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Collaborating with Radio Bilingüe to showcase traditional artists on air

Our long-term collaborator and one of the largest traditional arts organizations, Spanish language public radio network Radio Bilingüe provides access to wide-ranging cultural music and programming for the Latinx community. Radio Bilingüe co-founder Hugo Morales helped establish ACTA as a founding board member. In 2009, we begin serving in an editorial advisory role for Radio Bilingüe’s “Raíces: Art Moments on Radio,” offering story ideas, artist contacts, and background information on featured artists. This Spanish-language series highlights California’s traditional artists, exploring the state’s cultural diversity. “Raíces” promotes cultural projects and folk art practitioners who use their art to emphasize shared experiences and foster connections between diverse communities. Our collaboration with Radio Bilingüe spans more than 25 years and counting.”

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Showcasing Chicano music in DC

The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress invites us to curate two free concerts in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month in Washington, D.C., part of the LOC’s Homegrown Music Series. The concerts, titled “Cantos de mi Cancion / Songs of my home,” feature Chicano musicians and groups from California including Agustin Lira and Alma and the band Quetzal at historic stages at the LOC and Kennedy Center, and are later added to their permanent archive.

Watch performance →

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Celebrating the opening of our Southern California office

The opening celebration of our new Los Angeles field office, held at Grand Performances in downtown LA features several traditional artists from our 15-year history in the region, including Fulani drummer Malik Sow, Kumeyaay singer Stanley Rodriguez, Khmer Arts Academy dancers, and a voguing crew from REACH LA. Artisans demonstrate crafts such as quilting, saddle making, and Native California basket weaving.

Watch a video of the opening →

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Expanding our L.A. presence with a concert at the Getty

As part of their Sounds of L.A. series, the Getty asks ACTA to guest-curate a concert: we feature Chaksam-Pa, a Bay Area-based group of Tibetan master musicians and dancers, who were recipients of our Living Cultures Grant in 2011.”

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Bringing Son Jarocho artists to DC’s Kennedy Center and Library of Congress

We present an ensemble of six soneros – practitioners of Son Jarocho, a folk music and dance tradition from southern Veracruz – in Washington, D.C., for Latino Heritage Month. These soneros are key master artists with their apprentices, deeply integrated into the transnational cultural phenomenon of Son Jarocho. Son Jarocho rose in popularity in the 1970s alongside the fandango, a social gathering of music, song, dance, and poetry. By the 1990s, fandangos spread to Northern California, with people statewide learning instruments, creating verses, and dancing to participate in these vibrant gatherings. Our curated concerts, part of the annual Homegrown Music Series (a collaboration between the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center and the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage) bring California’s rich Latinx and Chicano folklife to a national stage.”

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Launching Sounds of California

We launch Sounds of California, a research and community engagement project that uses events and recording sessions to explore how music and sound can express collective experience. The inaugural concert in Oakland, co-produced in partnership with the Oakland Museum of California, Smithsonian Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage, and Radio Bilingüe, showcases California’s diversity through the lens of immigration and migration. Later that year, we curate the Ralph Rinzler Memorial Concert in DC of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, featuring Latino musicians Agustín Lira & Alma and Viento Callejero.

Learn more about Sounds of California in Oakland →

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Bringing Sounds of California to DC’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival

We co-produce the Sounds of California program with Radio Bilingüe at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, featuring daytime performances and activities and a series of evening concerts for two weeks on the National Mall. Over 60 California artists explore how changes in music and sound reflect the state’s (and the nation’s) demographic shifts, from Kumeyaay song cycles to Mexican son jarocho. A multi-year initiative of ACTA and our partners, Sounds of California expands to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Jose, documenting music and sounds reflective of community life. This project creates a public collection of recordings that express California’s diverse histories and cultures, and shares research and fosters dialogue through public programs in D.C., California, and online.

View the Smithsonian’s Sounds of California playlist →

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Engaging the Mayfair community in San Jose

We bring Sounds of California to East San Jose as part of a year-long initiative with The School of Arts & Culture at the Mexican Heritage Plaza. The initiative engages residents and draws upon local histories like Cesar Chavez’s activism to reshape the narrative of the under-resourced neighborhood and enhance public health, safety, and urban life. The project includes Mayferia, a showcase of the neighborhood’s rich musical heritage from Danza Azteca to Japanese Taiko, and more.”

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Mapping cultural assets for a new federal project

The City of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs invites us to use our Participatory Cultural Asset Mapping (PCAM) Methodology to identify cultural treasures in LA’s federally designated Promise Zone. Our comprehensive approach includes over 1,000 surveys, over 100 site visits, and 5 public gatherings, culminating with a celebration in 2018: Promise Zone Arts Live!

