Programs and Activities
Fiesta!
New for 2009
Fiesta! -- Latino traditions at the MSU Museum's 2009 Great Lakes Folk Festival celebrates crafts, games, music, dance, customs and ritual, holidays, occupational arts and children's activities with tortilla-making demonstrations, paper flower-making, piñata -making and games led by MSU's student group, Latinos on the Move. Also planned: a display of lowriders; modified, mural-rich vehicles (weather permitting).
This special festival program area at the Great Lakes Folk Festival draws from the MSU Museum's recent work with the Smithsonian Institution, producing a series of programs in connection with the special exhibition, "Our Journeys/Our Stories: Portraits of Latino Achievement."
This program area will run Saturday and Sunday, 12 noon - 6 p.m., near the Folk Arts Marketplace. See the festival site map for more details.
Groups and Community members who will be showcased in the Fiesta Area
Fantasia Ballet Folklorico
Latino Dance
Lansing, Michigan
Like other youth folklorico dance groups of Latino heritage in Michigan located in Saginaw, Detroit, Grand Rapids and Holland, Fantasia Ballet Folklorico has provided ethnic and folk dance instruction in the Lansing area as a non-profit organization since 1996. The mission of the group is to “increase the social conscience of audiences with respect to cultural contributions by Hispanics through the fine art of dance, music and costume. Fantasia Ballet Folklorico aims to motivate young children, teenage dancers and young adults to develop discipline, self-esteem, respect, and an understanding of Hispanic culture.”
With over 50 young people ranging in age from 3 to 25, the group regularly performs at conferences, parties, festivals and civic events, such as Lansing’s Silver Bells in the City and the Cristo Rey Fiesta.
City Limits Lowriders and Low 4 Life
Lowrider Clubs
Lansing, Michigan
The lowrider culture is one of several subcultures focused on the modification of automobiles. A lowrider car is a modified car, usually with a low, sleek, luxurious look that contrasts sharply with the utilitarian look of a street rod. The raw material is commonly an American muscle car of the 1960s, especially the Chevrolet Impala. Lowering is accomplished by a hydraulic system that allows the owner to tilt, bounce, dance, and lower the car to the street and still comply with legal height requirements when this is necessary. Major body and engine modification is not common, but plush upholstery, powerful audio systems, chromed chain-link steering wheels, extensive use of chrome and gold plate (in contrast with the de-chroming common in custom cars), and spectacular paint jobs, often including Mexican themed murals, all add to the desired look.
Lowrider subculture developed among Mexican-Americans of Southern California in the period immediately following World War II and soon diffused to Mexican communities elsewhere. In Michigan, active low-rider clubs exist in Detroit, Saginaw, and Lansing, as well as low-rider bicycle clubs for youth. The lowrider remains an important symbol of Mexican-American identity.
Two Lansing lowrider clubs will take part in the Great Lakes Folk Festival.
Latinos on the Move
Traditional Latino Games
East Lansing, Michigan
The Michigan State University student organization of undergraduates, Latinos on the Move, has a mission to build educational, health, recreational, cultural, and sports infrastructure in Latin American countries such as new schools, parks, clinics, playgrounds, and libraries. As a community service project the students have raised enough money to build the first beach soccer field in Bolivia in 2008, and a children’s playground in the city of Agua Pierta, Mexico in 2009. Latinos on the Move chose these sites through their own personal contacts as well as working with the Inter-American Development Fund. Drawing from their own personal experiences and heritage, Latinos on the Move students will share traditional Latino games such as ring toss games, dominoes, and loteria.
Maria Medina Lopez
Quilt Making
Lansing, Michigan
Maria Medina Lopez was born in Wyoming to Mexican parents who were migrant workers. At the early age of six, she began learning embroidery and crochet from her neighbors. Since then, she has always done needlework including Mexican drawn work called deshilado. An accomplished seamstress, she has sewn her own garments since junior high school. Lopez took up quilting while living in East Lansing, checking quilting books out of the library teaching herself how to quilt. She was one of the first quilting teachers in the East Lansing area when she began teaching quilting classes in the 1960s. Today her artwork reflects her heritage. They are colorful and reflective of her warmth and spirit.
