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The Raizado Festival will return to Aspen for its second summer and feature guest speakers, outdoor excursions, live music, and films that celebrate the Latine community at various locations around the city.
The four-day festival from Aug. 24-27 is hosted by The Latinx House, which organizes cultural events around the country, and was created by Mónica Ramirez and Olga Segura, who have committed to bring the festival to Aspen for at least 10 years.
On June 8 at the Hotel Jerome, Ramirez announced that the festival is expanding this summer to include a free, family-friendly community day on Aug. 27, and festival attendees will also enjoy a performance from three-time Latin Grammy award winner Carla Morrison.
And as part of a new summer series leading up to the festival, the Latinx House is hosting a special event alongside Hotel Jerome's Epicurean Passport program during the Aspen Food & Wine Festival.
Raizado Festival ticket details and the event schedule will be finalized and released in the coming weeks.
Ramirez is based in Ohio, but to garner more local input, she has developed a host committee to provide feedback and suggest content for this year’s festival.
She spoke with Halle Zander about the value of centering Latinx culture and people in a place like Aspen.
Mónica Ramirez: When the decision was made, you know, when I had the idea of creating the festival in the wake of the COVID pandemic, when so many Latinx people were dying across the country, many of whom were working in essential jobs, it became clear that there are some people in our country who are thought of, essentially, as throwaway people — people who our government is not investing in, people who institutions are not investing in, you know, the health care system wasn't investing in.
And that's how thousands and thousands of people in certain communities died and were more prone to getting COVID and being exposed and not having the right protections.
In my mind, the way our community has largely been framed in the media and society is that we are takers. We take jobs, we take opportunities, we take benefits, we take resources, and the truth is we are givers, and so this festival is about showing all the ways in which we give. We give culture. We make jobs. We create businesses. We give opportunities to other people. We give our ideas, and so in order for people in this country to think of us as givers, we need a 10-year runway, and that requires a deep commitment, and that's why we did that.
In organizing, there's something that we call place-based organizing. That means you go to a place and you start to work with a community, and you organize around issues and topics. And place based organizing typically happens in really impoverished places to address lack of health care, food instability or what have you, and essentially we're flipping that on its head.
We're saying, “No, this is one of the wealthiest communities in the world, and this community is strong and wealthy and vibrant because there are people who are working in the hotels, who are working in shops, who are, you know, the groundskeepers.”
And so essentially what we are experimenting with is, “What does it look like to take community members who literally sustain a community like this one but are largely invisible? How do we change it so that they become the focal point?”
I talked to community members who said that they work all the festivals here, and they have never been invited.
This year one of the things that we're doing that's a bit different is where the community day on Sunday, we're going to be chartering busses to have a loop to bring people from the Roaring Fork Valley so that they can attend because we don't want money or transportation or anything to be a barrier.
The local host committee, at the point in which we met them last year, a lot of the elements of the festival had already been ideated, and so one piece of feedback is that they wanted to be more involved in actually planning the program and suggesting speakers and suggesting content. And we said, “OK, this is their festival too. It's not just ours, and so we're going to build this together. We need to hear from them. Who are the speakers? What are the topics? What are the priority issues here?”
And the other piece of it was we needed more outdoor excursions like this in this beautiful place, and there are people doing great work on climate and environment and they're leading, you know, excursions and tours. And so that's why the Saturday morning on [Aug. 26] is going to be reserved for those outdoor opportunities.
I just would love for the Aspen and Roaring Fork communities to know this is their festival. We want to continue to grow and engage with them and know that our intention is not just to sort of fly in, set up something for a few days and then leave. We are here. We are investing here. I hope that we'll be able to eventually have more staff members here, and so I hope that folks in the Aspen community will also ask us for what is needed. You know, how can we help? What are things that we can support because that's how we want to be engaging.
