Thank the museums for the malls

On Dec. 1, Antonios San Maron participated in a routine Saturday afternoon activity — he drove to the Sunrise Mall with his parents, wife and three kids, and walked around.

“We come every weekend. We come to get a snack and walk around,” he said.

San Maron, 27, didn’t have anything specific to buy. After walking around, he sat with his father in the food court, silently eating with the din of hundreds of shoppers swirling around them.

San Maron has never been to the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art or the Historical Brownsville Museum. He’s taken his children to the Gladys Porter Zoo a couple of times and says he might go again, but has no plans of attending the museums.

For advocates of these cultural institutions, getting local residents into their doors is a challenge they face daily.

But for city officials like those at the Brownsville Economic Development Council, keeping these institutions operational with tax dollars is worth the expense, despite the lack of attendance, as it helps them to lure investors to the city.

Local residents and tourists from as far as Monterrey pack the mall and other Brownsville stores every weekend and most weekdays. In October, the new Kohl’s store had its largest opening in the company’s history.

While the city has added more than 40,000 residents since 2000 and continues to draw visitors, attendance at the Historic Brownsville Museum and the Gladys Porter Zoo has remained flat. The same number of people go each year, but it’s a declining percentage of the population.

The city regularly contributes funds to local institutions to boost the area’s quality of life. The BEDC says companies looking to open a new branch are attracted by such amenities because they represent a city’s commitment to the well-being of its people.

Local government continues to invest more money each year into many of its longstanding cultural institutions, with the Gladys Porter Zoo and Brownsville Museum of Fine Art receiving special funding in the past few years.

This year, the zoo will receive a total of $515,000 from the city, according to spokeswoman Cynthia Garza Galvan, $215,000 more than it usually receives. She says the additional funds were allocated to maintain and update the zoo, in hopes it will eventually becoming self-sustaining.

Annual attendance at the zoo has remained relatively static in the past five years, with a slight drop of about 10,000 between 2002 and 2006. So far this year, the zoo has welcomed 327,730 visitors.

Numbers for the Historic Brownsville Museum have remained relatively steady as well, with an increase in annual attendance of 200 since 2000, but a decrease of 400 people from 2004 to 2006.

Meanwhile, Brownsville has become the 24th fastest growing city in the United States, according to the Census Bureau.

For a store like Kohl’s, these numbers are the primary reason the store came to town.

“Kohl’s looks for communities with high concentrations of families with children,” company spokeswoman Elizabeth DeLuca wrote in an emailed statement. “When it makes sense, Kohl’s builds stores in new communities near communities we already serve.”

Although Brownsville itself is not a “new community,” it has added a population two-thirds the size of Harlingen in the past seven years alone.

SELLING BROWNSVILLE

Gilberto Salinas, director of communications and marketing at BEDC, says that much of his job revolves around using quality of life institutions like the museums and zoo to attract corporations and retailers to open up branches in Brownsville.

“Museums help us show executives that Brownsville does care for the arts. If a community is paying attention to its museums, they’re paying attention to the quality of life of their people.”

The city is continuing to increase funds to local cultural institutions — including its 2001 pledge of $1.4 million to fund half of the projected cost of building the Brownsville Museum of Fine Arts on Seventh Street.

The new building is more than three times the size of its old location on Neal Street, behind the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College.

Since it opened 13 months ago, the MFA has used its new location and increased funding to create expanded lecture and workshop offerings and bring in high attendance figures.

“Not everyone is going to be interested in every topic, so we do programming on a wide range,” said George Farish, who is on the museum’s board of directors.

The move is an example of an institutional success. According to Farish, the past year’s attendance alone has likely been greater than the last nine years combined. Much of this is due to the investment the city has made in the new incarnation of the museum. From 2001 to 2006 the museum had between 1,500 and 2,000 visitors per year. So far this year Farish estimates the museum has had 15,000 visitors.

Farish says that even so, this attendance comes at a large cost to local government and requires plenty of grant money. Only a small percentage of the museum’s income comes from its visitors. He says this is standard for an institution of its type.

“If you look at a pie chart for almost any museum, only a small sliver would come from tickets,” he said.

