ACTA's briefing, Weaving Traditional Arts Into the Fabric of Community Health -- the result of a study by UC Davis’s Center for Reducing Health Disparities, which links participation in traditional arts to individual and community health -- was featured this month on HealthyCal.org.  Merced Lao Family Community, Inc., a former grantee of ACTA's Living Cultures Grants Program, was also featured in the article.  Read the article by Claire Noonan on HealthyCal.org.

Calling all traditional and tradition-based artists and art organizations!  Are you looking for a network where you can share the impact of your work and learn from other people in the field? Is your art-making based on shared aesthetics and values of a cultural community?  Are you looking for a way to hone your grant seeking skills?  Would you like to share your art with others at an informal salon?

Mark your calendars and join us for ACTA's Bay Area Traditional Arts Roundtable Series.  First session will be held this Wednesday, February 22.

By Quetzal Flores, Photos by Maria Virginia Prieto Solis

My participation in the Son Jarocho: Workshop, Encuentro, and Fandango event at the historic Galería de la Raza in San Francisco on December 3rd, 2011, was a wonderful reminder of how one can maintain and build a community base while engaging in living traditional music and its innovative extensions.  The day’s events began at noon with workshops on jarocho instrument techniques, dance, and poetry practices of the son jarocho, led by musicians such as Laura Cambrón, Artemio Posadas, Russell Rodríguez, Federico Zuñiga, and myself.  Twenty-five to thirty participants of all levels attended the workshops.  An enlightening part of the day was the versada (poetry) workshop headed by poet/musician Artemio Posadas, who emphasized the very important distinction between writing verses that rhyme and writing verses that are poetic or say something significant.

Text and photos by Russell Rodríguez, Interim Apprenticehsip Program Manager

One of the signs of vibrant culture is the integration of new items, entities, and practices into long preserved traditions. The long-lived practice of carnival—the seasonal merriment that includes festive events and parades that precedes the Catholic celebration of Lent—has endured many transformations and interventions, especially with the recontextualization of carnival in locations such as New York and San Francisco.  For example, as another ACTA Apprenticeship Program master, Gloria Toolsie, has explained that material types and material designs of costumes have changed radically since she began participating in carnival—not to mention the utilization of less material in costume (meaning skimpy bikini-type attire for dancers that continue to be the central attraction of carnival spectators).  For the past ten years, master Stephen Tiffenson and apprentice/son Christopher Tiffenson, along with a few other artists, have contributed significantly to a new carnival tradition that seems as if it had always been part of the spectacle.  These artisans have invested in the concept of giant puppets that connect to a person’s body, thus moving/dancing in the fashion of a person.

On February 28, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings will release the bilingual album Imaginaries by East LA Chicano band Quetzal.  Quetzal rose from the ashes of the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings as a vehicle for social commentary and activism. Their unique blend of traditional son jarocho from Veracruz and urban rock and R&B has garnered praise from the LA Times, which called them "provocative, heartfelt and strikingly original."