Festival Blog

Chican@ music is not a genre, but rather an embodied experience. For almost one hundred years, musicians coming out of barrios in the southwestern United States have been articulating the complex identities and politics of a people.

Chicha silkscreen artist Pedro “MONKY” Tolomeo and Festival presenter Alfredo Villar (a.k.a. DJ Sabroso) arrived a few days early last week, just in time for the SMITHSONIAN at 8 kickoff event, “Chicha! A Peruvian Dance Party.”

The National Mall was filled with the sounds of storytelling, foot stomping, and rope twirling as the 2015 Folklife Festival’s Perú: Pachamama program entered its second day.

Led by the Smithsonian Accessibility Program, Morning at the Mall is designed to allow individuals with cognitive and sensory processing disabilities to experience the Folklife Festival in a calm and welcoming environment.

Eulogio Medina Sanabria has dedicated his life to the Peruvian art of mate burilado (gourd carving). While many carvers are drifting away from tradition, Sanabria continues to focus on detailed techniques

Since 2009, art director Josué Castilleja has designed eighteen logos for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. For the Perú: Pachamama program, he and his design staff have developed over 250 designs

The 2015 Smithsonian Folklife Festival opened today with the flare of woolen skirts and the roar of a hundred hand drums. Our Opening Ceremony for the Perú: Pachamama program took place in the National Museum of the American Indian’s Rasmuson Theater

Meet the people and places featured in the Perú: Pachamama program in this introductory video for the 2015 Folklife Festival.

Now a Smithsonian Folkways Recordings artist based in Fresno, Agustín Lira continues to chronicle the experiences and little-known histories of Chicano, Indigenous, and immigrant communities in California.