It’s a Sunday morning during the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. As I walk along the National Mall, the sound of lively music fills the air—flutes and drums as a man sings in Spanish, whistles cutting through the rhythm. Ahead, a burst of color catches my eye, and I see dancers adorned with feathered hats, women in embroidered dresses with scarves draping down that bounce along with the music. A large group of dancers moves in perfect unison, their hands sweeping down to the earth and rising back toward the sky.

A crowd gathers quickly; people clap to the beat, smiling and swaying, and I find myself doing the same. The joy is infectious. I don’t yet know what I’m witnessing or who these dancers are, but I’m clued by a Bolivian flag waving proudly above them.

Later, I learned that the dance is called tinku, performed by three Bolivian dance fraternities from the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area. This region, it turns out, is home to one of the largest Bolivian American communities in the country, with around thirty active dance fraternities, according to Shauna Inofuentes.

The word tinku comes from the Quechua term tinkuy, meaning “to come together,” a fitting description of how these dances are taught and learned. Inofuentes, a presenter at the Festival and a caporales dancer with more than thirty years of experience, described the collaborative way these dances take shape. Each folk dance is led by guides known as guías, but because the learning process is peer-based and collective, they aren’t considered teachers in the traditional sense.

“I think that’s really reflective of Andean culture, Andean Indigenous culture,” she said. “No one’s more important than the other, even though we have people who guide and whatnot. We dance the steps, and the ones who are learning go behind us and keep trying to imitate them until they get it. The teaching is very immersive and done without a lot of explaining, although we do slow things down and help each other out. But there’s this community feel and immersive experience we have while learning.”

Once a dance set is learned, executing a performance is another process.

Imagine this: music blasts, a crowd has its eyes on you, and you are a guia leading twenty to thirty people. How do you get the dancers’ attention? You blow a whistle, and then you throw up hand signs to indicate what the next step is going to be. A few counts before finishing the step—usually four to eight, depending on the guia’s style—you blow the whistle to signal the end of the move, then use a hand motion to show it’s time to transition to the next step. The steps themselves take about fifty seconds, so the dancers repeat that step until the leader signals that they’re done.

Inofuentes said that one of the most meaningful outcomes of bringing together different dance groups was the sense of camaraderie that naturally developed.

“Everyone got to dance both the set that they already know from their own fraternity and learned steps from another fraternity,” she said. “That promoted unity and community and very healthy friendship. I think it also helps with their dance growth because every group has a style, and when you get to learn someone else’s style, that just increases your dance capacity.”

Beyond connecting with others who share her heritage, Inofuentes believes that participating in the dance groups is a powerful way to stay rooted in Bolivian culture.

“Through the dance, you learn about the costume; you learn about where it comes from,” she said. “It’s a very vocal dance. We call out steps, and we have names for different parts of the parading troops, which are often in Quechua and Aymara. I think the learning is really so holistic.”

Across the Festival, that same cultural pride echoes through other dance performances. From the beat of Bolivian tinku music to the sway of Hawaiian hula, each group brings its own language, history, and movement to life.

Inside the National Museum of the American Indian, six girls in red dresses and yellow leis around their necks kneel on the floor, each holding a feathered gourd instrument in their right hand and tracing hula hand movements with their left—bringing their hand to their mouth and lifting it toward the sky. Behind them, a woman in a yellow dress, crowned with leaves, beautifully sings a song in the Hawaiian language. Her ethereal singing and the girls’ dancing create a hypnotic rhythm, assuaging the stress of my hectic day working on the Mall.

One of the male dancers, Kāwika Keuma, sees hula as a profound means of cultural connection. “I really like hula because, through the songs, you learn stories of the past,” he explained. “Not only that, it connects you to your heritage.”

Keuma is a student at Hālau I Ka Leo Ola O Nā Mamo (School of the Living Voice of the Descendants), a hula school on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi that teaches entirely through ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian language. Founder Pelehonuamea “Pele” Harman, a kumu hula (hula teacher), explained how the organization fosters deep cultural connection and advances language revitalization efforts.

“We are a hula hālau, which is a traditional Hawaiian hula school that seeks to perpetuate our traditional dances as well as perform new compositions, new choreography for contemporary Hawaiian pieces,” she said. “We teach through the medium of language. So, all our instructions, our discussions about the compositions that we dance, are all done through the medium of language.”

Harman’s great-grandmother, the renowned Hawaiian scholar, dancer, and educator Mary Kawena Pukui, remains a guiding influence in her life and work. Pukui’s legacy continues to shape the creation of educational materials and cultural resources for Hawaiian immersion classrooms, including those used at Hālau I Ka Leo Ola O Nā Mamo. For Harman, performing her great-grandmother’s original compositions and hula songs that are part of her hula genealogy are a way to keep her teachings alive through movement, language, and song.

“My teachers, when they taught [hula] to us, told us to take care of it, because we’re just vessels through which this knowledge passes from one generation to the next,” she said. “I try to remind myself, as well as our students, that these are things that have been preserved for us, so it’s our responsibility to take care of it.”

In addition to performing compositions to honor Pukui’s memory, the hālau prepared two more hula sets for the Festival.

“We created a set especially for the Fourth of July concert because we wanted to tell a story about our history as a people and our connection to the history of Americans,” Harman explained. “We were very intentional in crafting, using the dances and the chants of the songs that we chose to tell that story of our history.”

Keuma echoed this sentiment, describing it as unforgettable. “I think the Fourth of July performance was my favorite because we were able to showcase our lineage through the clothes that we’re wearing and through the songs that we’re dancing and singing,” he said. “Performing on the Fourth of July in the capital of the United States is something I’ll never forget because we were able to showcase our songs and our dances on the day that marks America’s birthday.”

Although Keuma is accustomed to performing regularly in Hawaiʻi, stepping onto the stage in Washington, D.C., carried a greater sense of responsibility. “Kumu Pele kept telling us that we need to set an example because we might be the first image of a Hawaiian that people will ever see.”

Harman expressed how deeply impressed she was by her students’ commitment and enthusiasm throughout the Festival, both on and off stage. “I’m glad that they understood also that we are ambassadors of our people, even offstage with how you interact with people,” Harman said. “It really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our kids. Not many people in the world can say, ‘I performed at the Main Stage of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on a major holiday.’”

Inofuentes also reflected that, although the tinku dancers are from the local area, they understood the honor and significance of performing on the National Mall.

“For the kids, it was so amazing,” she said. “They’re from the suburbs of D.C., so they’re very familiar with the National Mall, the White House, the Washington Monument, and the Capitol. They know how important and significant it is. For any American youth, that’s such an incredible historical marker and landscape, and then to get to present and share your art that you worked on so hard for so long. They were all so excited and so honored.”

Inofuentes also reflected on the overall experience of being at the Festival, emphasizing that its true power went far beyond performance—it was about creating a space where culture can thrive.

“One thing I learned about being at the Folklife Festival is just how wonderful people are, how wonderful human beings can be to each other,” she expressed. “It’s such magic to create these spaces of creativity, knowledge, sharing respect for each other, and respect for ourselves. It’s all about honoring every person, and I think that will help pull us through for future generations to have a better life.”

Sebastian Barajas is an intern in the Folklife Storytellers Workshop and a recent art history graduate from The University of Texas at Austin.