In a world this large, remembering where we come from can make it feel smaller.

Youth and the Future of Culture explores how young people engage with culture, sustain it, innovate upon it, and learn from generations prior. At this year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival, our team worked passionately to bring story bearers from far and wide to the National Mall and foster cross-cultural, intergenerational exchange, because stories of preserving cultural heritage live in all of us; they live in the participants, the visitors, and the people running the show from behind the scenes.

The following tidbits come from casual interviews with Festival interns and staff, meant to collect their memories in the same way that they would recount stories to a friend over coffee. They share the traditions they engaged with as children, whether from cultural backgrounds, personal passions, or new beginnings, and how they have carried them into adulthood.

Tori Baker – Accessibility Assistant

“I am half-Venezuelan on my mom’s side, and most of my cultural traditions are related to holidays, but one tradition I grew up with and still participate in is getting a bendición (blessing) from my grandparents whenever we say goodbye. Like many Venezuelans, my grandparents are Catholic, so the bendición is a memorized prayer that was prayed over me and my sister every time we parted ways. While I am not and have never been Catholic, I still feel the protection and safety from this ritual.

This is something we do regardless of where we are, whether we are out and about or at one of our homes. Last year after the Festival, my abuelo was in the area and stopped by the National Museum of the American Indian just to say hi while I was helping clean up. After he left, I realized I hadn’t gotten the bendición, so I texted him and he immediately called me. We did it over the phone with him on the Metro and me in NMAI. This tradition is a way that I get to connect with my grandparents and feel connected to a religious and cultural tradition that is important to them that I don’t participate in otherwise.”

Bella Pulliam – Accessibility Intern

“My mom is from Brazil and immigrated here on her own when she was in her early twenties. Although I am not geographically close to my family in Brazil in any sense, I have had the privilege to visit them many times, and I have my mom who was one of the main people who raised me. Throughout all of these experiences, one overarching theme is how important food is and how there is more value to it than what the nutritionist tells you.

In my family, food is an act of love and care. Whether it was my grandma making homemade popsicles and cookies especially for me and my sister every time we visited, or my mom making my sister and me snacks every day while we were doing homework when we were kids, or my mom showing us where food comes from with our backyard garden and chicken coop, the one connecting these memories is food. All these moments have allowed us to make invaluable memories with each other and accept the love that we are given. Every time I am at home, this ingrained knowledge comes back as my family sits together for meals, and every time I offer to share my food, it warms my heart since it connects back to the love my family has given me.”

Sara Benboubaker – Festival Services Assistant

“Growing up, I would spend every summer with family and friends in Tunisia. One of my most memorable traditions was going to the hammam, commonly known as a Turkish or Roman bath. Bathing in a hammam was more than a cleansing; it provided a connection with the women in your family as a communal experience.

Starting the hammam process, you sit in a steam room to allow your body to sweat out toxins. Next, you lay on a marble slab and a haarza (woman working at the hammam) lathers your hair and body in an organic clay mask called tfal that has been used for generations. Next, the haarza uses a coarse exfoliating glove to remove all the dead skin and sweat build up. It is a purifying and humbling experience seeing all of the grime scrubbed off of your body. A hair washing and massage is the final step in the process, which is then followed by relaxing in a warm towel and sipping on a cold carbonated drink or mint tea.

Hammams have become a part of every important event; before celebrations, weddings, back to school, or if you need a nice detox reset, people in Tunisia love a hammam. Every time I visit Tunisia, my best friends (our mothers and grandmothers grew up together and shared a friendship throughout their lives as well) and I go to the hammam before having a night out together.

To this day, I relish the moment I get to experience such an intimate sacred experience that has been passed down for generations. For me, it is like a spiritual practice. You almost transform into a new person with every hammam experience.”

Arlene Reiniger – Senior Program Coordinator | Intern Coordinator

“We always had fun birthdays. My parents would decorate the dining room table after we went to bed and put out presents and a very vibrant birthday tablecloth and sometimes streamers. I’m one of four siblings, and my parents would always have a gift for each of my siblings even though it wasn’t their birthday. If it was your birthday, then everybody else would also get a present and everybody would be celebratory with you. I’m still very, very close with my siblings. We still celebrate each other’s birthdays. We have a meal together, give gifts.”

