Mission & Defined Community

Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center (SRBCC) is a multidisciplinary arts and cultural organization based in Chicago whose mission is to preserve, and promote Puerto Rican and Latiné cultural expression with a focus on its African heritage. Our work aims to advance intercultural understanding, artistic excellence, and community well-being through the arts. For more than five decades, SRBCC has served as a vital cultural anchor where artists, youth, families, and audiences engage with music, dance, theater, literature, film, and visual art in ways that honor heritage while fostering new creative work.

SRBCC's defined community includes primarily Puerto Rican, Latiné, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latiné communities in Chicago, with a strong emphasis on residents of the city's West and Northwest Side neighborhoods, including Hermosa, Logan Square, Humboldt Park, Belmont Cragin, and surrounding areas. Our programming also serves multigenerational participants and audiences, including youth, emerging artists, professional artists, teaching artists, working-class families, recent migrants, longtime neighborhood residents, and culturally curious audiences from across the region. While our work is rooted in Puerto Rican cultural traditions, our community is also defined by a broader commitment to multicultural exchange, access, and creative opportunity for historically underrepresented artists and communities.

Programmatic Relevancy

During the most recently completed fiscal year, SRBCC offered a year-round range of multidisciplinary arts programs that directly advanced our mission by connecting cultural preservation, artistic development, and public engagement. These included music education and artist development programs such as La Cantera, our platform for emerging Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin jazz artists, and youth apprenticeship opportunities in Afro-Latin percussion and ensemble-based music learning. These programs help young artists build technical skill, cultural knowledge, confidence, and professional experience while remaining connected to community-based artistic traditions.

SRBCC also presented public-facing cultural programs, performances, workshops, and community events that celebrated Puerto Rican and Latino artistic expression across disciplines. These included concerts, literary and film-centered programming, artist residencies, and collaborative events with schools, festivals, and civic and cultural partners throughout Chicago. Through these efforts, SRBCC continued to serve as both a presenter and producer of culturally specific work while creating welcoming spaces for broad public participation.

Our programs offer meaningful opportunities to Chicago artists at multiple levels. SRBCC hires and contracts Illinois and Puerto Rico-based musicians, dancers, poets, filmmakers, visual artists, culture bearers, and teaching artists to lead workshops, develop new work, perform, mentor youth, and participate in residencies and community events. We provide paid opportunities for both established and emerging artists, with particular attention to artists whose work reflects the cultural traditions and contemporary realities of the communities we serve. In addition, our programs strengthen the local creative ecosystem by fostering collaborations among artists, creating pathways from training to professional practice, and ensuring that local and touring artists have platforms to share their work with diverse audiences. In this way, SRBCC's programming remains deeply relevant: it sustains living cultural traditions, supports working artists, and uses the arts as a tool for connection, visibility, and community vitality.

Aquí, Somos: 55 Years of SRBCC with Agua, Sol y Sereno

A fundraising event for Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center