By Brittany Gray, Christian Coronel, David Ruiz, Florence Methot, Liza Otto and Sam Richman



El Teatro Estación Cultural is a non-profit initiative by a group of architecture students who are building an open-air theater with a cultural collective in Tapachula, Mexico. The theater is intended to be a new public venue that bridges a gap between the local community and transient migrant families. The city of Tapachula is an important node for migrants who have just crossed Mexico’s southern border. In fact, its train station was once the first stop along the infamous “La Bestia” route, until it fell into disrepair after a hurricane in 2005. In 2018, a group of volunteers called the Estación Cultural Collective co-opted and transformed the abandoned site into a cultural center. This year, a group of graduate architecture students from the City College of New York joined their cause to build them a performance space that will support the Collective’s efforts of celebrating the rich heritage and dynamic cultures of Tapachula.

In 2017, migration increased dramatically in Tapachula’s region when caravans of migrants and refugees from Northern Triangle Countries started making the treacherous journey toward the U.S. The families that predominantly comprise recent caravans are fleeing from economic hardship and extreme violence in search of safety and opportunity. To reduce the influx of migrants at the U.S. border, the Trump administration enacted policies that required migrants to apply for asylum in Mexico and be denied before applying in the U.S. This increased applications in Mexico by 5,300% between 2013 and 2019, resulting in an overwhelming demand on Mexico’s immigration system. Thousands of migrants were trapped in border towns like Tapachula while they waited for paperwork, often without access to food, housing, healthcare, or education for their children. With a growing migrant presence year by year, the relationship between temporary and permanent residents has become strained, which makes finding work or even renting housing increasingly difficult.


In response to this growing issue, Teatro Estación Cultural is designed to function as a public venue that feels welcoming to migrants and locals alike. More than just a performance space, the modular structure will allow for a variety of community activities. A spaceframe canopy will extend out over the stage which was once the train platform of the historic train station. It will be equipped with room for a set and scaffolding to hang lights and a projector. Just inside the existing building will be a small library, with a collection of Spanish language scripts and performance books for all ages and from a variety of cultures. The modular terraced seating will lend itself to many functions like viewing performances, displaying art, sitting down to chat with a friend, or sleeping when there are no other options. At the back will be a small gray water system that filters water into a pileta for washing hands and clothes. The entire structure will become a climbable infrastructure for children’s play, morphing into a more traditional playground near the Collective’s garden out back.

The project is happening thanks to the CCNY students’ participation with Fundamental, a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit that executes student-led design-build initiatives across Latin America. Run by the architecture firm, Taller KEN, Fundamental offers students hands-on experience in grassroots, community-oriented design and construction in pursuit of reintegrating disparate communities. The students, who originally initiated the idea, were introduced to La Estación Cultural when they travelled to Tapachula to study migration with their CCNY studio. Captivated by their story, they were inspired to do more outside of the classroom. Now all three groups – the students, Taller KEN, and La Estación Cultural – are partnering to raise funds and design the new theater together.


Since 2018, the Estación Cultural Collective has volunteered their time to care for the community center, with no funds to install proper facilities. In 2020, after many attempts, the Mexican Secretariat of Agrarian, Land, and Urban Development (SEDATU) approved a significant grant to renovate and restore the building as part of a nationwide urban development program. This work is currently underway. They are returning the building to its original 1930’s art deco style and transforming the surrounding site into a covered plaza lined with shops and sports fields. Now that the municipality has taken interest in the area, the Collective is faced with defending their ownership of the station. Since they never owned the building to begin with, they must now prove the importance of preserving the cultural space, their gardens out back, and ultimately its existence as an inclusive space for migrants. They are hoping that the international interest accompanying the theater’s construction will help solidify their claim to the train station.



As of now, the plans for the project are pushing forward with Estación Cultural Collective welcoming the Fundamental team to Tapachula in January of 2021 to host outdoor educational workshops, design charrettes and a virtual fundraising performance for local and international stakeholders. Fundamental and the participating CCNY students will return to build the theater with local students and volunteers over the summer. For them, the most important thing is continuing to support the mission of Estación Cultural as an essential public space for everyone in Tapachula, regardless of background or status. They believe this project has the potential to help bridge cultural divides, improve access to education, support sustainable community planning and help answer the question, “what can architecture do?” In the end, it is the hope of the participants that the Teatro Estación Cultural will usher in a new era for the Collective and serve its communities as a place of union for years to come.

1. Maureen Meyer and Elyssa Pachico, “Mexico Has a Major Role to Play in Undoing Trump’s Disastrous Migration Policies,” WOLA, December 2, 2020. Retrieved online from: https://www.wola.org/analysis/mexico-migration-under-biden/

Adjunct Associate Professor, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

Professor of Architecture and of Art and Architectural History, Roger Williams University

In the midst of the humanitarian crisis of migration – many years in the making but coming to the fore before our very eyes – one of the issues that seems central to raise is that of human agency. Under what conditions are the migrants and locals ­addressed in the project presented here­ able to determine an identity and place within the limited parameters established by their displacement? Further, how can they encounter themselves as citizens within a broader project of political and bureaucratic exclusion overdetermined by new mechanisms of control?

The answer begins to be addressed here but not through what its architecture can do but, rather, through what the project proposes. The self-preservation and positive self-perception of the migrant and local community rests in rejecting the homogenization of their individuality, in making possible for them to reassert their personal responsibilities, of acting collectively with a communal interest in mind, and of expressing their identities and needs through the de/re-programing of spaces they can gather in, occupy, and use.

To do this and to avoid reifying these communities and their experiences, it is important to acknowledge their realities, to provide for them comforting-while-flexible spaces, to recognize their needs without essentializing them formally, discursively, or representationally. The present problem calls for imagination rooted in reality rather than the fabrication of imaginary circumstances. To reassert the identities, stories, and specific cultural conditions of both migrants and the community to which they arrive, the solution lies in the interstices of the vision, complex model of collaboration, and activism of the team behind this proposal for the Teatro Estación Cultural in Tapachula.