#this is like the fourth time this has happened this year. gotta learn spanish at this point!!!

[leefi]

I’d like to thank the latinx community for informally adopting me but please stop speaking to me very fast in fluent spanish. it makes me scared

[doc-pickles]

all's well that end well to end up with you (p.2)

Welcome back to part two of this fic! If you missed part one it’s right here! enjoy!!

xoxo nina

The absolute last thing Jo had expected when she came to New York for a medical conference was running into her ex-husband. It should’ve been on her radar, Arizona was headlining the conference, but she hadn’t thought that Alex would be interested in maternal-fetal medicine. Yet there they were, staring at each other across a crowded hotel lobby. Arizona interrupts her train of thought, welcoming her and gushing about how excited she is that Jo is now an OB.

“I have to run but I see your husband over there,” if Arizona registers her shock she doesn’t show it. “Good to see you, Jo!”

As soon as Arizona is out of sight Jo finds herself marching up to Alex and slapping his arm, “Ow! What was that for?”

“What was that for? Arizona just called you my husband,” Alex flinches and Jo can’t help rolling her eyes at him. “You didn’t tell her?”

“It never came up.” “Alex! It’s been three years,” at the mention of their separation reality seems to sink in around Alex and Jo. They haven’t seen each other in three years, not since Jo dropped him off at the airport. “Hi.”

“Hey. You look… wow,” Alex realizes his blunder almost immediately, stuttering over his words as he tries to correct himself. “Sorry, uh, about Arizona. I’m scared she’s going to hit me for letting you get away. Which, fair enough, you know?”

Jo takes Alex in fully for the first time. His hair is a bit grayer but he looks good with his sun-kissed skin and toned arms. He’s dressed in a button-up and slacks and in other circumstances, Jo would find him devilishly handsome.

“Yeah, you’d have to be pretty stupid to let this get away,” Jo sends a subtle wink Alex’s way and watches as he sighs in relief. “So what are you doing at an MFM conference anyway?”

“My hospital is opening a brand new neonatal and MFM wing so the board decided that the chief and some of our surgeons should come out and learn a bit more. It also helps that Arizona taught me everything I know,” Alex nervously rubs the back of his neck, watching Jo carefully. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m an OB now,” the shocked expression on Alex’s face makes Jo giggle. “I know but after… Well after everything that happened I needed some change, something to make me happy. So I switched to OB, adopted a baby, and dyed my hair blonde. The blonde didn’t stick but the baby and the career switch did.”

There’s an overhead announcement for the start of the conference, people moving inside all around them. Everyone else seems to fade away though as Jo and Alex meet eyes again. He’s wearing that dumbstruck look that he wore when she dressed or after she said I love you or when they’d lay in bed together. Despite the years and distance between them, Alex still wears the undeniable look of love he always did when he looked at Jo.

“I gotta find Carina but… I’ll see you around?” Alex nods, still entranced with Jo as she turns to walk away. Their interaction is brief but it makes her crave Alex all the more.

-

Late that night Jo finds herself alone at the hotel bar. Carina had initially joined her but had gone back to their room to call Maya and their daughter. Jo is about to head up herself when someone sits on the stool next to her.

“Jack and coke for me and a whiskey sour for my friend here.”

Jo’s head whips up in surprise as Alex settles down next to her, a smirk gracing his lips, “It’s still a whiskey sour right?”

“Yeah thank you,” Jo nods to the bartender as he hands her the drink. “So… we’re friends now?”

“I’d like to hope so,” Alex picks up his glass and Jo gladly toasts him. “To new beginnings”

“To new beginnings.”

Alex and Jo sit together and discuss what’s changed for them. There’s no awkwardness or hostility like Jo might have thought. Instead, it genuinely feels like catching up with an old friend. She talks about Luna and proudly shows a video of the young girl counting to 10 in Spanish. Alex brings up a photo from Izzie’s wedding of himself squished between Eli and Alexis, all three bearing matching crooked smiles and bright eyes. Jo can’t help the swell of pride that mounts in her chest at the sight. Eli looks more like Alex but she can still see the Karev shining through Alexis as well. For a moment she wonders, goes through the what-ifs, but she quickly pushes them down.

“I think I’m gonna head up but I really enjoyed catching up,” Alex leans down, pressing a kiss to Jo’s cheek. Her skin flames up under his delicate touch and she knows she’s wearing a deep blush. “Goodnight Jo.”

“You missed.”

“What?”

“You missed,” Jo leans up, her fingers brushing Alex’s cheek as she pulls him down into a deep kiss. She brings her other hand up to tangle in his hair and pull him closer, sighing contentedly as his hands find her waist and pull her flush against him. She pulls back only slightly, leaning her forehead against Alex’s. “Are you still leaving?”

“Not without you I’m not,” the words sound so natural as Jo melts into Alex’s embrace, his arms wrapping fully around her. Their lips meet in a chaste kiss before they’re stumbling out of the bar, not drunk enough to blame their actions on the alcohol but just enough to begin to heal the open wounds of their failed relationship.

