The Brooklyn Cumbia Festival is a one-day musical event anchored by Cumbia music and celebrating the diverse identities of Latin American people touching on race, culture, and mythology.
Leader
Camilo Quiroz-Vazquez
Location
50 Goodwin Pl Brooklyn, NY 11221
The event will take place in the Summer of 2023 at the Good Life Garden in Bushwick. This event will focus on sharing Latin America's diverse music through workshops, dance 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. Cumbia is the root of much of the music of Latin America, similar to the Blues in the United States. The style has since traveled to every country in Latin America and the United States, 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. This event will also feature food, dance, and visual art inspired by the various countries involved and by the music that will be shared.
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 bring awareness to the history and prejudices many Latino people still harbor against Afro-Latinos and indigenous communities by highlighting that our culture was born from these communities. We want this festival to be about starting difficult conversations that can carry on beyond the event. The event will feature tables by local immigrant rights groups and cultural groups that can expound on the topics this festival will feature. We hope to turn this into an annual festival that can be held every Summer in Brooklyn. We expect this event to employ between 30-50 artists.
Upon meeting our ioby fundraising goals, we will do the following:
And who doesn’t love art, food, and dancing!?