Tucson’s Borderlands Theatre, a company that focuses on works that tell the story of the communities connecting Southern Arizona and Mexico, has landed a “transformative” national grant that could bolster its sustainability.
The three-year $600,000 operating grant from the Mellon Foundation also will help the company return to full season programming for the first time since 2017 and find a permanent home with performance and rehearsal space, said Associate Artistic Director Milta Ortiz.
The grant is the largest Borderlands has ever received in its 39-year history, said Ortiz, who runs the company with her husband, Artistic Director Marc David Pinate. The couple took over in 2014 from Borderlands founder Barclay Goldsmith, who died in April at the age of 87.
Ortiz said the Mellon Foundation reached out to her last April and over a Zoom meeting asked her about Borderlands’ goals and how she saw the company’s future.
“What would you love to be able to do five years from now?” Ortiz recalled Wednesday after Borderlands announced the grant. “They said, you know, we would like to grant some money. We just want to know what it is that you’re looking to do to continue the work that you’ve been doing. And, you know, I had ideas.”
Also among those ideas was to expand Borderlands youth and education program and hire a full-time dedicated staff member to work on donor development to ensure the company’s financial stability after the grant period.
Borderlands has used part of the grant’s first installment to add to its staff, growing it from two — Ortiz and Pinate — to six.
The money also will help Borderlands to mount a three-event season in 2025-26 that will include a play by a local playwright in the fall, a dinner theater event in February and in the spring, the world premiere of an original musical, “Anita,” created by Ortiz and Quetzal Guerrero.
“My dream for the future is for us to produce a play and a musical, if not every season, every other season, depending on funding and that sort of thing,” she said.
The Mellon Foundation grant builds on the momentum of the company’s 2023 grant from the National Latinx Theater Initiative and a recent grant from the Center for Cultural Empowerment.
In 2023, the Tucson theater company was one of 18 nationwide to win a $100,000 grant from One Nation/One Project to create an original performance celebrating home, healing and thriving as a community. The companies put on their productions on the same day last July.
Ortiz said that since she and Pinate took over the company, Borderlands has relied on grant funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona and a host of other public and private grants.
