17 July 2009
Folklife Festival Brings Latino Musicians to Washington
Crowds celebrate the music and the cultures it reflects
Washington — Musicians from Mexico and Colombia, from Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, from Paraguay and the United States brought their pulsating rhythms to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on Washington’s National Mall.
Since the festival was launched in 1967, millions of spectators have streamed to the mall in late June and early July to take in the annual two-week event — one that provides perhaps the ultimate in culturally diverse programming.
Each year, the festival focuses on three regional or conceptual themes. This year, the whole range of Latino music and the culture it reflects got its turn in “Las Américas: Un Mundo Musical/The Americas: A Musical World.”
Completing the trio of featured themes were an area devoted to the culture and music of Wales and one celebrating the contribution of African-American oral traditions to American culture.
Smithsonian’s Daniel Sheehy, the Latin American program’s co-curator, termed it “a vivid testimony to how music can be much more than melodies and rhythms.”
“Each tradition represented in the program is a musical flag of identity, a beacon that unites cultural communities and a means of cultural self-actualization,” Sheehy said.
On a typical day, visitors to the two big performance tents in the Latin American section of the festival grounds — Salon de Baile and the Folkways Salon — could hear Venezuela’s Maestros del Joropo Oriental, playing music from the country’s eastern portion, and Grupo Cuero Madera y Costa CUMACO, an Afro-Venezuelan drumming ensemble from the Caribbean coast.
They could catch groups from three different regions of Mexico, playing in the styles of the southern Veracruz gulf region and the cattle-herding region of La Huasteca, and offering the corrido, a narrative song and poetry style typical of Sonora.
Multiple regions of Colombia were represented, with groups presenting the joropo music of the plains, vallenato folk music from the Caribbean coast and currulao marimba music from the country’s Pacific coast.
Central American and South American food specialties like Peruvian-style salad, arroz con pollo, homemade pupusas, fried plantains and Aguila beer from Colombia were available.
At a smaller tent, La Peña, spectators seated at tables set up café-style could watch demonstrations of techniques and listen as panels of musicians discussed their craft.
That smaller site, with its opportunity for “exchange and dialogue,” reflected a central point of the festival, said co-curator Olivia Cadaval.
“We created this space of musical interaction and conversations … [based on the question] ‘What is this music to you?’” she said. Topics could range from “the role of women in music, to cultural identity, to how you use this music as an immigrant — a series of themes that were very pertinent to the musicians. … This is what the festival is, giving people voice, giving people a place to speak for themselves.”
The performance by the Grammy Award-winning, Los Angeles-based group Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano illustrated Cadaval’s point on the centrality of exchange among the musicians. Members of Mariachi Chula Vista, a highly regarded high school mariachi band from San Diego, California, were in the audience, watching in rapt attention to learn from the pros.
Cecilia Ortega, originally from Veracruz, Mexico, and now a fifth-grade teacher in Queens, New York, was excited about all the acts. “It’s really, really nice meeting all those people from all over the world and enjoying their music and their traditions,” she said.
The Mexican and Colombian performances amounted to a preview of future festivals. Cadaval said Smithsonian staffers are well along in planning for the 2010 event, where Mexico will be featured, and have begun planning for a featured role for Colombia in 2011.
