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Annual Festival de las Calaveras:
Twin Cities Dia de los Muertos Celebration
www.festivalcalaveras.com
Festival de las Calaveras: Who We Are & What We Create
Festival de las Calaveras is a Latinx music and arts festival volunteer-organized by non-profit community group Tlalnepantla Arts. The festival is centered on the traditional and contemporary celebration of Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), an indigenous Mexican tradition which honors the memory of ancestors and departed loved ones.
Festival de las Calaveras is composed of a series of events that take place annually in the fall and include live music, dance performance, puppet theater, visual arts exhibition, multimedia animation, spoken word, and family art-making activities. Festival events take place at leading Twin Cities’ venues, claiming and creating space for Latinx arts, artists, and community.
Mission
Tlalnepantla Arts is a community-based organization founded by visual artist Deborah Ramos in 2008. Tlalnepantla’s mission is to promote ancestral creativity through contemporary art forms that promote cultural identities and transform community.
Objectives
Festival de las Calaveras addresses limited resources and support for high quality annually produced Latinx arts showcases in Minnesota. Guiding principles for the festival are to build community through Latinx arts; connect and grow the Twin Cities diverse Latinx arts community; recognize and expose local Latinx artists to the Latinx and broader Twin Cities audiences; and promote artistic collaborations among local, national, and international Latinx artists.
Goals
The festival intends to promote the celebration of Day of the Dead within the Latinx community, embracing diverse inter-generational, educational, economic, cultural, and gender identities. Further, considering that many may not practice the same tradition of ancestral remembrance, yet are invited to appreciate similarities rather than cultural differences as original peoples of the Americas. The festival also extends the opportunity to members of other cultural communities and allies to celebrate the remembrance of their own ancestors through Latinx artistic expression and the Day of the Dead tradition.
Tlalnepantla Arts History
The Zenteotl Project was the community engagement component of Tlalnepantla Arts from 2009 to 2017. The Zenteotl Project fused art, Mexica (Aztec) dance, and urban agriculture within a community garden in Central Neighborhood, South Minneapolis. In 2013, the first Festival de las Calaveras was organized to bring awareness to the Zenteotl Project’s community gardening work that was dedicated to planting organic blue corn and engaged community with the creation of a Day of the Dead ofrenda (offering) on the same plot where the corn was planted and harvested.