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Jarochicanos is a music collective based out of Chicago dedicated to the practice and preservation of traditional Afro-Indigenous Son Jarocho music from southern Veracruz, Mexico. They began in 2008 as a youth workshop learning to play Son Jarocho, and throughout the years developed into a collective of educators, organizers, and artists leading numerous initiatives and projects utilizing traditional music as a tool for community building, resistance, and transformation including: free Son Jarocho workshops for children and adults, cultural exchanges with traditional musicians of other countries, international tours with elders and groups from Veracruz, pop-up shop with handmade creations of Jarochicanos and other community artisans, and arts integration educational programs. In 2021 Jarochicanos helped found the non-profit 18th Street Casa de Cultura, a cultural center in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, which is now the home of Jarochicanos’ programming. The projects of Jarochicanos and 18th Street Casa de Cultura strive to create spaces in our urban, American context where the ancestral knowledge found in our inherited cultural traditions can be shared, practiced, and remembered for they have what we believe is the key to transforming and healing our communities.

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Dancing Through Prison Walls is a California-based dance and performance project whose mission is to dance with, choreograph with, and tell stories within embodied carceral landscapes and beyond, amplifying voices of incarcerated people, and addressing mass incarceration. Begun in 2016, the work embraces a porous community of incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and “free world” dancers, choreographers, visual artists, and performers, with the artistic direction of social practice choreographer Suchi Branfman, whose ten-year choreographic residency at CRC Prison in Norco, California runs through 2026. The resulting hours of dance, dance making, performance, film creation, writing, and community conversations comprise a body of work that is at its essence a critical dialogue about freedom, confinement, and ways for surviving restriction, limitations, and denial of liberty through the act of dancing. Moving towards our North Star goal of decarceration and abolition, we dance through prison walls.

Suchi Branfman, choreographer, curator, performer, educator, and activist has worked from the war zones of Managua to Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre and Kampala’s Luzira Prison to NYC’s Joyce Theatre. Her work strives to create an embodied terrain, grounded in storytelling, dialogue, listening and action. Branfman is currently amidst a ten-year choreographic residency at the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium security state men’s prison in Norco, CA, is Artistic Director of the multi-faceted Dancing Through Prison Walls project and serves on faculty at ��������Ƶ. She is also a community gardener, a prison abolition activist, and a current California Arts Council Creative Corps Fellow, Lucas Arts Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center, City of Santa Monica individual artist grant fellow.

#carenotcages

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Meklit Hadero is an Ethiopian-American vocalist, songwriter, composer and former refugee, known for her electric stage presence, innovative sound and vibrant cultural activism.
Meklit’s performances have taken her to renowned stages across four continents. Her last album topped world music charts across the US and Europe, and was named amongst the best of the year by Bandcamp and The Sunday Times UK. Most meaningfully to her, Meklit is a star in her home country of Ethiopia, after the music video for her song Kemekem and her TED Talk went viral there, the latter garnering over 1.3 million views.
Meklit has collaborated with renowned artists such as Kronos Quartet, Andrew Bird, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and the late creator of funk music, Pee Wee Ellis.�� She is currently signed to Smithsonian Folkways, with two records set for release in 2024.
Meklit has always straddled her creative practice with her passion for cultural activism. She is the former Head of Creativity and Impact at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, where she helped design and implement a slate of radical programs supporting social justice focused artists during the height of the pandemic. She is a sought after thought leader and speaker and has given talks on multiple TED Stages, at the UN, and at the National Geographic Storytellers Summit, as well as at companies, organizations and Universities around the globe.
Meklit is a National Geographic Explorer, a TED Senior Fellow, and a former Artist-in-Residence at Harvard University and NYU.�� She is the co-founder of the Nile Project, a featured voice in UN Women’s theme song and the winner of the 2021 globalFEST Artist Award. Her work has been featured by the New York Times, BBC, CNN, NPR, Washington Post, Vibe Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe and many more.
Meklit is co-founder, co-producer and host of Movement, a new podcast, radio series and live show sharing the stories and songs of immigrant musicians. The show airs monthly on PRX’s The World to an audience of 2.5 million listeners.

PC: Ibra Acke.

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Based on ten years of work with immigrant children in two different border states — Arizona and California —��Drawing Deportation��gives readers a glimpse into the lives of immigrant children throughout 300 children’s drawings, theatre performances, and family interviews.

Silvia Rodriguez Vega is a community engaged writer, artist, and educational practitioner. She is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of Chicana/o Studies. Her research explores the ways anti-immigration policy impacts the lives of immigrant children through methodological tools centering participatory art and creative expression. Before joining UCSB, Rodriguez Vega was a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow and a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University in the Department of Applied Psychology. She received her PhD from UCLA’s Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies. Her first book, Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children��(NYU Press, 2023) argues that immigrant children are not passive in the face of the challenges presented by U.S. anti-immigrant policies.

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Join us for a night of education about Black/Latinx Queer Ballroom culture, skills workshopping in key Ballroom categories, and friendly competition in a mock Ball!