Pablo Molinero-Martinez – Program Coordinator

“I’m from Spain, so on Sundays we gather with the family and we cook paella. My grandma would make it, your grandma would make it. We had paella depending on the season. When it’s summer, more seafood. When it’s winter, we had, for example, not by itself but the kind of rice with a rabbit.

These Sunday gatherings with the family is something that I really miss. That’s the day when no matter even if you were out partying on Saturday and you go to sleep at 7 a.m. on Sunday, you would wake up and you would go and celebrate. Food gathers people, and that’s a universal truth. Even if you don’t have any other things in common with some members of your family, you still gather on that day and you share that moment.”

Paloma Catalan – Management Support Specialist

“I started dancing when I was three, and I’ve been with the same group since then. It’s called Los Quetzales Mexican Dance Ensemble. My dance teacher has watched me grow up; I met her when I was three years old and we’ve gotten very close. I consider her family at this point.

There was no Mexican folk dance group that existed at my college, but there was a Latin dance group that I joined my freshman year and I ended up being president of that club. It’s called Ritmo Latino, mostly focused on other kinds of dances, like bachata, merengue, salsa, but I tried to introduce a little bit the Mexican folk dance. When I was in high school, I felt a little disconnected because I was one of very few Latino kids there, and when I went to college, I felt like I really wanted to change that feeling and mindset. I wanted to be a lot more connected. It was awesome to find other people who were just as passionate about their heritage.”

Jess Coia – Graphic Designer

“My dad’s family is 100 percent Italian but has lived in New Jersey for probably a ton of generations, so we would do Italian food on Sundays. We would make homemade ravioli with all my aunts and cousins a week before Thanksgiving. I was young when we did it, so my job was to take a fork and press the little ridges of it so that it had the shape at the end.

Now that I’m on my own, I’m trying to pick up my mom’s recipes. She’ll write out recipe cards for me so that she could send them, because for a while when I was at college I wasn’t eating it, and every time I would come home I’d be like, ‘Please make me some authentic spaghetti and meatballs!’”

Katie Marshall – Audio Documentation Assistant

“I played a lot of different folk music, including traditional contradance fiddle music. It’s a tradition that comes from the northeast of the U.S., stemming from various traditions in England, Ireland, Western Europe. It’s musicians playing form dances and someone is calling out moves and telling everyone what to do, and it happened this year on the National Mall.

I grew up learning that style of music, and then when I was in my early teens through grad school, I was playing pretty regularly for contradances with various bands. We have had many contradances at the Festival and I work in the archives, so I’m deep into the history of it at this point.

Contradance is really inclusive of a lot of different people. Since it’s traditionally ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ the callers have changed the words they use for the lead and follow. Callers will go to workshops and learn to change the way they think about writing the roles of a dance. Like now, the calls are two birds: the lark and the robin.

It’s not a perfect utopia, but it’s generally a good place where people feel happy to be, and I’d love to see it catch on more with the youth. A lot of people in the community right now feel like it’s sort of dying, and it’s actually not. I’ve spent a lot of time studying how music can be used in time of crisis and how cultural practice comes and goes and is attacked in many ways, and I want to preserve cultural practices for those reasons. But the ones that are very much with us, that are not dying. People just need to know that they exist.”

Clifford Murphy – Director, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage

“I grew up in New England and my family is Irish American and Yankee, so there’s a tradition of dry humor, sarcasm, and wordplay. So, when I was a kid, my family at the dinner table would riff on words nonstop, and I was unconscious of this because it was what I lived in. I have kids now, and they will make wordplay jokes. I have a nine-year-old that will make puns. It cracks me up—I love it.

