Big Jim: A look at Tucson Meet Yourself

This originally ran Sept. 3, 2013:

Tucson Meet Yourself has been described as a celebration of the richness and diversity of the living traditional arts of the folk and ethnic communities of our region. In translation, that means that we invite traditional artists, craftspeople, singers, musicians, dancers, and cooks from as many as possible of the components of our complex society, and let it all happen. Or as one friend put it, it’s the only occasion in the year at which one can watch a Ukrainian Easter egg decorator, eat a Vietnamese egg roll, and listen to a Tohono O’odham polka band, all at the same time!

When I started this blog, the folks I had most in mind were the recent arrivals who might not have an easy way to learn about the people, customs, and stories of this region. I know it’s read by many seasoned Tucsonans as well, and I’ve learned a lot from your comments and letters. But my main objective was letting the new folks know what an exciting place they had moved to.

And a weekend at Tucson Meet Yourself is a wonderful way in which to see, hear, taste, and learn about our exciting mix of cultures. The wonderful thing about this festival is that it isn’t just a show. The invited participants are eager to discuss who they are, what they do, and why they do it. So there will not only be booths selling ethnic foods, but also a kitchen demonstration area where people from different cultures will show you how they prepare certain dishes, putting them into the context of their lives.

You’ll have the opportunity to talk with a lot of exciting folk artists who will be happy to explain, not just the “hows,” but also some of the “whys” of what they do. The Low Rider community is making a special effort to present itself to the public, as are the Yaqui, Tohono O’odham, and other communities. And all these folks are eager to help you learn about who they are and how they create their own particular kinds of beauty.

The festival has been going on for forty years now, and is designed to be interesting, educational, and fun. It will happen downtown on October 11-13, and admission is free. And you’ll be reading a lot more about it as the intervening days and weeks unfold.

This originally ran Oct. 4, 2013.

Tucson Meet Yourself is scheduled for Friday, Saturday and Sunday, October 11-13. Festival hours for Friday and Saturday are 11 a.m. 'til 10 p.m., and Sunday from 11 a.m. 'til 5:30 p.m. It’s held downtown in and around El Presidio Park. Admission is free.

It features the usual mix of traditional music, dance, folk arts, and food from Southern Arizona and Northern Sonora. However, no two editions of TMY are ever the same, so for the next three blogs I’ll be giving you hints on what to expect.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I am in no way a disinterested party: I helped start this thing in 1974, am heavily involved in it still, and serve on the board of directors.)

In the first place, our footprint has both contracted and expanded. We no longer take in the Convention Center area, but only extend to the County Buildings and the bridge over Congress. On the other hand, Pennington and Church Streets will be closed off and the festival will extend north of Granada to the area around the Tucson Museum of Art.

Pennington Street will be occupied by a whole new food category: American festival foods. That’s where you’ll find Philly cheese steaks, barbecue, Little League hot dogs, and roast corn. After all, these constitute a tradition as much as do pirogi, lefsa, and curry. The rest of the food booths selling foods from 30 distinct cultural traditions will be scattered through Jacome Plaza and El Presidio Park. Just as a teaser, there will be Peruvian food, Jamaican food, Chinese food, and of course popovers and Sonoran hot dogs! And at our Cultural Kitchen you can learn as well as taste..

The area between the Art Museum and Old Town Artisans will be given over to Low Riders for all the hours of the festival, with food, music, and demonstrations as well as cars and bikes.

There will be four stages — one in El Presidio Park, one on Church Street, one in Jacome Plaza, and one between the County buildings. This year we are grouping the performances by genre, so that on Friday, for instance, there will be various social dance traditions on Church Street from 4:30 'til 10 p.m., and a dance styles showcase in Jacome Plaza from 4:30 'til 7:30 p.m.

Also on Friday you can experience European music and dance, a Middle Eastern dance party and much, much more. I’ll be particularly eager to hear a festival first: traditional Ethiopian music on the City Hall Stage at 8 p.m. — I have no idea what it’s like!

Also new this year is a tent sponsored by the Chinese Cultural Center with historic photographs of Tucson’s Chinese community over the years. That’s another feature I’m really looking forward to.

For complete schedules and parking information, go to our website at tucsonmeetyourself.org

This originally ran Oct. 8, 2013.

Saturday’s program at Tucson Meet Yourself lasts from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Oct. 12, and includes the usual bewildering range of choices. The Folk Arts areas in the Courthouse Square and on Church Street will by active all day. Tohono O’odham artists will occupy the east side of Church St., and Yaqui artists the west side. The Cultural Kitchen will be going strong, winding up in the evening with a Soul Food Pantry Party, featuring peach cobbler, gumbo, and some of Mr. K’s famous barbecue, which should make the accompanying soul music slide down even better!