At the Gladys Porter Zoo, Galvan says she hopes the extra money allocated by the city which will be used to perform maintenance, update facilities and expand the gift shop, will bring in more visitors.

Galvan added that because many of the zoo’s attractions are outdoors, the annual figures often depend on the weather.

“A couple of years ago we had a beautiful January, and people just came to the zoo,” she said. “This year it just rained and rained and no one wants to go to the zoo in the rain.” The January attendance for 2006 was 18,746, compared with 11,280 in 2007.

‘COMFORT ZONE’

Salinas says that ultimately for the BEDC, museums and other cultural institutions are not as significant a selling point as the cheap cost of labor or the low cost of living — fifth lowest in the U.S. — which are found in Brownsville.

He says the most difficult hurdle the BEDC faces in selling a potential investor on Brownsville is the low education level of the workforce.

“High-tech firms won’t give you the time of day,” Salinas said. “I don’t think that BISD is doing a bad job. I think that parents don’t follow through with their children’s education.”

For Salinas, much of the low attendance of local institutions like museums is cultural. In his own life, it took moving away to Austin for college to discover museum-going as an activity and consequently become interested in visiting Brownsville museums. Now he is diligent about bringing his own children as part of their education.

“Every night my wife and I sit with our kids and make sure they’re doing their homework and that they understand everything,” he said. His own parents emigrated to the U.S. from Mexico.

“When I was growing up it wasn’t expected of me to go to college. I was expected to graduate from high school, but if I hadn’t I think it would have been good enough for my parents that I at least went to school in the U.S.”

Farish says that it is this kind of attitude toward education that prevents those who might enjoy and benefit from the varied offerings of local institutions from attending.

“The majority of people in Brownsville have probably never been to a museum in their life,” he said. “There’s an intimidation factor.”

While Salinas finds education the biggest obstacle in his work of selling Brownsville, for MFA director Carol DeMoss, the hardest part is convincing those who are not interested in museums that these institutions are for everyone.

“The biggest competition? Video games,” she said. “Trying to get people out of their comfort zone in front of the television.”

Virma Villafranca and her family, who live in Matamoros, aren’t parked in front of the television. They enjoy crossing the border every weekend and often visit the mall. There, massages, workers dressed up in elf costumes to welcome shoppers, and swarms of people provide entertainment.

She says that she’d like to go to the museum as well — there just isn’t enough publicity for her to know where to find it, she says.

“We know that it’s an important thing for our family to do, we just don’t know where it is or how much it costs,” she said.

‘A WONDERFUL SURPRISE’

For DeMoss, providing Spanish programming and reading material to those like the Villafranca family and making the museum accessible is her most important work.

She has used the Internet, newspaper, and mailed advertisements to try to generate local awareness about the museum. Unfortunately, for a family in Mexico without a computer, much of this never reaches her audience.

Bob Carrizales was at the mall last weekend to shop with his family for Christmas. He said he’d never been to any of Brownsville’s museums, although his family does go to the zoo once a year.

“If they lowered the price we would go,” he said of the museum. Tickets to the MFA cost $5.

“We went on a field trip with school,” said his 11-year-old daughter Bianca, generating a look of surprise on her father’s face. “It was nice. We got to make drawings.”

Many children have their first experience going to a museum on a school field trip.

“I went a couple of times,” said Gilbert Garcia, a 23-year-old from Brownsville, as he sat in the food court at Sunshine Mall with some friends last weekend. “The last time was in eighth grade.” He said he has tried to go since, but when he went the MFA was closed.

DeMoss says that those who attend the museum are often surprised when they walk in the door.

“People will come in and say they didn’t expect it to look this big from the outside,” she said. “I think people are surprised we have something this wonderful in Brownsville.”

Each of these institutions is holding holiday events to lure in more visitors. The MFA is currently holding a Member’s Exhibit until February 3. At the zoo tonight, “Zoo Nights and Lights,” will host a botana from 6 to 8 p.m. At the Historic Brownsville Museum, the Nacimientos exhibit is currently on display, with more than 300 nativity scenes from all over the world.