Humanity in the Public Square

Why a folklife festival matters right now

by Kimi Eisele

The year I was born, United States soldiers were overseas fighting a strange war in Vietnam. The conflict caused millions of casualties and long-term psychological trauma. In America, it left many with distrust of government and a cynicism toward authority. Americans were deeply divided about the war. We may never have fully recovered from the cultural instability that followed.

But one of the things that helped begin to heal America in the 1970s was creating spaces where communities could gather around shared cultural activities. In 1974, one of those spaces was Tucson Meet Yourself, the annual folklife festival I now help to produce.

The festival’s original goal was simple: to bring cultural activities and expressions out from places of worship, home kitchens, and workshops into the public square, where they could be experienced and celebrated by others. It was meant to replicate the kind of mundane, repeated contact that exists in healthy pluralistic societies—the kind of contact that can shift how people see each other.

I’m not a historian, so I won’t argue whether the current U.S. political landscape is more fractured than it was over half a century ago. But we are living through another moment of deep political division. That makes the work of coming together to celebrate our differences equally as necessary.

A folklife festival is not frivolous cultural programming but rather, a kind of civic infrastructure. Right now, amid great political tension, it is a deliberate and loving choice to say: “We are going to gather together to experience what we create, what we eat, what we celebrate. We are going to make it harder to hate while songs are being sung, dances are being danced, artwork being made. We are going to insist on shared belonging.”

Everyone in Southern Arizona (just like everyone in the United States) comes from somewhere. Whether from this very Sonoran Desert or other Indigenous lands, or from Sweden by way of Minnesota, Egypt by way of Michigan, Mexico by way of Texas, or the Dominican Republic by way of Florida. We carry our cultures inside us.

And in festival spaces, we bring those cultures out. Here, cultural sharing is not a defense—it’s a joy. Centering cultures previously unknown or underappreciated or marginalized makes room for learning. And “marginalized” means different things in different places. In Tucson, Scandinavian folk dances are less known than Mexican folklórico dances. Argentine empanadas are harder to find than Sonoran hotdogs. The thing about Tucson Meet Yourself is that it aims to give representation to any cultural group that wants to be known, making sure new groups get a chance to be seen and experienced every year.

Festivals offer genuine human connection. They get you off your phone and into public space to be with others who share this community with you. At Tucson Meet Yourself, artists and cooks share their creations in person. Audiences witness the patience it takes to learn and carry on a Tohono O’odham artform like weaving baskets from desert plants or an Indian artform like applying mehndi designs on skin with dye from henna plants. These exchanges expand space for deep appreciation and shrink space for belittling, quietly undermining us-versus-them attitudes.

A festival is also a place to discover new things. To learn, for instance, that the local Polish dance troupe welcomes dancers with no Polish ancestry, that it is possible to derive joy from a culture that is not your own. All it takes is leaning in a bit.

Contempt thrives, in part, on distance and abstraction. Unlike the blue-lit spaces on the other side of phones and laptop screens, direct encounters—especially in festive environments—can shift assumptions in ways online arguments rarely can. It’s harder to diminish or caricature people when you’re eating their food or clapping your hands to their rhythms.

Festival experiences reveal cultural complexity. Thai monks who serve noodle dishes at Tucson Meet Yourself each year don’t have to sit in silent meditation during their off hours. They can slip out to listen to Scottish bagpipes or snap selfies with visiting friends. No one should be defined by a single cultural identity marker, and folklife festivals make our personal and cultural complexities clear.

Civic space is literally where democracy happens. We must coexist. We all have a legitimate claim to community. We all must wait for the free Porta john. And if the line is long, or if it’s over 100 degrees or pouring rain, we may need to negotiate, compromise, and cooperate. But if there’s a steel drum band playing or Hawaiian hula dancers nearby, it all might feel a little easier.

It’s harder to dehumanize someone with whom you’re sharing a picnic table or a dance floor. At festivals, we are people from different families, perhaps different cultures, breathing the same air, enjoying the same flavors and sounds. This may not erase disagreement, but it complicates hatred in significant ways.

Of course, attending a festival together doesn’t mean we accept violence or harassment. On the contrary, it means we learn to take responsibility because we learn to care about one another. We are capable of the sometimes unglamorous but necessary work of coexistence.

When we rub (or link!) elbows with a stranger during a cumbia dance, we are teaching one another to be less afraid. When we make friendly conversation at the Vietnamese Student Association food booth with young people preparing Banh Mi whose relatives were no doubt impacted by a war over fifty years ago, we restore something of our humanness. We remember our flesh and blood and bones and tastebuds in common.

Tucson Meet Yourself began in moment of national fracture. Perhaps it endures because healing fractures is how we grow. Festival spaces don’t cure divisiveness or necessarily change anyone’s mind, but they still matter. Mostly because they’re not about winning arguments or converting opponents. They’re about creating the conditions where we can encounter each other and learn to respect one another as whole human beings.

__

Kimi Eisele is the managing editor of BorderLore and folklorist and communications manager with the Southwest Folklife Alliance, which produces the annual folklife festival, Tucson Meet Yourself. The festival is held every October in downtown Tucson, since 1974. This year it happens October 17-19.