When I was 16 years old, the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center gave me my first job.
As part of the center’s new youth internship, we came in on weekends to cut pieces of multicolored glass, puzzling together the likenesses of Selena Quintanilla and Dolores Huerta. A food truck on Rainey Street gave us free donuts in a bag, and the street was still mostly lined with small houses. A few of us worked the kids’ summer camp and helped them smear glue over papier mâché alebrijes.
We named the mosaic we made La Mujer, which now stands along the Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail. And for the last three and a half years, to those passing by on the trail, the mosaic has been the only visible part of the MACC.
But before then, the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down in March 2020. The MACC was closed to the public until the summer of 2021, when the building reopened temporarily with limited programming and virtual summer camps.
Then in December 2022, the center officially shuttered for a long-planned renovation called Phase 2. Tall construction fences were erected along the trail to the left of the mosaic, blocking the building – a colossal arc-shaped structure made of hand-chiseled concrete and embedded with marble – from view.
Altogether, the MACC hasn’t been fully open to the public for more than six years.
And as Phase 2 and the pandemic overlapped, construction that was meant to take two years stretched to over three. “The cost of materials had increased significantly [during the pandemic]. Labor was difficult to line up,” Michelle Rojas, who has directed the MACC since 2020, told us.
Some events and programming for kids, like the Austin ISD-partnered program Academia Cuauhtli, has survived in libraries and community centers thanks to people like Katya Guzman, who loaded art supplies from storage units into her car and drove to those different sites.
At the same time, many other functions of the MACC have been on a long hiatus. “We were planning to continue operations while being closed, but that was a challenge for us,” Rojas continued.
But now, the long-standing construction fences have been taken down. The morning of June 6, the MACC will fully reopen to the public for the first time in over six years, now with 19,000 additional square feet of programmable space with a transformed inner plaza, or zócalo.
We toured the new building in early May. The MACC now rises above the trail where it was once level with the gravel path. A screen-like metal fence now lines the property. Pecan trees, now mature and much taller than they were six years ago, canopy much of the concrete zócalo that had once radiated with summer heat.
Predecessors
Long before the MACC opened in 2007, El Centro Chicano opened on San Marcos Street for Mexican Americans living mostly in then-segregated East Austin in 1974. Neighbors and a resident militant group that fought police brutality, the Brown Berets, used El Centro to register voters, host an annual Fiesta del Barrio, and provide services the city of Austin didn’t.
One October in the mid-Seventies, according to paper pamphlets held in the city’s archives, the East Austin community launched a protest from El Centro for three Mexican youth from their neighborhoods who were shot or killed by the Austin police for petty crimes or while being held in county jail. One was Ignacio Lara, 16 years old.
And then in 1978, El Centro was burned down by an arsonist. Our Centro Was Burned but Our Spirit Lives On! reads another pamphlet, asking for donations to open another center. “The need to open another Centro is obvious. There aren’t enough programs that address the problems that confront the poor [in East Austin], particularly the youth and elderly,” it reads in Spanish.
In the early Seventies rose another predecessor: Juarez-Lincoln University, created to teach Latino students and studies in Austin, at a time when those students were banned from speaking Spanish or studying Mexican American history elsewhere in the state.
And when the university lost funding, it became the building where Chicano and Latino artists created and exhibited art in Austin, including the political League of Chicano Artists (LUChA) and Mujeres Artistas del Suroeste (MAS), formed by painters like Santa Barraza and Mexic-Arte founder and director Sylvia Orozco.
Roén Salinas remembers when his mother, María, brought Salinas and his siblings to Juarez-Lincoln for the first time as children to dance, learning Mexican baile folklórico. “All of the children from different families, we were practicing right there in the gallery,” Salinas remembered. “Austin was a small town then. Everyone made do with what they had.”
That is, until 1983, when Juarez-Lincoln was demolished by the city of Austin and a small, iron wrecking ball. In archival photos, students and community members hoist signs reading “Save Our Barrio.” In a videotape of the demolition, poet Raúl Salinas recites one of his spoken-word songs as it swings feebly, initially, against the mural Los Elementos by Raúl Valdez.
