Bianca Encinias

Founder/Owner

She has over 18 years working in the non-profit sector, over 9 years running a brick and mortar arts and cultural business, and 5 years as a planning consultant. In the summer of 2017, Bianca completed her Master’s Degree in Community and Regional Planning with the completion of her Thesis entitled Our Grandmothers’ Stories: The Role of Mestiza, Mexican, Spanish, Nuevamexicana Women in the Settlement and Community Development of the Wagon Mound Area, earning her thesis the recognition of “distinction”. 

Bianca grew up in Mt. View community, in the South Valley of Albuquerque, that is 80% Hispanic/Chicano/Latino and low-income and zoned for heavy manufacturing and polluting industry. This experience led Bianca to work at the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice for 10 years, starting off as a secretary and working her way up to Lead Campaign Organizer for the LUCHA Campaign, the Land Use and Community Health Action Campaign. Through the Southwest Network, Bianca was provided with the opportunity to work with community organizers in California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and across the United States to develop a regional strategy to address racial inequities further perpetuating disparities in public health, land use and loss, and zoning.

Working at the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice provided Bianca with the opportunity to learn and work with key organizers and Executive Directors who were involved in the Civil Rights Movements in the sixties and now leaders of community-based organizations throughout the Southwest and Western United States. Through this work Bianca was provided with the opportunity to travel and visit communities whereby she studied patterns of racial inequities in the planning and design our communities, identifying cookie cutter top-down trends of planning being implemented across the United States, exacerbating racial inequities through toxin emitting industry, displacement, land loss, and gentrification.

With the inspiration and mentorship provided to Bianca by elders involved in the Civil Rights Movement, Poor People’s Campaign, Environmental Justice Movement, and Liberation movements around 2008 Bianca was a co-founder of Los Jardine’s Institute a farm in the South Valley that is part of a larger collective , a cooperative, providing locally grown vegetables and herbs to the Albuquerque Public Schools and restaurants throughout Albuquerque. Then in December 2010 Bianca opened a cultural art space called El Chante: Casa de Cultura LLC. El Chante: Casa de Cultura is a space made possible by the generations who dedicated their lives to social justice. El Chante: Casa de Cultura LLC provided Bianca with the opportunity to develop a small business with a socially conscious perspective. El Chante: Casa de Cultura has a boutique where local and regional art and apparel is sold, it’s a gathering and meeting space with monthly poetry events and writing circles, and an art gallery with an emphasis on Nuevomexicano cultura and art.