Earlier this month, the organizer of two Chicago festivals supporting Latino theater artists said it was putting the popular events on pause for the year.
Inicios, a Chicago playwrights festival started in 2023, paired emerging playwrights with local Latino theater companies for workshops and staged readings. Meanwhile, the year-old Latine Theatre Artists Week helped theater artists navigate the industry, from open-call auditions with major stages like the Goodman and Chicago Shakespeare to sessions on contracts and audition prep.
Both events were organized by the Latino Theater Alliance, which will focus instead on its signature fall event, Destinos. But the forced pause on the smaller industry-facing events is having ripple effects among Latino artists — and it illustrates the perfect storm facing small arts organizers.
Not only have executive orders from President Donald Trump threatened federal grant dollars, but shifts in local philanthropy dollars have winnowed private funding streams. For the executive director behind the events, a family emergency also pulled him from the office, illustrating the delicate nature of small arts group leadership when there’s no deep bench.
“There’s a lot happening,” said Jorge Valdivia, the executive director of the nine-year-old Latino Theater Alliance. “We’re all trying to make sense of it.” In no way, he added, are these circumstances unique to his group.
On Monday, leaders of Latino arts groups around Chicago gathered to collectively discuss the emerging challenges faced by Latino arts organizations. For many people running theaters, this has been a tumultuous year. Executive orders issued in February changed the guidelines for National Endowment for the Arts funding. New stipulations restrict federal grants from going to groups that support “diversity, equity or inclusion” and “gender ideology.”
The Latino Theater Alliance lost a $20,000 NEA grant to support Destinos, its marquee event.
But that was not the sole reason the organization paused its 2025 installments of the two run-up events, Inicios and Latine Theatre Artists Week.
While programming both, Valdivia was dealing with fallout from the new executive orders and planning how to respond and program the eighth installment of Destinos. One staffer was reviewing Desinos’ submissions and another focusing on a financial audit. When Valdivia needed to step away to address a family emergency, the small organization just didn’t have the bodies to keep the two smaller festivals afloat.
“We are not a large organization,” said Valdivia. “We have three full-time staffers and one part-timer.”
Even though both festivals are scheduled to return next year, the absence will be felt in the theater community immediately. Raquel Torre, a Chicago-based director, participated in both festivals in 2024. She said the festivals support the industry, bringing artists together and creating a place where connections happen.
In the playwrights festival, Torre directed No One Cares (About You) by emerging local playwright Ale Castillo, who had a chance to network and work side-by-side with an established Chicago director.
At Latine Theatre Artists Week, directors like Torre used the open audition call to cast projects they were directing.
“I was set to direct a play called The Lizard Y El Sol at the Goodman,” she said. “That is a piece that’s entirely in Spanish and created for young audiences. So, we were looking for Latino talent that had good physicality, and we needed native or fluent Spanish speakers.”
Torre and co-director Jamal Howard hired two actors — Osiris Cuen and Emmanuel Ramirez — from the open audition last year.
“I could go on and on and on about the repercussions this one event had that led to Latino actors having work, getting hired, getting seen by people,” said Torre, pointing out that Steppenwolf, Teatro Vista and professional casting agencies were also there. “I can rave again and again about the importance of having those spaces.”
Marcela Muñoz, the producing artistic director of Aguijón Theater, sees the current challenges facing the industry through a seasoned lens. She programs one of Chicago’s longest-running theater companies, located on the northwest side.
“When you get to be 35, you see all of those waves and the ebbs and flows of not just the sector, but the funding and how it is directed toward our organizations specifically,” said Muñoz. “This has been going on forever, because obviously the NEA, you know — sometimes it’s great, depending on who the president is and what the administration is like. And we are currently living in a time when it’s not a friendly environment, to say the least, and for us in particular, the politics of the country has always been very much a factor of what we do.”
Muñoz said her organization is not directly funded by the NEA, but the cuts speak to larger rifts in the industry.
“This NEA situation isn’t just the money,” she said. “The grants were not always the thing that kept our doors open or the doors opened in any other organization, but it’s the big federal government saying, ‘This is where we stand.’ It’s a turning away from the humanities in general and the arts specifically.”
For Valdivia, the sentiment is similar: Destinos will still proceed this year as planned. But for an arts organization that was already operating on a limited budget with a small staff, if government cuts are followed by slashes to philanthropic support, there could be problems in the near future.
“When the government fails you, foundations step in,” Valdivia said, citing a commonly used phrase in nonprofit orgs. “But that’s a question mark right now. We’re still waiting on some of the big organizations that have traditionally supported performing arts to step up.”
At the conference Monday, a similar thread: Leaders expressed the ripple effect of losing federal grants, which in many cases are matched by foundations — meaning the loss of a coveted NEA grant can lead to the loss of multiple matching funds from private foundations.
Mike Davis is WBEZ’s theater reporter.