The New Mexico Folklife Festival
Johnny Flores and Charla Nettleton from Las Cruces
Pete and J.P. Lewis of Crow Flats, New Mexico, Perform, While R.W. Hampton
Looks On
A four-day festival featuring more than 100 participants, from Hispanic,
Native American, and Anglo- and African-American traditions, celebrating
the many traditional cultures of New mexico through occupational skills,
traditional arts and crafts music and dance, presentations and
performances. The festival originated in the idea that the Columbian
Quincentennial was a most appropriate occasion to feature the
multicultural heritage of the state of New Mexico in the 1992 Smithsonian
Festival of American Folklife to be held on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
The Heritage Center played an essential research and development role for
this festival in our nation's capital, which was attended by over 1.2
million people, all of whom were encouraged to srtop and ask questions of
the tradition-bearers. On the basis of that success, the state
legislature and the City of Las Cruces appropriated funds to restage the
festival in Las Cruces in 1993.
The New Mexico Program was divided into four presentation areas. In the
Range area, an arena was set up in which charros and cowboys demonstrated
their skills, while nearby small shops featured bootmakers, saddlemakers,
blacksmiths, and campcooks, and Mescalero Apaches danced to the Mounatin
Spirits and Navajos, from Ramah, NM, demonstrted their weaving under a
traditional ramada.
Cindy, of New Mexico, Demonstrates Her Cutting Horse
Another major area was the Plaza,a central social and
performance space, featuring music, dance and storytelling performances
and adobe construction, which was enclosed by a number of small shops in
which potters, furniture makers, jewelers, santeros, weavers, even a
muralist, worked.
Floyd Trujillo, Bone Carver from New Mexico, and His Work
Nearby, in the Foodways area, a variety of New Mexico
foods were prepared npublic demonstrations of African-American, Czech,
Hispanic, Pueblo and Navajo cooking, while a special Music stage featured
continuous performances. Before developing the program, each of these
traditions was carefully researched to determine their authenticity and
their rootedness in community life.
Other New Mexico Projects