Over on the Community Matters stage you will hear classical Indian flute and tablas, followed by a recently-arrived Syrian violinist, playing Middle Eastern music. The same stage will see a panel discussion, sponsored by the Arizona Humanities Council, on “Why Does Ethnic Studies Matter for Western History? (The Western History Association meets in Tucson that weekend!)

Pow Wow 101 will return this year on both Saturday and Sunday, on the Global Rhythms Stage. The ever-popular corrido contest will be on the City Hall Stage from 2:30 'til 4 p.m. Finally, on that same stage at 10 p.m., there will be a waila dance with Gertie and the T.O. Boyz.

And in between and everywhere else there will be bagpipes, balalaikas, Carribean music, Peruvian music, Tex-Mex music, Puerto Rican music and dance, and the usual wide variety of performances. And the Low Rider Show continues north of Alameda Street, storytelling happens in La Cocina Restaurant.

Oh, yes … and food. Let’s concentrate on Jacome Plaza today. How about Vietnamese, Jamaican, Thai, Russian, Peruvian, Indian, Filipino, Chinese, and Iranian food? How about Sonoran hot dogs, churros, and fry bread? How about a taco to fill in the corners? And don’t forget the Cultural Kitchen, with food demonstrations and discussions throughout festival hours.

And it’s all free, except the food and the things you can buy. Why do we do it? Because we believe that Tucsonans really want to know the beauty and complexity of the community in which we all live. It’s not free to put on, of course. That sets us back about $300,000 each year. We get grants and gifts and sponsors and partners, of course. But if every person at the park were to kick in $1, we’d be able to do even more. So when you see our folks with their buckets or hear an appeal from the stage, please help us out. It’s your festival, too.

This originally ran Oct. 11, 2013.

Sunday at Tucson Meet Yourself is usually a little less crowded than Saturday, but with all of the same things going on — four stages, Cultural Kitchen, Folk Arts, Low Riders, and food booths.

Let’s start with the food, so as to gather strength for the rest of the experience. I’ll concentrate on El Presidio Park today. Unique to this area will be booths selling Turkish, Spanish, Costa Rican, Colombian, Danish, Greek, Bosnian, Middle Eastern, Polish, and French foods. The Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders will also be represented, and the International Students will be selling world deserts.

All this in addition to some of the foods we’ve already encountered in Jacome Plaza! And don’t forget the Cultural Kitchen, where you can learn as well as stuff.

On the City Hall Stage there will be a long session of “Sounds of Inspiration,” featuring a Congolese choir (I’ll be there!), Gospel, and other forms. That session winds up with Yaqui deer and pascola dances and Tohono O’odham singing and dancing.

At the Church Street Stage we’ll begin with a Mariachi Explosion, progress to the Pacific Rim, hear a Tohono O’odham blues band, dance to some R&B, and end up with music from the Ivory Coast. Where but at TMY can you take that trip?

The Community Matters stage will feature Cuban music and dance, a discussion of Islamic traditions, African-American music, and a presentation called “Tucson Meet Your Birds,” by the Audubon Society.

On the Global Rhythm Stage you’ll experience various kinds of Native American song and dance, a steel band, classical guitar, and much more.

And don’t forget the Folk Arts areas, the low riders up by the Tucson Museum of Art across Alameda Street, and the spontaneous jamming that’s sure to go on around the park. And then by 6 p.m. Sunday, Tucson’s most exciting blatantly educational experience will be over till next year. See you then!

This originally ran Oct. 3, 2014.

There’s a new kid on our folklife block, and its name is the Southwest Folklife Alliance. It grew out of Tucson Meet Yourself, when that organization started to move beyond the production of our festival in Tucson.

Now don’t panic – the Tucson Meet Yourself festival will continue under the same name, with the same shape and mission, with the new Alliance as its support organization.

As my next two blogs will show, this year’s TMY will be as exciting as ever, and perhaps even more so.

Under the dynamic leadership of Maribel Alvarez, the Alliance has formed a partnership with the University of Arizona’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences which will allow us to expand our activities and our geographic scope. (I say “our” because I’m on the Board of Directors.)

Over the last three years TMY has run three field schools, given two series of workshops called “Diggin’ Deeper” and presented a few concerts and a one-day mini-festival, all in anticipation of this change.

Our hopes and plans for the future are much greater in scope. We hope to start a folk artist apprenticeship program with cash grants to both master and apprentice. We are planning a small-business incubator for traditional cooks, farmers, and food artisans. We have already begun to consult with other communities and organizations that wish to start their own folklife programs.

At the University, we have already hired Nic Hartmann as Folklorist in Residence and will increasingly provide opportunities for students to get involved in various projects. And of course we’ll continue learning through fieldwork, and passing that knowledge on to the public by means of our programs.

