Tucson Meet Yourself Folklife Festival Returns With An In-Person Scaled-Back Event

Press release from Visit Tucson:

September 10, 2021

The 48th Annual Tucson Meet Yourself (TMY) Folklife Festival returns to downtown Tucson Oct. 8, 9, and 10, allowing the public to reconnect with its diverse and distinct cultures. As always, innovation and adaptation are emblematic of shifting traditions, and this year festival organizers have redesigned the event to prioritize the safety of artists, vendors, and the community at large.

Organized by the Southwest Folklife Alliance, this year’s TMY will be held on Jácome Plaza and the surrounding blocks of Stone Avenue, Church Avenue, and Pennington Street. Casino del Sol is back this year as the festival’s title sponsor after taking a hiatus in 2020 due to the pandemic’s effect on its closure. Organizers have consulted City of Tucson and Pima County Health Department officials as well as Centers for Disease Control to plan an adaptive festival that mitigates risk associated with Covid-19. A 15-point set of Covid Guidelines is viewable (and regularly updated) on the TMY website.

Festival highlights for 2021 include:

Festival Program Director Maribel Alvarez says, “We’ve been very careful and intentional about planning this year’s Tucson Meet Yourself. We produce a festival for the public, of course, but our allegiance is primarily to the artists and food vendors who get to share their culture. Our close conversations with these participants—many with whom we have enjoyed decades of relationship—have helped us plan a scaled-back festival that takes safety very seriously, while still allowing for celebration and enjoyment.”

Alvarez invites festival attendees to spend time on the web site prior to the weekend to select their favorite vendors and artists and plan their experience with a more limited time engagement than in past years. “We know that cultures evolve and change slowly over time, but that also new learning and revelations can happen in a single instant—when you try a new food for the first time, or hear another culture’s song, or see the dance from a part of the world you’ve never visited. At Tucson Meet Yourself we are committed to creating such instants and we’re excited to be together, safely, this year,” says Alvarez, who is also Associate Dean of Community Engagement at the University of Arizona’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Learn more at www.TucsonMeetYourself.org

Tucson Meet Yourself is produced by the Southwest Folklife Alliance (SFA), an affiliate non-profit organization of the University of Arizona, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. We are the designated Folk Arts Partner of the Arizona Commission on the Arts with the support of the National Endowment of the Arts. Its mission is to build more equitable and vibrant communities by celebrating the everyday expressions of culture, heritage, and diversity rooted in the Greater Southwest and U.S. Mexico Border Corridor. Nationally, SFA amplifies models and methods of meaningful cultural work that center traditional knowledge, social equity, and collaboration.

This press release was produced by Visit Tucson. The views expressed here are the author’s own.