Casa de Unidad (Detroit, Mich.)

Organization founded in Detroit, Mich. in 1980 as Casa de Unidad Cultural Arts and Media Center. The center devoted its resources to identifying, developing, and preserving the Hispanic/Latino cultural heritage of Southwest Detroit. The organization offered workshops in the visual, literary, and performing arts. It also held a performing arts festival, and nurtured local artists by providing exhibition space in its gallery.

The Casa de Unidad Cultural Arts and Media Center was founded in December of 1980. In November of 1981, the organization was officially incorporated by the State of Michigan. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, the center devoted its resources to identifying, developing and preserving the Hispanic/Latino cultural heritage of Southwest Detroit. Among the programs offered by Casa de Unidad were educational workshops in the visual, literary, and performing arts. The center also sponsored a workshop designed especially for high school students entitled Tradiciones Vivas .

Besides cultivating local interest in the arts, the center nurtured many local artists by providing an exhibition space in the Galería, the center's art gallery. Casa de Unidad also complied the first Michigan Hispanic Arts Directory in 1988-1989. Moreover, the center held an annual two-day performing arts festival called Unity in the Community, which brought together local businesses, human service agencies, artists and entertainers for a weekend of cultural unity and celebration.

One of Casa de Unidad's most significant contributions to the preservation of local cultural history came out of their 1987 documentation project, which resulted in the published study Tradiciones del Pueblo: Traditions of Three Mexican Feast Days in Southwest Detroit (1990). The study was based on a series of oral histories and interviews from Detroit Latinos about the community's artistic and cultural traditions, such as Posadas, Fiestas Gaudalupanas, and Día de los Muertos.