With a lot of the work that we do at the Center, there are forms of cultural practice that are really visible. My ancestors made decisions generations before I was born where they apparently chose not to carry forward music and dance traditions from Ireland, which means that I didn’t grow up immersed in it in my household. It’s always interesting and exciting for me to see how culture functions in other ways. To see my children carry forward a kind of humor that comes from my family, that’s maybe more intangible, it feels good.”

Elisa Hough – Editor and Web Content Manager

“In Filipino tradition, during Christmastime, you put a big star-shaped lantern in your window called a parol. You can make them super fancy. In San Francisco, there’s even a parol-making contest. Growing up, we had one big one my mom made by hand that we put up in the window, and she made a smaller version that went the top of our tree. I’m not sure if that’s a Filipino thing, the tree topper, or if she adapted it. You can tell if there’s a Filipino family living in a house by the star. There was one other Filipino family down the street from us that had theirs up too.

A few years ago, my aunt, who had never made one before because my mom would make them for her, learned how to do it herself, and then she taught me, then I made one for my brother and for my cousin. I still haven’t made a real one for myself. I was making them as gifts, like my mom had done.

The idea of going out to buy a parol never occurred to me, because she instilled in us as kids that if you can make something, you might as well make it. It’s more fun that way. I carry that into my life now. I still make my own Halloween costumes; I’ve never bought one.”

Ariana Hameed – Festival Services/Sustainability Intern

“My grandfather is Lithuanian; my grandma is Italian. Christmas Eve is the Feast of the Seven Fishes, so we always go to their house and make seven different fish dishes. And there’s this Lithuanian tradition called Kūčios where everyone stays up all night eating and eating.

There are these consecrated wafers that everyone gets, and you would go around to each person in the family and wish each other a happy new year or merry Christmas and take off a piece of their wafer and eat it. Whoever had the biggest piece at the end would have the luckiest new year. If you want to be mean, you take a big piece so that the other person can’t get a happy new year. My cousins and I would do that.

I was raised Muslim, but half of my family is Catholic. I really loved that it was so normalized, celebrating all these cultural traditions."

Elena Lacayo – Participant Assistant

“Being from a small country (Nicaragua), you know that everything you do, no one else knows about. I grew up in the United States too partly. Everybody knows what the U.S. does, but the other way around doesn’t happen.

I’m a musician, and I realized a few years ago that I need to preserve some of the songs from the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. There’s a novena nine days before the feast day. It’s basically like a party. They’re at people’s houses, and they’d set up altars and have lots of food, usually rice pudding. I went to some in Miami before I moved back to Nicaragua, and when I would go, that was one of my first interactions with our culture in the U.S. At the novena, women would sing rosaries, and there’s all these songs that I think are unique to our tradition, so a few years ago I recorded a medley of the songs from that. A lot of them are versions of Hail Mary, and a lot of them are the songs that we sing when we go to the different houses on the actual feast day.

I hold onto this pamphlet of the songs. I think I got it from the Nicaraguan embassy in the U.S. I keep moving with it, and I keep saying that I wouldn’t throw this away because where would I find it again?”

Connor Roop – Program Assistant

“On my mother’s side of the family, my great-grandfather and great-grandmother immigrated from Alatri, Italy. They came to Philadelphia, and my entire mother’s side of the family has been there ever since. At Christmas every year, we hang special boots on the Christmas tree, and as the eldest grandson, it’s always been my responsibility. And we would always listen to “Dominick the Donkey”—it’s a very Italian song.

A lot of traditions we had aren’t well documented, or we’ve lost them, but those are the two main ones that survived. I was fascinated by the lack thereof of my family’s history, and I spent a year in Rome and I learned Italian and I can speak Italian now, so it’s been revived. My mom came out and visited me in Rome because she had never been.”

*****

To truly remember requires intentionality. As I think about my own traditions, I realize that the more I embrace the ones I grew up with, the closer I feel to my heritage. So, I encourage you to think about your own. What is a tradition that you practiced when you were younger? How did it affect the way you understand your place in the world? How has it changed, or remained the same, as you've grown older? Respond in the comments and discuss with your loved ones.

Cassie Roshu is a media intern at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and an incoming senior at Syracuse University majoring in photojournalism and international relations.