And that’s just the beginning. You can look for an explosion of projects over the next few years. And speaking personally, as one of the folks who started TMY back in 1974, this expansion exceeds my wildest hopes and dreams.

One way to keep up with what we’re learning and doing is to read Borderlore, our monthly on-line newsletter presented by the University's Southwest Center. For information about this year’s Tucson Meet Yourself festival, check out www.tucsonmeetyourself.org.

This originally ran Oct. 7, 2014.

This year’s festival will take place in El Presidio Park, along Church and Pennington Streets, and in the Jacome Plaza by the Library — its traditional core area. No more serious hiking to see it all! The event starts each day at 11 a.m. Friday and Saturday it ends at 10 p.m., and on Sunday at 6 p.m. Within that space and time you’ll be able to experience many aspects of the traditional cultures — old and recently-arrived — that call Tucson “home.”

There will be the usual mouth-watering variety of food, with the addition of booths offering Nicaraguan and Haitian cuisines. The winners of our first-ever Global Foodways Fellowship will present specialties from Guadalajara, and the Iskashitaa Refugee Network will serve Afghani samosas and Somali chicken. The Cultural Kitchen Stage will feature thirty-two demonstrations and discussions of different foods during the three days of the festival. These presentations are complete with ASL interpretation. There is also a tented exhibit on the Wong family farm in Marana, concentrating on traditional Sonoran white wheat.

Come for the food, stay for the culture. This year we have selected six genres for extra-long or multiple sets that we call “Special Programs.” Each of these will include discussion by a participant in that particular tradition. On Friday and Saturday there will be a Polish Fiesta on the City Hall Stage. A Polish student folk group from Poland will be joined by our own Lajkonik dancers. On all three days the Church Street Stage will be the scene of a Waila and O’odham Culture Showcase, with six bands over the course of the festival. And also on Friday afternoon, The Gabriel Ayala Quintet will perform its fusion "jazzmenco" music.

Mideastern Traditional Dance and Music will be presented and discussed around midday on Saturday and Sunday, while “From Old-Time to Bluegrass” takes the City Hall Stage between 8 and 10 p.m. Saturday. And from 7 till 10 p.m. that same evening on Church Street there will be a “Global Carnival," featuring music from Trinidad & Tobago, Japan, Brazil, Latin America, and West Africa. Talk about tough choices!

Of course there will be the usual TMY variety on Friday’s three stages, ranging from the Arizona Balalaika Orchestra through Cuban music, to folklorico and Mariachi, with some Norwegian dance and Czech music thrown in. There’ll be Bluegrass and Western music, jazz and Soul, harmonica and classic guitar, and much more. And don’t forget the Community Matters area on Pennington Street, or the Yaqui and Tohono O’odham artists’ presence on Church Street.

Stay tuned; There’s more on Saturday and Sunday!

For full details on the program and other aspects of the festival, visit the TMY website at www.tucsonmeetyourself.org

This originally ran Oct. 10, 2014.

Now it’s Friday, and I've already given you an idea of what’s going to happen today. Let’s hit some highlights of the rest of the weekend. In the first place, Church and Pennington Streets will be closed to vehicular traffic on Saturday and Sunday. The Community Matters and Sponsors’ booths will be on Pennington Street, while folk artists and Low Riders will occupy Church Street. More folk arts demonstrations will be found in the Old County Courthouse.

There will be about 100 folk artists demonstrating and discussing what they do. You can see Ukrainian Easter egg decorators, rawhide braiders, African-American hair stylists, and a spectacular demonstration of Turkish paper marbling. There will be Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Turkish calligraphers. There will be Mexican and Yaqui paper flower makers, Polish paper-cutting, and Mexican piñata makers.

On Church Street you'll get a chance to meet Yaqui and Tohono O'odham artists and craftspeople. Many of our invited artists will offer hands-on experiences; others will have some of their work for sale. New to this year's festival will be Hopi quilting and basketmaking, and a Persian jewelry maker.

A little farther south on Church you'll find this year's low rider "Show and Shine" display. The Dukes Car Club is in charge of this part of our festival, and they have invited other local clubs to participate. There should be some great new and vintage cars, and even a few bikes.

We’ll be showing a movie at 9PM Saturday on the Global Rhythms Stage in Jacome Plaza. It’s the PBS documentary “Deaf Jam” about a deaf teen from Israel entering into the slam poetry scene with the help of a young Palestinian slam poet. The program will also include guest spoken word poets and the MC from Tucson Youth Poetry slam.

All three stages will be going strong, with the usual wide variety of music and dance. You can pick up a free program at the festival, which will give a complete list of everything we think is going to happen. I mentioned the Special Programs in Tuesday’s blog; suffice it to say that we’ll have the traditional TMY mix of music and dance genres, including many old friends and some new folks as well.

