With support from the California Arts Council, Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural will provide our free offsite and onsite Cultural Arts Series Program during the Summer and Spring of 2023 – 2025 for Northeast San Fernando Valley youth ages 5-24.
Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural offers year-round, on-site and off-site, virtual and in-person, free to low-cost bilingual and intergenerational arts and literacy classes, workshops, and presentations through our core programs: Seasonal Arts 8-12 week arts education classes; Trauma to Transformation (T2T) focuses on systems impacted youth and adults and takes place in juvenile camps, halls, day reporting centers, and reentry homes; Indigenous in Us, community-based Indigenous Native Mexica and local Native American teachings and practices exposing residents to the beauty of Mexica Danza, drumming, Nahuatl language, songs and cosmology, ancestral oral traditions and the origins of cultural celebrations, such as Dia de los Muertos; Ongoing programs, which consist of open mics, writing circles, and a weekly practice from our resident Mexica Kalpulli, Danza Temachtia Quetzalcoatl. These programs are offered year-round on an ongoing basis. Major events also include our annual Winterlandia celebration and community marketplaces where we uplift artisanal vendors and community artists.
Being the only independent bookstore in the NSFV, TC makes culturally relevant books and literacy events accessible to area residents, with the intention to carry books that resonate with our culture, history, stories, and aspirations for healing and transformation. Founded in 1989, Tia Chucha Press is one of the country’s leading small cross-cultural presses, publishing socially engaged poetry and literature. Since 2005, Tia Chucha’s has sponsored the area’s longest-running free annual outdoor literacy & arts festival, Celebrating Words Festival: Written, Performed, and Sung. Literacy-focused programs also include our monthly Social Justice book club and Lil’ Readers, a bilingual and multicultural storytime and activity for children 0-5.

