A Home for Dreaming in Ciudad Juárez

Carolina Rosas Heimpel, who co-directs work at the Edificio de los Sueños, speaks of a time when the border city of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico felt different. 

The city’s Plaza Cervantina—a downtown pedestrian passage lined with commercial establishments made of adobe and brick—was bustling. Workshops, cafes, and art galleries flourished so readily, according to Rosas Heimpel, that people can't help but look back and “remember this time with nostalgia.” 

That was Juárez more than 40 years ago—before a cocktail of globalization and migration left the city transformed.  

Between the 1980s and the turn of the century, the population of Juárez nearly doubled, a phenomenon that can be attributed to the introduction of economic and legal incentives for maquiladoras (that is, American and other foreign-owned assembly plants designed to manufacture exports, which proliferated after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994). Such extraordinary growth easily outpaced the city’s ability to deliver sufficient public services, leading to pollution, unregulated urban sprawl, and the spread of violent activity. 

While residents like Gabriel García Moreno (who is a founding partner of Edificio de los Sueños) are proud that the city today is known for “burritos, margaritas, and Juan Gabriel [a queer Mexican icon] . . . as well as the friendliness of its people,” they also know that its reputation has been marred by “maquilas, narcoculture, and the rise in feminicides recorded since the 1990s.” 

In this thoroughly complex context, Rosas Heimpel, García Moreno, and other residents around Juárez have been rallying around a radically simple idea. 

Even in a place “constructed for and by capitalist interests,” as Rosas Heimpel describes it, the community still has a right to its city. For the Edificio de los Sueños project, reclaiming that right starts with reclaiming space. 

In 2017, after years of walking along Plaza Cervantina, Rosas Heimpel and García Moreno, along with a group of friends and local culture workers, keyed in on a structure built in 1940 that was once home to a neighborhood convenience store called Lili’s Grocery. The building had been abandoned for 20 years and was in a state of disrepair with holes in the roof, trash on the floors, a flock of resident pigeons lining the walls. But rather than focus on the ruins, the group saw an opportunity for a dignified space “where people can belong with their different dreams, ideas, and needs,” Rosas Heimpel says. 

Seven years later, the group has purchased the space and is now rehabilitating it into a cultural center that they call the Edificio de los Sueños, or the “building of dreams.” 

The building’s renovation, which is supported through a grant from Mellon, is focused on making the space safe and optimized for community use—including a basement community bicycle workshop, a ground-level store and gathering space, and additional semi-public levels to support exhibitions, co-working activities, book storage, screenings, and other needs as they arise. 

The Edificio’s renovations are expected to take place through spring 2025, but the changes on the street are already palpable. 

If, today, you walk along Plaza Cervantina, you’re likely to happen upon a once-again-bustling bazaar that features works from proud local artisans. You might be pulled into a multimedia exhibition that presents issues of borderlands communities through a new lens. You might even stumble onto a rancorous group of artists in the middle of a heated boardgame. It’s a snapshot of the many ways the Edificio is being activated—informed by Rosas Heimpel’s work on the solidarity economy, which she teaches as a faculty member at Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, and always driven by a readiness to leverage the power of the arts. 

Programming at Edificio de los Sueños is new enough to feel a bit sprawling and is only beginning to address the social and economic challenges Juárez residents face. But the point isn’t to pretend that adversity will disappear overnight. 

Rosas Heimpel explains, “We’re planting the seeds of dreams, which may or may not germinate and bear fruit in the future. But it is precisely in the act of collective sowing that we find acts of hope and transformation.”