ABSTRACT
Borderlands Theater, founded in 1986 in Tucson, Arizona, radically changed in 2017 from a traditional theater company model to an ensemble-based approach rooted in placemaking and community development. The shift transformed the organization from an unsustainable model plagued by burnout and financial insecurity caused by the Great Recession to a fiscally stable ensemble of Indigenous-Latinx theatre-makers creating a postcolonial theatre of Sonoran heritage rooted in cross-sector alliances. The Barrio Stories Project became the flagship of Borderlands Theater’s evolution. An iterative, site-specific, heritage festival, Barrio Stories is grounded in ethnographic methodologies and creative placemaking theory, fusing popular theatre forms with technology and narratives of place to engender feelings of pride and belonging among multi-generational residents of Tucson’s historic Mexican-American barrios. The project made Borderlands Theater unique in the region, sparking a reimagining of the how the organization functioned and financed itself, while redefining notions of success for its Brown theatre-makers working on their ancestral homeland.
