab space for young leaders and entrepreneurs.
Culture and community development belong together
SFA’s cultural organizing work is supported by:
Cultural Organizing | Upcoming Events
Cultural Organizing Program Leadership
Alisha Vasquez
Disability Cultures Folklorist
As a historian and fifth-generation Tucsonense, Alisha brings a distinctive lens to the socio-political landscape of the borderlands, pushing back against dominant narratives and centering voices that have been left out. She has taught across generations inside and outside the classroom, was shaped by punk rock, and co-directs the Mexican American Heritage and History Museum… Find out more
XAlishax@Arizona.edu
Nelda Ruiz
Programs Manager in Cultural Organizing
Nelda is a community organizer, cultural worker, and folklorist from the Sonoran borderlands who has organized on Tucson’s southside for more than 15 years. She manages SFA’s participatory action research (PAR) projects and community-based documentation initiatives, and is co-founder of Regeneración, a grassroots collective focused on neighborhood leadership and advocacy. Nelda is a 2019 NALAC… Find out more
NRuiz33@Arizona.edu