Read about PZA Live! →

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Bringing Sounds of California to Bayview-Hunters Point, San Francisco

We organize a concert at the historic Bayview Opera House in one of San Francisco’s last African American neighborhoods, Bayview-Hunters Point. The Muwekma Ohlone were the first peoples of this waterway, followed by successive waves of immigrants and refugees attracted to work opportunities in the nearby shipyards. Our concert explores through music how traditions evolve and how residents maintain a strong sense of home, despite displacement or chosen migration. The multi-generational artists participating reflect African American traditions based in Lucumí Yoruba practices, Vietnamese music, Kurdish Alevi sufi songs, and Mexican American and Chicano music. A commissioned film by Tumani Onabiyi provides context to the early history of the area concentrating on hallmarks of African American life present in the Bayview. The concert is followed by a community recording day inviting 9 artists and culture workers to reflect on their lives in the beloved and often embattled neighborhood.

Listen to the concert →

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Hosting a dialogue at ArtChangeUS Cultural Equity Summit

We partner with ArtChangeUS to shape the REMAP: LA Cultural Equity Summit, offering a Traditional Arts Roundtable Series session where cultural leaders, artists, grantmakers, and community members come together to advance cultural equity strategies. In “Theories of Change and Transformative Cultural Practice,” we discuss cultural organizing strategies rooted in traditional arts practice with artists engaged in our Building Healthy Communities work in Boyle Heights, including ACTA Artist Fellows Omar Ramirez, Ofelia Esparza, and others.”

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Commissioning 10 new songs about Boyle Heights

We commission 10 Boyle Heights musicians to compose songs illuminating the neighborhood’s storied history: a haven for Japanese-Americans after WWII internment, a first stop for Mexican immigrants, a sanctuary for mariachi musicians. Our five episode program “Rola del Día” pairs two artists in conversation and presents their songs through lyric videos, as part of our Sounds of California - Boyle Heights project.

View the Playlist →

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Co-producing a Native California Indian Arts and Culture Festival

We co-produce the inaugural Native California Indian Arts and Culture Festival as part of Ohlone Park’s 50th Anniversary Celebration in Berkeley with the California Institute for Community, Arts, and Nature. Native peoples of all ages, including Rumsien Ohlone, Chochenyo Ohlone, Maidu, Yurok, celebrate and share their cultural practices. Eighteen tents in Ohlone Park display exquisite material arts like beadwork, baskets, jewelry, and clay dolls. The Festival is so successful that it continues annually.”

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Launching the Sounds of California online experience

Planning for an online archive of the tremendous stories and multimedia generated by our Sounds of California series had long been in the works, but when COVID shut down most public programming, we kick into high gear. We launch with new fieldwork from a Boyle Heights community documentarian team who captures the neighborhood’s sounds and voices, preserving its essence in the face of urban renewal and gentrification. The bilingual Sounds of California microsite explores stories, music and soundscapes as vital expressions of collective experience across Oakland, Mayfair, Bayview, and Boyle Heights, with particular attention on how stories of migration and immigration are embedded within music, sound, and social practice.

Visit the Sounds of California microsite →

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Showcasing California’s cultural expressions through an educational video series

With students around the country and the world turning to remote learning during the pandemic, we recognize an opportunity to reach new and existing audiences with video content about some of California’s most cherished traditional art forms. In our first series of Engaging Traditions, our Arts in Corrections teaching artists create mini-documentaries about their journeys and traditional arts practices. Produced remotely during the pandemic, these videos first air inside California state prisons and keep us connected to incarcerated students during lockdown.

Visit the Engaging Traditions resource library →

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Investing in a space for young musicians

Video of “Buenas Tardes Amiguis”

We know that music can be a gateway for connection, mentorship, and empowerment. More than 68,000 of LA’s young people are considered disconnected – meaning they are neither enrolled in school nor working – placing them in vulnerable positions facing displacement from the city, incarceration, and at risk of becoming homeless. Alongside our partner Invest in Youth Coalition, we launch a new space in Los Angeles for young musicians aged 11-24 to collaborate with each other, and play and create new music that focuses on themes of youth power and decision-making.

Learn more about Invest in Youth Coalition →

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Collaborating on a National Folklife Network

In response to the first-ever analysis of their Folk & Traditional Arts awards portfolio, the NEA develops the National Folklife Network in 2021 to advance cultural equity by strengthening the folklife infrastructure in both rural and urban communities across the United States.

ACTA and First People’s Fund partner with NEA grantee Southwest Folklife Alliance to conduct extensive Field Scans, identifying cultural assets, as well as gaps in service and capacity within the seven regions identified for support. A new stage of the work materializes when ACTA helps convene Community Connectors and other stakeholders in the first NFN convening in Rapid City, South Dakota in the spring of 2023.

Learn More →

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