And as it always has, the festival will end Sunday afternoon on the City Hall Stage with presentations of Yaqui and Tohono O’odham ceremonial music and dance. It’s our tradition to wind up the festival with a Tohono O’odham circle dance, with everyone invited to join hands and join in.

Just to remind you, Tucson Meet Yourself is a project of the newly-formed Southwest Folklife Alliance.

This originally ran Oct. 2, 2015.

Well, folks, it’s Tucson Meet Yourself time again. This year’s festival takes place on October 9-11, in downtown El Presidio Park and Jacome Plaza.

The festival will be much as it always has been, featuring traditional foods, music, dance, and visual arts from many of the communities that call Southern Arizona “home.” This year, as is always the case, we’ll be trying some new ideas. One of these is the granting of “Artistic Fellowships” to local groups who want additional resources to put on a special program.

Two such groups will be performing Friday:

The Bill Gantz Western Band will be on the City Hall Stage from 4-7 p.m., presenting classic Western songs and the stories behind them. You may have heard “Nightrider’s Lament,” but you may not know that it was written by a cowboy near Vail, Arizona. The band will be feature songs and language of the Mexican vaqueros, stories of the heroism of Black cowboys, and a host of other songs. Our western song heritage comes from all over, and they’ll touch on much of this history… and sing you some great songs!

Flamenco del Pueblo Viejo will perform at 8 p.m. on the Global Rhythms Stage. This local group will be augmented by nationally and internationally known performers to present an hour-long, extremely varied flamenco fiesta.

Other featured performers on Friday will be our own Bouncing Czechs at noon on the Global Rhythms Stage, and the very popular waila band, Gertie and the T. O. Boyz at the Church Street Stage at 9. Both bands feature very different kinds of polka. And of course the usual TMY variety will be maintained with folklorico dancing, bluegrass, Balkan singing, Brazilian capoeira, Tejano music and more. And don’t forget the food from all over the world, scattered around both parks.

A festival feature that I’ve never written about is the “Community Matters” section, located this year in and around Jacome Plaza. This is where representatives of various community service and other organizations can rent some space to spread their message.

This year, I want to highlight a special project which is closely aligned with our purpose — a film-in-progress called “Mariachi Miracle.” Produced by Dan Buckley, it traces the history of Tucson’s own School Mariachi movement — a movement which has spread all over the country. The parts I’ve seen have fascinating interviews from musicians and professional educators and, of course, spectacular music and dance performances. The booth will be on Church Street, just south of the main crossing. Dan will be there to show parts of the film and talk about his project. Check it out — this is right in line with what TMY is all about!

This originally ran Oct. 9, 2015.

Tucson Meet Yourself is happening, and here are some of the things to look for on Saturday and Sunday. You can also head Downtown today.

The more than 50 food booths will be open during festival hours with the usual mix of ethnic and regional goodies. (There will be lists and maps on our website, as well as posted in the park.)

Over at the Old County Courthouse, the folk artists will be demonstrating and discussing their traditional skills.

Yaqui and O’odham artists will be featured on Church Street just east of the Courthouse.

On Church south of Pennington, the Low Rider Show and Shine will feature a wide variety of beautifully customized cars.

The “100 Years of Anthropology” exhibit will be open both days in Jacome Plaza.

The annual AIDSWALK happens Sunday morning, followed by the ritual unfolding of NAME quilt panels in Jacome Plaza.

If that weren’t enough, the usual rich assortment of music and dance performances will be presented on all three stages. This year, featured artists have been given the opportunity to bring in special guests from outside our region to augment their presentations. On Saturday, the featured artists include

Ragazona, with a program of Indian classical music,

Key Ingredients of African Soul, including music and dance from Ethiopia,

The Barbea Williams Performing Co., with African and African American dance, and

A Taste of My Cuba, with an overview of Cuban music.

On Sunday, the Lajkonik Polish Folk Ensemble will present a Polish Harvest Festival.

Those are just the featured presentations. In addition, there will be the usual wonderful TMY mix of genres and styles. When I tell you that Saturday starts with a Chinese Lion Dance and Sunday ends with a Tohono O’odham Circle Dance with everyone joining in, you’ll get the picture.

In between there will be Mariachi music, Bluegrass, bagpiping, Iranian dance, and just about everything else you can think of. And with three stages, you can’t possibly experience it all!

The best part is, that it’s all free (except for the food and other sale items.) We’ll be giving you plenty of opportunities to help keep it that way, by buying water, sodas, and T-shirts and by making contributions. We are now a membership organization as well, and you’ll have a chance to join us! (Full disclosure: I helped start the festival 42 years ago, and am on the board of the Southwest Folklife Alliance, our sponsoring organization.)

A full program and other festival information may be found on our website, tucsonmeetyourself.org. Hope to see you at TMY!