Felicitas, Raquel, and Patricia Moreno
Piñata and Lupitas
Lansing, Michigan
Felicitas "Fela" Moreno was born in Plymouth, Indiana and moved to Lansing in 1973 to study at Lansing Community College. It was while Fela was at LCC that several Mexican friends taught her how to make piñatas for the college's "Holiday in Mexico.”
Originally, piñatas were made using a ceramic base and bamboo rods to hold the papier-mâché form. Fela constructs them entirely out of papier-mâché, which she and other piñata-makers have found is safer for children when the piñata is broken. Of her designs, she makes all of the traditional piñata forms such as the star and the donkey, but she also makes others personalized to the customer.
Traditional Mexican dolls were constructed of sawdust and cloth, toys that were part of Fela’s childhood experience, and are still sold in Mexico today. Fela's smaller dolls, in the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, hence the name Lupitas, symbolize the working Hispanic women. Often the dolls are depicted doing domestic tasks such as selling either flowers, piñatas, Mexican chocolate or bread, making tortillas and salsa, and working on quilts. Often believed to bring good luck in the kitchen, they can be attached to braids of garlic and dried peppers.
She has taught piñata making to her daughters, Patricia and Raquel, and family friends. Today Fela regularly gets together with her daughters and friends to make these traditional items that they sell out of their home.
Juan Javier Pescador
Day of the Dead
East Lansing, Michigan
For people of Mexican ancestry there is a sacred festivity every November 1-2: the Day of the Dead. On El día de los Muertos, an ancient Mexican celebration in which families reconnect with departed ancestors, the realm of the “fleshless” or the dead is thought to be in a fluid relationship with the world of the “flesh” or the living. “The fleshless ones” are considered to be a living presence in this world while the “living ones” contemplate death as the natural progression of life and renewal. The Day of the Dead is a celebration that connects through respect and affection for the departed ones with living family members. In the U.S., Chicano communities celebrate the Day of the Dead with traditional offerings at home, art installations in public places and cultural/political activities addressing community issues and aspirations.
Juan Javier Pescador, a photographer and historian, was born in Mexico and grew up in a family where domestic altars were the spiritual center of the house, “a place,” Pescador says “where ancestors and departed relatives were always present, always remembered, always loved.” He has created Day of the Dead multimedia installations in museums, art galleries, community centers and universities, dedicating his altars to inspiring departed men and women with significant contributions to Chicano culture and memory such as Frida Kahlo, Ritchie Valens, Lydia Mendoza, Diego Rivera, and Antonio Burciaga.
His solo exhibitions, Peregrinos del Norte: Religious Rituals among Mexican/Latino Communities in the Great Lakes and Sunday Heroes: Sports and Leisure Culture in Detroit and Chicago, have been shown in Chicago, East Lansing, Ann Arbor, Albion, Grand Rapids, and outside Michigan.
Irma Rodriguez
Quilt Making
Newaygo, Michigan and Ashland, Missouri
Irma Rodriguez was born in Texas, one of 16 children of migrant workers, and first migrated to Michigan with her husbandin1965. Eventually they settled with their four children in Newaygo where Rodriquez began to make and sell quilts. Irma’s mother had also quilted but she first learned the skill as a young girl from an aunt in San Antonio. Now, with the help of her daughters and a sister-in-law, Irma works on many quilts often in the log cabin pattern while other favorites are nine-patches, maple leafs, and “snowballs.” Rodriquez also makes quilts for family members. For the birth of her first daughter she made five quilts, including one with "prairie points,” an edging made with folded cloth triangles.
She has also passed on her skill to her daughters. Diana, the eldest, made her first quilt within two weeks and once made a quilt a day. Daughter Anita made a prize-winning quilt as a school project when she was about 10 years old. In Newaygo, Irma and her daughters would sell quilts directly from their front porch where the quilts were displayed.Now having retired to Missouri, Rodriguez continues making and selling traditional quilts at festivals and craft shows and by word of mouth. Her daughters Anita and Diana will demonstrate quilting with her at the Great Lakes Folk Festival.
