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. La Doce is a commercial and cultural corridor that has faced decades of disinvestment despite its deep cultural roots and the resilience of the largely Indigenous, Latino, and immigrant families who call it home.
Work began in 2017 with an inquiry into food traditions inside kitchens across the barrios along South 12th Avenue. Since then, it has grown into a multi-phase building renovation, a series of resident-led design workshops, and the formation of the La Doce Community Land Trust (CLT). The La Doce CLT is a community-governed structure that will hold the property in permanent trust for neighborhood benefit once fully realized. Phase 1 of the renovation was completed, and the Center opened to the public in spring 2026.
Phases 2 and 3 will bring a commercial kitchen for heritage foodways businesses, outdoor gathering and garden spaces, a ceramics studio, and an archival story-keeping room — all designed with and by the people who will use them.
A economic corridor with deep roots and a community ready to lead
Known locally as “La Doce,” the corridor of South 12th Avenue in Tucson has long been home to multigenerational families, Indigenous and Latino traditions, small heritage businesses, and the quiet, persistent creativity of working-class neighbors. For decades, the area has been celebrated as a cultural and culinary destination—and for just as long, its residents have navigated the pressures of disinvestment, displacement, and development that bypassed rather than benefited them.
A 2018 community-led research project, the La Doce Barrio Foodways Project, brought those realities into focus. Conducted in partnership with the City of Tucson, the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, and the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona, the project trained youth and adult residents as citizen ethnographers to map neighborhood assets, document foodways, and identify the occupational and cultural knowledge already living within the corridor. What they found was a community ready, as the report put it, to “upend expectations, re-interpret economic and community cultural development, and exercise local control over their own wellbeing.”
That project seeded what has grown into one of SFA’s most sustained commitments: a long-term, resident-led effort to build community ownership and cultural infrastructure in La Doce—anchored, now, in a historic building at the heart of the corridor.
Refreshment at Louis Market
Planning Louis Market
Food Along La Doce
From neighborhood store to neighborhood hub
In 2023, the Southwest Folklife Alliance used an unrestricted gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to purchase 4009 S. 12th Avenue, the historic Louis’ Market building, as a permanent home for the Center for Cultural Organizing. The acquisition reflected a deliberate choice: to leverage a rare institutional resource in direct service of community-controlled development, rather than institutional expansion.
The building carries its own layered history. Louis’ Market was one of several Chinese-owned grocery stores that once anchored the La Doce neighborhood—a history that will be honored, alongside the corridor’s deeper Indigenous and Mexican roots, as the space is activated. The Center is designed not as a showcase for outside investment, but as a platform built and governed by the people who live there.
The three-phase renovation transforms a closed storefront into a neighborhood hub for education, small-scale entrepreneurship, cultural programming, and community governance. After three years of stewardship by SFA, the building will be gifted to the La Doce Community Land Trust to be governed and utilized by local residents in perpetuity.
Round Projection at Louis Market Opening
Ceremony at opening
Listening at opening
Folklife as a tool for liberation and community power
SFA defines cultural organizing as using art, culture, and folklife practices to connect and uplift communities. Residents are agents who hold critical knowledge and the capacity to shape their own neighborhoods.
A folklife lens changes the frame. Rather than starting from what is wrong or lacking in a community, it starts from what is already there: the carpenters and gardeners and masons and cooks and storytellers whose knowledge, relationships, and creative labor are the real wealth of a place. From that foundation, La Doce residents have participated in asset-mapping workshops, land use training, stakeholder planning sessions, and heritage micro-entrepreneurship programs—building both the skills and the structures needed for long-term self-determination.
What the Center will hold
A co-working hub for neighborhood residents. An event space for community gatherings and cultural programming. Pop-up markets for heritage-based artists. A community garden and greenhouse. A commercial kitchen for foodways traditions. A ceramics studio with a community kiln. An archival and story-keeping room rooted in oral history and local documentation.
What the process looks like
Multilingual design workshops and story circles where residents are paid co-designers, not unpaid participants. Resident-informed architectural planning. Ongoing collaboration between SFA staff, Regeneración organizers, volunteer architects, and preservation specialists. Community surveys and feedback integrated into every phase of development.
Support the work that’s rooted
La Doce is not a new idea imposed from the outside. It is the formalization of relationships and knowledge that have been building for decades. Your contribution helps Southwest Folklife Alliance and Regeneración sustain the community organizing, design planning, resident honoraria, and cultural programming that make community-controlled development real.
Funding from supporters and grantmakers directly supports resident participation so that that elders, youth, artists, and neighborhood entrepreneurs can be paid co-designers in shaping the future of their own corridor.
Built with Regeneración, for La Doce
Additional partnerships in the La Doce project include these organizations and a network of volunteer architects, preservation specialists, and civic partners who support the project’s planning and technical development.