The woman in the mural pulls what looks like a root out of a portal of light, her black hair billowing behind her. Mystical creatures blow air and rivers across the wall of the university. The small wrecking ball flies directly into the woman’s face.
“Knowledge is beginning / knowledge has no end / knowledge is forever,” Salinas says. After a few swings, the bricks in her face begin to give. Walk, and you will know. Walk into spirit worlds.
Today, where the university once stood on what was then called East First Street at the intersection of I-35, there’s an IHOP.
“A major institution we had built from scratch was being demolished,” UT-Austin historian Emilio Zamora said, who had taught at Juarez-Lincoln as a graduate student. “It symbolized the city’s disregard for our history, the history of youth and Mexican Americans and our community.”
After the demolition, another two decades passed before the MACC would be built. Orozco helped found Mexic-Arte in 1984, a museum that still exhibits Latin American art, but the community was without a permanent cultural center to call home. That didn’t stop Chicano and Latino artists from creating and exhibiting their work, Orozco told us.
Orozco and other artists used an empty warehouse near the existing MACC, and asked local curator Gil Cárdenas if they could borrow pieces from his now-famous art collection to build out an exhibit. “People survived. People made their own spaces,” Orozco said. “We didn’t have any money. We used to work in restaurants at night. Pio [Pulido] was a cook, and I was a cook too.”
While Orozco and Pulido worked to fund their art, the local community also stepped in to help. “Whether it’s putting stamps on an envelope or helping to paint something, everybody would come help,” Orozco continued. “I think artists will always find a way to do things. We’re resourceful. If we don’t have a space, we’ll make it.”
The warehouse was one of many “satellite” centers where Latino artists in the city continued to dance, paint, and teach art, Salinas added. He now leads the dance group his mother María founded, the AZTLAN Dance Company, one of the oldest artist groups still operating from Juarez-Lincoln. He describes their vocabulary of dance as a mix of Aztecan danza, zapateado, and the folklórico his mother taught him.
“I’ve always felt that there are countless stories that exist within our cultural community that are assumed by us and ought to be shared,” Salinas said. “We’re the archivers of our time.”
Giving It Arms
“That was the least we could do, give it arms,” Juan Miró laughed, describing how the arc of the MACC now stretches further to embrace its zócalo. “That building wanted to have those arms extended.”
Austin-based Miró, Miguel Rivera, and Mexico City-based Tatiana Bilbao, the three primary architects of the Phase 2 expansion, harbor obvious admiration for Teodoro González de León, the original architect of the MACC known for crafting chiseled concrete to mimic pre-Hispanic building materials.
“It’s actually beautiful for us as architects when we have the opportunity to work with something that’s preexisting, that sets the tone for the conversation,” Miró said. “[González de León] was probably the most important architect in Mexico for so long, so there’s a sense of responsibility.”
Miró and Bilbao feel convinced the expansion is what González de León would have wanted. “We had no question in our mind that that was the right thing to do,” Miró continued. “It was very clear that our egos were not part of the question.”
But they decided not to continue using the chiseled concrete, which now drops into white ceramic-tile brick for the extension. “We thought it was a really good material that talks in dialogue with what Teodoro proposed,” Bilbao said. “In a way, we continued the party … but we adapted it to our times.”
Those double-decked arms now contain classrooms for children to use during summer camp, complete with child-sized furniture and a fish tank. Next door, a room that could be a drop-in restaurant or meeting space. In the opposite expanded wing, there’s a large new kitchen, empty mixed-use rooms, and a vegetable garden out back. In the center of the zócalo, a new roof structure reflects light uniquely through different times of day.
The primary feedback that MACC leadership heard from the community in regard to the expansion was a desire for transformable spaces – rooms that could be used to serve food, exhibit art, or host dance classes. “There’s more intergenerational learning capability space now, where basically the whole family can come and there’s something for everyone to do,” MACC Board Chair Angelica Navarro said.
In early May, the final light fixtures and coats of paint were being installed and rolled over the MACC’s new walls. In the Sam Z. Coronado Gallery on the second floor, Dolores García and Luis Gutiérrez had recruited young students to help them install the gallery for the public to view on June 6.
