Afro-Latino Festival Announces Timely Return with 9th Virtual Edition June 28/29 2021
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Artwork by Anthony Muchai Muiruri. IG: @madebymuchai
Festival Announces Timely Return with 9th Virtual Edition June 28/29
Theme: Love X Resistance
June 16, 2021 - The Afro-Latino Festival NYC is excited to announce its return for our 9th consecutive year, June 28-29, 2021. It will be presented online via Youtube and on www.afrolatinofestnyc.com. While we are grateful to see promising signs of the Covid-19 pandemic receding in some places, we remain vigilant. Now as much as ever, this Festival is necessary to continue to Affirm, Educate and Celebrate. The 2021 Festival continues as the only cultural event in the U.S. of its size centering the 150 million people from Black communities in Latin America and their diasporas. It is a grassroots event created by Black Latinxs who understand the responsibility of advancing culture, empowerment, networking, entrepreneurship, and action.
This year’s theme, "Love & Resistance" centers our intergenerational and collective resistance to systems of inequity and oppression and also recognizes love as a form of resistance. Love of self, love of community, love of fundamental rights to justice, recognition, and development (the goals of the U.N. Intl. Decade of Afrodescendants 2015-2024).
We are excited to present ten amazing artists hailing from Brooklyn, Colombia, Perú, Panamá, Dominican Republic, and Brazil. Acknowledging the current popular resistance movements in Colombia, we will hear from singer-songwriter & activist, Alexis Play on “Art Activism and the Colombian National Strike". We are honored to present performances of selected songs from “Ancestras”, the new album from the iconic Petrona Martinez, the Queen of Bullerengue, the music of maroon descendants. She will be joined from Peru by our 2017 Lifetime Achievement honoree and 3x Latin Grammy winner Susana Baca; Enerolisa Nuñez, a preserver of the Dominican Republic' Salve music, who we were fortunate to present in the Bronx in 2018; and for the first time at the Festival we welcome, songstress, Yomira John of Panamá. We also bring you directly from Salvador de Bahia, Brazil the Meninos da Rocinha do Pelô, a youth drumming collective founded by Maestrina Elem Silva at the age of 15. Herself the subject of the documentary “Maestrina da Favela”, Elem’s work has gained attention both inside and outside of Brazil for her preservation of cultural heritage and youth empowerment through the art of drumming.
Finally, we present four artists representing Panamá. Hailing by way of Detroit and Brooklyn, we are thrilled to welcome the sultry love songs of recording artist Ro James in a live acoustic set from 7 House Gallery in Bushwick. Hailed as a unique blend of Maxwell and Prince he will remind us that one of the greatest forms of resistance is love. We also welcome the new sounds of reggaeton and afrobeat en español from Italian Somali who has taken radio by storm and who will be sure to have you dancing. Up and coming guitarist & singer-songwriter Jackie Plummer will take it back to Black with some soul music in Spanish. Finally, after many years working to produce the Afro-Latino Festival NYC behind the scenes we are thrilled to introduce the music of our founder and Festival Creative Director Mai-Elka Prado. She will perform new music including her latest song “Cada Marea” which is featured in the documentary short, Miss Panama, premiering at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.
The Festival would not be complete without our AfrolatinTalks symposium which will be co-curated in collaboration with our community partners Radio Cana Negra podcast and the Kilomba Collective.
Afro-Latino Festival NYC 2021 is made possible by public funds from the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and from the Decentralization Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, both administered in Kings County by Brooklyn Arts Council.
For More Info: proyectoafrolatino@gmail.com
To Watch: www.afrolatinofestnyc.com