Livin' La Vida Local

Small-town Festivals Bring Out the Bigger Community

By Ken Wright, 5-09-06

Festivals just might be the highest form of civilization in existence right now. A sign of evolution. A seed for the whatever sustainable, enjoyable, aesthetic, positive, local, cooperative culture our present flailing socio-economic experiment will have to soon become. Places to practice not just tolerance, but actual appreciation of the diversity within which we must find symbiosis.

I don’t mean those contrived mass-marketed massive psuedo-events that are packaged as “festivals” in order herd a mass of spenders into small space. I mean the organic gatherings that arise in communities by the will, and good will, of some group seeking to share a slice of its culture with the others who share their place. In these, each of us gets to meet and play with and peer into some part of our world that might be off our radar otherwise, or that we might just see through those mass-mediated fun-house-mirror images on TV and in the news.

For example: Never mind the national hand-wringing over immigration and wall-building along the border. Never mind, even, the state of Colorado’s attempts to punish our fair (and I mean that interpersonally) city for its open stance of being a “sanctuary” city -- passing a resolution to not use municipal resources to stalk illegal aliens. Instead, Santa Rita Park on Saturday was alive with color and music and people milling around, gathered for the annual Cinco de Mayo celebration.

Canvas-covered stands displaying crafts for sale and impromptu galleries formed an art walk. Dozens of pinatas were sacrificed to the blind-folded batting of dozens of children. Taco stands and grills hid behind hungry lines. People of all descents, backgrounds, age groups mill around talking or sitting on lawn chairs watching a couple dozen kids in Mexican dress perform a traditional dance. Overlooking it all stood an inflatable amphitheatre fronting a singer belting out Mexican pop songs with the help of music machine, karaoke style.

Neither my wife or I are Hispanic, but we nonetheless ran into lots of people we know, Latino and otherwise. Because everybody was there. Because this, even if it ain’t what you see in the chamber of commerce brochures, is a real picture of Durango and La Plata County. An apolitical unideological unmarketed reality. A beautiful thing.

And here in Durango and the Four Corners, Cinco de Mayo is just one of many another community-gathering festivals we are blessed with. Add that to a list that includes among my personal favorites:

· The Hozhoni Days powwow. Held in March at Fort Lewis College and hosted by Wanbli Ota, the college’s American Indian student organization, the gathering has been bringing a Native celebration to town for 42 years.
· Bluegrass Meltdown lets the hayseeds and hillbillies in all of us run amok over the town’s bars to see great pickers from all over.
· The Durango Independent Film Festival brings underground filmmaking above ground and into even our rural town.
· The weekly Farmers Market rises every Sunday morning in the summer in a bank parking lot, and lets us actually see where food comes, taste food from where we live, and meet those who work the land we live on.
· The Iron Horse Bicycle Classic bridges more than a century of history, bringing out bike riders of all skill levels to take on both the mountain passes and the narrow-gauge steam train as they race to Silverton, high in the San Juans.
· Animas River Days rallies both boaters and those curious about that curious crowd, as both descend again at Santa Rita Park to paddle or watch paddlers in the city’s whitewater park and slalom course.

And, yes, I’ll even add to my list the Labor Day-weekend motorcycle rally (in whatever form and where ever it manifests each year). Hog riding isn’t something I myself partake of – and I can’t say the three nights of bike roar that fill Durango during the rally all night are very relaxing ones -- but my family and I enjoy walking around town and looking at the bikes and watching riders preen and talking to the amazing diversity of “bikers” I hadn’t envisioned before the rally appeared in the Four Corners in the early ‘90s. And I get to see all the closet leather-clad biker neighbors I never knew I had.

It’s the real world. It’s our world. It’s all our worlds. And at a festival, we can practice the community making that makes all of our worlds fit into one world. And we all end up better for that.

Meanwhile, back at the Cinco de Mayo festival, my wife and I got to see that community making in action, as we watched our 11-year-old daughter – wearing her pink-laced high tops under her colorful dress – and a couple dozen of her elementary school friends take the stage in front of the amphitheater and her great mix of neighbors, and dance …

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