LOCCA Mission
L.O.C.C.A.: The Law Office Center for Citizenship and Art is a site specific platform where individuals and the local Hispanic community of Houston’s East End can undertake an aesthetic experience with culture and the visual and performing arts that intersects with social justice, the human sciences, history and service to the community.
L.O.C.C.A. is an artist-initiated project founded by Henry G. Sanchez and inspired by his parents, Maria A. and Henry V. Sanchez. It is established on the grounds the Sanchez Law Building that has provided affordable family legal services to low and middle-income families in the neighborhood for 53 years. L.O.C.C.A. intends to create socially engaged art initiatives that collaborate with artists, community residents, institutions of higher learning, sociologists, historians, scientists and political activists in order to empower community partners and individuals to address issues confronting the Latino/a/x, Mexican and Mexican American experience. L.O.C.C.A. seeks to celebrate and strengthen the Hispanic presence in the neighborhood, city and state of Texas. This trans-disciplinary mission bridges an investigatory process and social action with participation in an aesthetic experience to discover a broader definition of human fulfillment and citizenship for the local population.
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To establish an artist residency, think-tank and a research center for visiting and local artists.
To celebrate and strengthen the Hispanic presence in the East End neighborhood, the City of Houston and State of Texas.
To establish a center where the local community can acquire legal services and advice and where the local population and participate, collaborate and educate with an artist in resident.
To provide a place where the local community can both seek an aesthetic experience and a place for social and legal assistance.
To establish an intersection where attorneys, social activists, visual artists, social practitioners, theorists, writers, historians, musicians and the local population can interrelate and exchange ideas, assistance and action.
To collaborate with artists, community residents, institutions of higher learning, sociologists, historians, scientists and political activists in order to empower community partners and individuals to address issues confronting the Latino and Mexican American experience.
To support the Sanchez Law Building efforts to provide affordable family legal service to the local community in the areas of family law, divorces, child custody, wills, probates and immigration law.
To support the Sanchez Law Building efforts to create a center for new attorneys to establish experience in the sector of family law, in order to provide early career experience dealing with clients and the local community.
To establish an artist residency that will provide an opportunity for artists to embed and interact with the Spanish speaking community in order to create projects that collaborate with the local population.
To establish an artists residency for the artists to concentrate on composing a work of scholarship for use in future publications.
To provide a safe and hospitable place for residents and members of the community to tell and recite stories about their lives in the East End.
To establish a venue for the visual and performing arts.
To establish a platform for visiting artists outside of Houston to lecture, dialog, perform and discuss their ideas, works and projects.
To develop an organization that will network with fellow artists and arts organizations in Houston, the US and around the world.
To create an organization with an ethic that values new ideas and re-imagination towards solutions for various social problems.
To establish an institute of action and thought, where the arts, humanities, social justice and practical legal assistance can be housed in 7016 Canal Street; the same place where the longest continuously serving Mexican American law office in Houston, Texas.