Compañía Teatral del Norte is a nonprofit civil association founded in 1995 in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, a northern Mexican state on the Arizona border, two hours' drive from the crossing. It is a registered Mexican charitable organization, authorized to issue tax-deductible receipts under Mexican law.

Since 2018 the company has run El Mentidero, the first venue in the state registered as an arts and cultural center, housed in a restored mid-nineteenth-century schoolhouse in the historic center of Hermosillo.

We do three things. We produce our own work and keep a season running nearly every weekend of the year, which makes us the only company in the state with continuous programming. We open our stages to companies from across Mexico. And we take theatre out of the building: La Cachetona, a trailer that folds open into a stage, brings performances to towns that have no venue at all.

The company works from a conviction. Governments should support the arts, make them possible and set the conditions for them to exist, and that responsibility is indispensable. But a company should not depend entirely on public subsidy, or live at the mercy of grant cycles. We also reject the split between commercial and auteur theatre. What we defend is an artist's right to decide what to say and from where, and our own responsibility to build the material conditions that keep exercising that right from being a precarious luxury.

To contribute, through the production and circulation of the performing arts, to a freer, more perceptive, more reflective and more critical society.

A resident ensemble of seven — Paulo Galindo, Sergio Galindo, Neida García, Rodolfo Nevárez, Felipe Nery, Luz Karian and Klear Padilla — with creative teams hired for each production.

Much of the repertory comes from one pen: Sergio Galindo, the company's founder and resident playwright, who holds Mexico's Carlos Monsiváis National Literature Prize (2012) and the Xavier Villaurrutia Medal (2016).

Ticket sales pay for the operation. Philanthropy sustains what we believe must stay within reach of people who cannot pay for it: free performances in rural communities, and festivals that open a circuit otherwise closed to artists in this region.

Gifts from the United States are made to the Border Philanthropy Partnership, a 501(c)(3) organization, for the purposes of Compañía Teatral del Norte.

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