The Latin American Arts Festival is a multidisciplinary celebration of music, art, film, dance, theater, literature, and culture. Our mission is to promote artistic diversity, raise intercultural and intersectional awareness, expose social issues, and challenge stereotypes about Latinx and Latin America in our school and community. The festival is hosted between February and March at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA, and includes events such as performances, installations, screenings, lectures, and workshops by CalArts students, faculty, and alumni, as well as guest artists.
The LatinFest was born out of the need for representation and exposure of Latin American Art in our school and community in 2018. This student-led project was initiated by Diana Teixeira and Eloy Neira (Peru); Emilia Moscoso (Ecuador), Lucas Longaresi (Brazil); Vivian Naranjo (Chile), Leila Jay, Rafael Luna, and Rosa Boshier (USA); and Pablo Leñero (Mexico). We seek to promote traditional art forms, but also challenge them and expose new ones. We strive for the decolonization of the arts, the mind, and the body. We question what it means to be Latinx. We confront embedded cultural issues such as machismo, xenophobia, and aporophobia