“It’s OVAH! A Ballroom Extravaganza” is a one-of-a-kind immersive experience in the history, culture, and art forms that live in Ballroom, the Black/Latinx queer competitive tradition that brought you Voguing, and hit series like “Pose” and “Legendary.” Join us for a night of education about Ballroom culture, skills workshopping in key Ballroom categories, and friendly competition in a mock Ball! We want to see you WALK! The evening will begin with education on the roots of Ballroom and its persistence and importance, followed by mentoring workshops to hone your runway skills under premier figures, Legends, and Icons in Ballroom today. The Extravaganza will conclude with a mock Ball to showcase your talents in front of a panel of seasoned Ballroom judges. We can’t wait to see what you’ve got! “It’s OVAH!” will be brought to you by the “Legend of Iconic Things,” Maven Lee, with The Shades Project in collaboration with the “Ever Legendary” Byron Juicy Couture Miyake-Mugler.

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The paper-mache doll is a distinctive traditional craft that became the dear play object and companion for many children in central Mexico. Today, this tradition is struggling to survive, being kept alive only in workshops of the few artisans who continue to produce paper-mache dolls, not for monetary gain but for continuity of this beautiful art. In this single day workshop, you will sew and create your own doll using molded forms, string, embellishments and paint. You will also learn about the history of the paper mache doll as a traditional and indigenous form of art from Mexico as well as its use with practices of art therapy.

About the artist: Ramona Garcia is a visual artist based in Sacramento, CA. Her work is inspired by her cultural upbringing and Mexican Healing Traditions, particularly folk art and paper mache doll-making. She is a recent recipient of the Seedling Creativity Grant through Sacramento’s Office of Art & Culture. With this grant, Ramona will be execute series of Doll Making Workshops with a focus on trauma informed practices that engage the often-overlooked Spanish Speaking immigrant community.

She graduated from University of California, Berkeley in 2012 and currently resides in Sacramento, California where she continues to expand her interest and education in the field of mental health while sharing her passion for this art at cultural community centers and universities across the country. Her mission is to honor these traditions by raising awareness about artisan work, cultural revitalization and bridging together traditional art making with practices of art therapy.

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Tarabu Betserai Kirkland – Director/Producer

Tarabu’s background as a Media Artist, Producer and Administrator includes twenty years in Public Radio having served as General Manager of radio station KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, Assistant Manager of KPFA in Berkeley where he co-founded the Third World Media Department and helped establish national radio training programs for producers of color, and General Manager of the Community Information Network. He is also the author and composer of the musical “Jukebox” which stared Danny Glover, author and producer of the stage play “Ritual of a Bop Solo,” producer of the stage play “Jungle Bells,” and producer and musical co-director for the National Public Radio drama “Quiet Thunder.” Tarabu has been the writer and producer for numerous radio documentary projects and the writer/producer /and director of the award winning documentary film, 100 Years From Mississippi.

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Dr. Jade Power-Sotomayor is a Cali-Rican educator, scholar and performer who works as Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego.�� Her research interests include: Latinx theatre and performance, Dance Studies, nightlife, epistemologies of the body, feminist of color critique, bilingualism, and intercultural performance in the Caribbean diaspora. Dr. Power-Sotomayor is currently working on a monograph called��¡Habla!:Speaking Bodies in Latinx Dance and Performance in which she theorizes her concept of “embodied code-switching” across distinct “Latinx” social dance spaces. Publications can be found in TDR, Performance Matters, Latino Studies Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, The Oxford Handbook of Theatre and Dance and Theatre Journal (forthcoming).��Her essays on the Fandango Fronterizo and on bomba dancing have been recognized with awards from the Dance Studies Association, American Society for Theatre Research, and the American Studies Association’s Sound Studies caucus. In 2019 she co-edited a special issue of CENTRO Journal: “Puerto Rican Bomba: Syncopating Bodies, Histories, Geographies” and collaborates on the Bomba Wiki project, a crowdsourced online bomba archive. She also works as a dramaturg and co-directs and performs with the San Diego group Bomba Liberté. She is grateful to her many teachers and students for gifting her a lifelong experience of learning.

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Michelle Habell-Pallán, Professor, Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at, University of Washington, is Director of the Certificate for Public Critical Race Scholarship and co-directs the Womxn Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities Oral History Archive. She co-curated/authored the bilingual exhibit & bilingual book��

Sonnet Retman is an Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies where she teaches courses in African American literature, cinema, popular music studies and new media.�� Her work on race, gender, genre, and performance has appeared in a range of academic journals. Learn more about her current projects:��, and��

Angelica Macklin, PhD Candidate,��Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at, University of Washington, is lead media producer for Womxn Who Rock and leads a creative team that produces multimedia training resources for the fields of early childhood education and expanded learning opportunities at the state and federal level. Her innovative professional development resources align access, equity, and quality, in early learning quality recognition systems, workforce technical training systems, and in higher education early learning programs through our EarlyEdU Alliance.

