Colorado House District 57’s Elizabeth Velasco, author Sandra Cisneros, Latino USA Host Maria Hinojosa, and Top Chef contestant Manny Barella were some of the big names at this weekend’s Raizado cultural festival celebrating “Latine excellence.”
Latinx House founder and festival organizer Mónica Ramírez said she chose to name the festival “Raizado,” which translates to “rooted” in Portuguese, in part as a tribute to the land where the festival takes place.
“Just like these aspen trees here on these grounds, we are deeply rooted in this community and in this country,” Ramírez said in her opening remarks.
Ute community member Skyler Lomahaftewa and Colorado Rep. Elizabeth Velasco were also invited to greet festival goers with opening remarks.
According to Velasco’s team, she is the first Mexican-born state house representative in Colorado, and the first openly queer Latina representative on the Western Slope.
“It is not easy to be the one and to be the first,” Velasco said. “There are barriers and people who doubt and try to exclude you at every step of the way, from the campaign trail to the House of Representatives, … as artists, musicians, chefs, actors, writers, activists, elected officials and more, representation matters.”
Tickets to Raizado are not open to the public. The Latinx House limits attendance for most programming to 250 invited guests, allowing staff to curate the festival’s guest list.
In an interview with Aspen Public Radio, Ramírez said the small group makes for a more intimate experience.
“It's about deepening connections,” Ramírez said. “And if you have 5,000 people in a place — like, sure, maybe you make a few friends, but you really can't have that experience where you feel like you've really been on this journey with a very tight group of people.”
Ramírez added that the exclusive nature of the event is not intended to prevent people who disagree with their message from attending.
“I think disagreement is healthy,” Ramírez said. “This is a really difficult climate that we're in. There's still, unfortunately, a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment, but we are keeping the badges to a curated list because … we are committed to this idea of bringing the right people together.”
There were some opportunities for the public to get involved, including Community Day on Saturday and several film screenings on Friday and Sunday. Public tickets were available for some master classes on Thursday as well.
Program Offerings
Attendees at this year’s festival were invited to attend master classes with indigenous chefs and community organizers, panel discussions with nonprofit leaders and political advocates, and receptions to eat and imbibe in food traditional to Latinx communities.
At a fireside chat on Friday, Ana Valdez, the president and CEO of the Latino Donor Collaborative, emphasized the role Latinos play in the U.S. economy by sharing data collected by her think tank.
“The reality of who Latinos are in this country is completely different than the perception of who Latinos are,” Valdez said. “Our job … is to create the data that shows the reality – fact-based data – and combat the stereotypes.”
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Hispanic workers are projected to account for 78% of net new workers between 2020 and 2030.
The Latino Donor Collaborative has done extensive research on the Latino workforce in the U.S. as if it were its own country, assigning it a gross domestic product of $3.2 trillion. The organization’s report also noted Latino purchasing power was $3.4 trillion.
If U.S. Latinos were a country, Valdez said they would be the 5th largest economy in the world, only ranking behind the U.S., China, Germany, and Japan.
“We're indispensable to the economy of the United States,” Valdez said. “We don't say it because we're arrogant. We don't say it because we are not good people or because we are showing off. We say it because people in America and in the world, quite frankly, need to know these numbers.”
Valdez said CEOs, politicians, and other resource allocators need to know which communities are fueling economic growth in order to make informed investment decisions.
Other panels touched on paid family leave, water sustainability, and threats to democracy, among others.
At Saturday’s Community Day, several speakers emphasized the importance of representation and visibility — on topics that ranged from entrepreneurship to immersive journalism.
ABC News journalists John Quiñones and María Elena Salinas spoke about their new book, “One Year in Uvalde,” and the extensive time they spent in the small Texas town after a mass shooting at an elementary school in 2022. They also produced five documentaries about the loss and resilience of the predominantly Latino community; Salinas said ABC executives chose her and Quiñones for the project in part because of the journalists’ own Mexican-American backgrounds.
“They said that they wanted John and I to be there, and (former ABC News president) Kim Godwin said, ‘I want John and María Elena to be the face, because they can relate to the community, and the community could relate to them,’” Salinas recounted.
Salinas said the team was able to secure interviews and build trust with people who only spoke Spanish, and who were reticent to speak with the media. For Quiñones — who grew up a bit more than an hour from Uvalde in San Antonio — the story hit close to home; he said he was proud to be part of a team that stayed in the community long after other national outlets had left for the next story.
“We walked away learning more than we could have ever imagined about the capacity of the human spirit and this wonderful community's ability to to heal,” Quiñones said.
“They'll never be the same, of course, but for strength and hope and resilience, what a lesson they can teach us,” he added.
Looking ahead
The Latinx House has committed to run Raizado for at least 10 years in Aspen, and festival organizers are considering how it will grow in the next few years.
Raizado kicked off in 2022, and programming has always been centered around the arts, whether that’s film, dance, food, or fashion.
Ramírez has a service-oriented vision for the future, and as the festival continues, she wants to hear about community needs and see where she can be an advocate.
“My vision going forward is that we continue to use art as the core of the work, and that as we do the work to gather people in community, then we'll start hearing the issues that need to be moved at a policy level,” Ramírez said.
Ramírez noted that some of the topics on this year’s schedule of events could be jumping off points for Raizado’s work in Colorado.
Ramírez said she’d also support requests for more direct services, such as providing arts and music classes in the region.
