Year-in-Review: Artistic & Transformative Practice

It’s been one year since our launch of Huertos Familiares and over the course of that time we have seeded and supported several gardens in San Antonio, Austin, Cedar Park, Houston, Tucson, Chicago, and Dallas. We have shared lessons, photos, and fruits from our gardens.

We’ve deepened our commitments to each other, to the land, to gathering in community. In the Spring of 2025, we hosted our first Harvest Sobremesa with everyone that participated in the pilot launch of the project. It was an incredible evening filled with delicious food, insightful conversations, and inspiring lessons drawn from the work that had been done throughout the season. 

In the Fall of 2025, we were awarded the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation (AKR) grant to advance the work of Huertos Familiares. With the support of AKR, we have begun the process of developing a repository of digital resources to support the Huertos Familiares gardens and that of any one who is interested in planting a pollinator and/or food producing garden.

This work will continue in 2026. Additionally, we were able to restock our seed/ distribute seeds for the Fall/Winter gardens and loan out tools from our tool library, which were purchased with the support of a grant from the City of San Antonio’s Office of Sustainability. The broadfork, which is most responsible for the success of our gardens, was a huge hit! Many families used the tool! We’re still waiting on photos for our Broadfork Diaries, which we’re hoping to launch in 2026. 

We are incredibly grateful for the amazing support and embrace of Huertos Familiares. We are looking forward to developing the project even further in 2026 as we continue sharing seeds, plants, and tools and as we expand the digital resources, design a framework for the documentation of Huertos Familiares, propagate native plants and shelter our Spring garden starters in our new greenhouse, and gather in our huertos to dream, imagine, and simply be in spaces that honor and support all life. Above all, we are excited to know that Huertos Familiares is part of a large web of folks and organizations committed to creating abundance.

In October, Virginia Grise, founder of a todo dar productions and close friend and collaborator of TA, and Marissa Ramirez were invited to deliver the closing plenary at Cara Mia Theatre’s Latinidades Symposium, which is an international theatre festival and arts symposium in Dallas, TX that gathers artists and cultural leaders from across various countries/locations to build networks and exchange strategies for sustaining creative work. The closing plenary titled “Soñar es Luchar: On the Radical Possibility of Collective Dreaming” was a discussion of a todo dar’s artistic work and practice. One of the projects that we highlighted was the Huertos Familiares project, which sparked several wonderful conversations. 

From Dallas, we traveled to New Orleans for the National Performance Network (NPN) Annual Conference, which brings together artists, cultural workers, activists, and arts funders from across the country that are committed to art as an essential and powerful element of liberation movements. At NPN, we revisited our “Soñar es Luchar” presentation and deepened our conversation and strengthened our network with other artists and cultural workers interested in centering community, the land, and our more-than-human relations. 

The Fall of 2025 also came with the award of NPN’s Creation and Development Grant for Entre Lazos, a collaborative project with a todo dar productions, Pangea World Theatre, Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, and Border/Arte. Entre Lazos is a traveling performance and sobremesa – a convivial gathering, a sharing of stories, a wild imagining of how we nourish and support each other, with each production uniquely designed for its location (San Antonio, Tucson, Bronx, and Minneapolis) based on conversations with community members who have made commitments to be co-creators with nature.

Our good friends at a todo dar productions were also recipients of the Latino Theater Company’s National Latinx Theater Initiative award. The award is intended to support the ecosystem of theater organizations and ensembles founded by, led by, and serving the Latinx community, U.S. Brazilian community, and Latinx indigenous communities Congratulations to a todo dar! We are excited to witness the beautiful art they will create in 2026.