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Community radio, led by Chicanas and farmworkers in rural areas, has a history of connecting more isolated communities with the world around them. Dr. Monica De La Torre’s book��Feminista Frequencies: Community Building Through Radio in the Yakima Valley��centers the work of Radio Cadena KDNA 91.9 FM in Granger, Washington and the cultural power Chicanas forged behind the microphone through Spanish language programming and collaborative media production.��Beginning in the 1970s, Chicana and Chicano community organizers and farmworkers turned to community radio broadcasting to educate, entertain, and uplift Mexican American listeners across the United States. In this talk, Dr. De La Torre will delve into her book and online archive, feministafrequencies.com, to explore how community radio’s past can inform our current production strategies to further harness the cultural power of collective media production.

Dr. Monica De La Torre , born and raised in Los Angeles, California, is the eldest daughter to Juan and Jovita, immigrants from Zacatecas, Mexico. De La Torre is a Chicana feminist activist scholar and media producer, with roots in community based collaborative radio production. She��is��associate professor of media and expressive culture in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University where her research and teaching practices bridge Chicana feminisms, Latinx feminist media studies, radio and sound studies, and women’s and gender studies. As a scholar practitioner of media and radio, she analyzes both content and production practices in articles and public scholarship published in��WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly,��New Review of Film and Television Studies,��Current: News For People in Public Media,��and��Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog.��De La Torre’s first book,��tracks the emergence of Chicano community radio in rural farmworker communities beginning in the 1970s.

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Founded by Nobuko Miyamoto and Quetzal Flores, Great Leap’s FandangObon convenes into one circle the participatory music and dance traditions of Fandango of Veracruz, Mexico rooted in African, Mexican and indigenous music; Japanese Buddhist Obon circle dances in remembrance of ancestors; and West African dance and drums of Nigeria, Mali, and New Guinea. As we continue to build this practice, we have also welcomed the Sufi Muslim traditions of the Hadra as well. Rooted in culturally-based sustainability practices, FandangObon also honors the balance between mother earth and humanity by bringing us together into one circle. You can join us again or for the first time. FandangObon invites strangers and friends from multiple communities into one circle to learn from each other, share in our traditions new and old and engage our connections to ancestors, each other, and mother earth.

A veteran of both Broadway and the protest line, Nobuko Miyamoto is an icon of Asian-American music and activism. A third-generation Japanese American child of World War II concentration camps, dance was a way of healing. Early training led to a career in Hollywood and Broadway musicals, but it was the social movements of the late 60s where Nobuko found her own voice as an activist and singer, co-creating the seminal album A Grain of Sand (1973) regarded as the first album of Asian American songs. She went on to improvise her path, founding Great Leap, a multi-ethnic arts organization. Across five decades, she has forged a creative practice that thrives on community and collaboration, continuing today with a fire for justice. Now in her eighth decade, Nobuko Miyamoto still performs and is co-producer of FandangObon. Her album 120,000 Stories was released by Smithsonian Folkways in 2020 and memoir Not Yo’ Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love, and Revolution was published by University of California Press in 2021.

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Son de Madera is an artistic group who specializes in the interpretation and composition of one of the traditional musical genres of southern Mexico: the Son Jarocho. Formed in 1992, Son Jarocho rises from the heart of fandango. Son Jarocho music travels through the world creating and recreating sounds that are nourished by a deep knowledge of the ancient roots of the genre, and at the same time evokes and renews tradition, distinguished by the cultivation of music, the song and Jarocho poetry as a living tradition. Son de Madera was nominated for three categories in the 9th Edition of the Independent Music Awards as the Best Latin Album, Best Song and Best Cover; in Traditional Music Performance at Las Lunas del Auditorio in 2015. Within the cultural diversity that resurfaces today in the State of Veracruz, Son de Madera presents a musical and scenic proposal that, far from its origins, develops and takes this tradition to a high level, thanks to the creativity and life experience of each of its members.��A Son de Madera performance is based on a recreation of the various elements that are intertwined in fandango: the music, the singing, the poetry, and the improvisation.

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My Mother always told me stories. I began telling stories formally when I was in high school in Chicago (St. Ignatius) in the 60’s, stories of Africa and the struggles of African-Americans for freedom. In 1992 I met Joel ben Izzy from Berkeley, CA who was introduced to me as a professional storyteller. “You mean to tell me that people pay you to tell stories!?”�� I asked. I picked his brain and vowed that I was going to become a professional teller too, and my motto would be “Have mouth. Will run it”. A week or so later I asked myself what would I do as a profession if I was independently wealthy. Tell stories, was my answer.

So I went to my local library and began collecting folk tales from different countries and reading books about storytelling. One day the Young Adult Librarian asked me why I was getting so many books of folk tales and asked if I was writing a paper. When I told him that I was a storyteller he said that he had a group of teenagers that wanted to learn storytelling. Could I give them a workshop? I said sure. The workshop was a success. Thus began my career. And I’ve been running my mouth around the country and around the world ever since.

In 1996 I initiated the GRIOT Workshop in Leimert Park in Los Angeles. This is a place where anyone can come and get assistance in developing their storytelling skills. From 2004 until 2008 I was the Pacific Region Representative for the National Storytelling Network (NSN) Board of Directories.

My life has been one heaven of a story: Student activist, Black Panther, US Army martial arts instructor, acupuncturist, world traveler, spiritual seeker, construction worker, storyteller, husband, father, crazy friend.

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