Brooklyn Cumbia Fest

For year two of The Brooklyn Cumbia Fest, we’re back and better than ever. We have satellite events across Manhattan but are prioritizing the heart of the festival in our borough- Brooklyn. This year's events will take place in the Summer of 2024. These events will focus on sharing Latin America's diverse music through workshops, performances, talkbacks, food, and visual art. The musical anchor of the event will be Cumbia, a style of music with roots in African drumming and indigenous singing and instrumentation. Cumbia was born in Colombia and was created as a communal form of celebration and resistance. The style has since traveled to every country in Latin America, the United States, and across the world, where it has evolved and been influenced by taste, technology, and the particularities of each region. In the last two years, we have worked with various Brooklyn-based musicians who specialize in different forms of Cumbia. We want to hold a festival that brings these musicians together while sharing and teaching about this diverse art form. 

Although often treated like a monolith, the Latin American community is incredibly diverse and not always a united front. Through experience and exploration, Cumbia is one of the common denominators of our cultures. So, we want to use the musical form to create a space to discuss our similarities and differences. This festival will once again bring awareness to the history and contributions of Afro-Latinos and indigenous communities through celebrations and conversations that highlight how much of our culture was born from these ancestries. We want this festival to be about starting difficult conversations that can carry on beyond the event.

Upon meeting our ioby fundraising goals, we will do the following:

• Confirm our date with the Goodlife Garden in Bushwick, our community partners, and all other participants.
• Submit our permits for the confirmed date.
• Draft and execute contracts with performers, musicians, and photographers. 
• Pay deposits for musicians and photographers.
• Solidify our marketing materials with accurate dates and confirmed participants. 
• Plan our social media campaign and plan our press release.
• Place tickets on sale

 We have an artistic dedication to creating and prioritizing communal spaces, and we want to engage the people and spaces already dedicated to serving the community. 

We are bringing different communities together for one shared experience while promoting the fact that immigrant art is American art with deep roots and a large audience behind it in New York City and beyond.

We are supporting local businesses and street vendors and creating a safe space for them to work. Stimulating local micro-economies is the most impactful way to develop and maintain a thriving and diverse local community. This event will make a venue for local sellers to have a guaranteed income.

We have worked with many large institutions to bring our work to them and our community. Still, we want to get this work directly to our community, in our community, and invite institutions to partner with us and meet our audience at home!

And who doesn’t love art, food, and dancing!?