Dolores García, now in her 70s, has obvious affection for the pieces of art strewn on the gallery’s floor, arranged to be hung. After all, they are her life’s collection, ultimately 14,000 pieces she and her husband, Gil Cárdenas, have bought and obtained from artist friends over the decades. Today, it is one of the largest collections of Mexican American art in the world.
It’s also a collage of Austin’s iconic Chicano, Mexican, and Latino artists. When Cárdenas was a graduate student in the late Sixties, García told us, he began collecting the political posters that were nailed to and forgotten on street lamp posts during the civil rights era.
One pair of pieces, by José Montoya and his brother, Malaquías Montoya, stood out in the corner of the gallery. They were political posters made in the Sixties and Seventies, García explained. “Malaquias and his wife were padrinos for our wedding,” García said fondly.
The poster by Malaquias is titled The Immigrant’s Dream: The American Response. A person-like figure is straitjacketed by the American flag, the 50 stars covering the head like a hood. The red stripes bind the person’s arms to the body. Barbed wire fencing is visible in the background, from which a tag hangs and reads “Undocumented.”
Carving Space
The idea of the MACC was born around 1965, when Chicano theatre troupes of UT-Austin and St. Edward’s students began to push the city to build a cultural center where they could perform, Emilio Zamora said. Those groups of young artists also campaigned to elect candidates from their own community, like Gus García, to Austin’s City Council in 1991.
And when East Austin began to be more rigorously developed by the city of Austin in the late Eighties and Nineties, the local Mexican American and Latino residents pushed back, Zamora remembered.
“[Their] leaders began to argue, ‘If you’re going to do that – allow developers to come in and build condos in historic Mexican communities – there also needs to be an attempt to incorporate Mexican American needs into this development agenda,’” Zamora said.
García later became the city’s first Latino mayor in 2001, and was instrumental in making the cultural center a reality, along with Emma Barrientos and other activists. After tense negotiations, the city finally agreed to include the MACC’s construction in the East Austin area’s general development plan. And now, as Orozco called it, the center is a “jewel of Austin,” a dream that took the wide turn of the century to realize.
The demolition of the Juarez-Lincoln building was insulting and traumatizing for Mexican Americans in Austin, Zamora recalled. But the construction of the MACC was a sign that the city of Austin was finally willing to invest in their community, Orozco added. And now, the Phase 2 expansion is yet another meaningful investment.
Even so, the six years that have passed since pre-pandemic times and the MACC’s closure have marked fear and disruption for Mexican American and Latino families across the city under the current administration, Rojas acknowledged.
“I think the biggest point where the MACC can support the community, especially while we’re seeing Black and brown people being treated terribly by law enforcement, by ICE … is to provide a space where people feel safe and can celebrate being a part of this culture,” Rojas said. “And then for others to be able to learn about our culture, and experience a space that is vibrant.”
Even while the building was shuttered, the MACC was able to work with a local law firm to provide free legal clinics for the community, Rojas added. When the MACC reopens, it will continue to partner with nonprofit organizations, provide know-your-rights workshops, and be a center for education.
MACC Board Vice Chair Lily Zamarripa-Saenz also noted that even as the MACC prepares to reopen to the community, even more families in East Austin have since been pushed out to Austin-area suburbs like Manor, Buda, and Kyle since the pre-pandemic closure.
A cultural center in Downtown Austin, built and meant for Mexican and Latino families to cohabitate and create art together, may no longer be accessible to them. “I think it’s going to be great to see people come back, and also gentrification is real,” Zamarripa-Saenz said.
Even so, Olivia Tamzarian, longtime marketing and program coordinator at the MACC, believes it’s important that the community has a place to return to in deeply gentrified Downtown Austin.
“People have had to move far away from the city, we know this,” Tamzarian continued. “But to be able to invite people back and let them know … Downtown still has areas – Mexic-Arte, La Peña, the MACC – where the community can find themselves on the walls of galleries and feel included in Downtown Austin.”
Tamzarian nodded to the towering apartment buildings and skyscrapers that now directly border the cultural center. “What a visual symbol of holding space,” she pressed. “Of carving out a space in Downtown Austin, to pay homage to the people who truly created the culture that Austin is known for.”
This article appears in June 5 • 2026.