Everything after that comes naturally, the lost lovers escaping upstairs and falling into bed with practiced ease. Jo feels right at home in Alex’s bed, both of them remembering each other’s bodies as if they’d never parted. Neither of them thinks twice about the pillow talk they share after or the way they drift off to sleep in each other’s arms. It’s not until the next morning when Jo answers her phone that she realizes things are amiss.

“Mmm hello?”

“Thank goodness, I thought you were dead.”

“Carina?”

“Where are you? You missed the first speaker of the day.”

Jo bolts up in bed, finally realizing where she is. Alex’s arms snake out and around her waist, his gruff voice slightly muffled by his pillow, “Come back to bed, I’ll make it worth your while.”

“Carina I’m going to grab a shower and I’ll be down as soon as possible.” There’s a light laugh on the other side as Carina confirms Jo’s plan, “I’m glad you’re having fun, Jo.”

Jo hangs up, jumping out of bed and searching for her clothes in a rush to get out the door. Her frantic pace brings Alex out of his sleepy stupor as he rubs his eyes and watches her, “Where are you rushing off to?”

“Well it’s 10:30 so I already missed the lecture on in utero surgery,” Alex rolls over, groaning when he sees that Jo is correct. “I’m hoping I can fit in a shower before Arizona goes on.”

Once she’s finally dressed Jo walks back to Alex, her lips brushing over his lightly before she pulls him in for a sweet and sensual kiss. She watches him for a moment, taking in the shocked look on his face, “What?”

“Why aren't you mad at me? I left you.”

“I forgave you a long time ago for that Alex,” Jo runs her fingers across his cheek, meeting his eyes with a serious stare. “As soon as I held Luna I understood why you did what you did. I knew that if I felt that way about a baby that wasn’t even mine yet that you couldn’t leave two kids who were half you. I always knew you would be a fantastic dad. Even if it wasn’t with me I’m glad that you got that.”

Jo presses one more chaste kiss to Alex’s lips, leaving him staring dumbfounded at her, “Can I come back tonight?”

“I’m sorry,” Alex seemingly ignores Jo’s last statement, looking up at her with a sorrowful expression. “Leaving you… leaving you was my biggest mistake. I love my kids but you were everything. You’re still everything. And I know you say that you forgave me but I never apologized. I’m so sorry Jo, you didn’t deserve how I left you.”

There’s an amicable silence as Jo and Alex just stare at each other, both of them with tears welling in their eyes. There’s not much else to say, but they both know that their newfound relationship wouldn’t end with the weekend.

+

It's three weeks after Alex‘s surprise weekend visit to Seattle and Jo has never felt so terrible in her life. Despite Carina‘s prescription of an anti-nausea medication Jo’s morning sickness and vertigo continue to plague her no matter what she tries. She hasn’t operated or delivered any babies in almost a month, her work routines now consisting of doing chart work and checking on patients when she’s not trying to keep food down. Between trying to maintain her work schedule and keeping up with Luna on top of her pregnancy, Jo is exhausted and completely depleted of any energy she might have once had.

She finally hits her breaking point an hour into her shift when she’s thrown up for the fourth time that day and nearly passes out. Her head is swimming as she leans against the bathroom stall, the only thought she can focus on is how much she wishes Alex was there. He always knew exactly what she needed when she wasn’t feeling good. There’s a knock on the door and she barely lifts her head when she sees Carina walk in.

“I’m admitting you. You need rest and fluids and you’re not going to get that if you keep running yourself into the ground,” Carina places her hand on Jo’s forehead. “You’re burning up, mi amor.”

“I’m fine, I don’t need to be admitted,” Jo attempts to brush off Carina as she grabs her hand, but the rush of blood to her head stops her. Carina barely catches her as her knees go weak and her vision blurs.

“What am I going to do with you, Jo? Come on, let’s go.”

Jo doesn’t put up any more of a fight, following Carina to a room and all but collapsing onto the bed. Her brain is foggy, words incoherently falling from her mouth as Carina asks her questions. Finally, her eyes flutter shut and Jo is enveloped in silence.

When she pries her eyes open again the sky outside is dark. Jo realizes this is the longest she’s slept in over a month and lets her eyes fall shut again. Only a moment later she remembers her morning with Carina and a deep panic sets into her bones.

Her baby.

As if sensing her unease, Alex reaches his hand out to grab hers. Jo then realizes that he’s sitting at her bedside, eyes tired and body restless in the small chair, “The baby’s okay, you don’t need to freak out.”

Jo nods, rubbing her hands over her face in exasperation. Even though their baby is okay Alex’s worried expression tells her that things might not be all rainbows and sunshine.

“Carina called me after you passed out. Scared the shit out of me, I thought you were dead or…,” Alex doesn’t finish the statement out, Jo putting the pieces together and settling her hand on the slight curve of her stomach. “You’ve gotta take better care of yourself.”

“I didn’t pass out, my vision went spotty and I was light-headed. And then I took a nap.”

“Jo, you slept for 15 hours straight. You were out long enough for me to finish a laparoscopic cholecystectomy, drive an hour to Kansas City, hop on a four-hour flight, and sit in traffic from the airport to get here. You’re running yourself into the ground,” Jo avoids Alex’s gaze as she fights back tears. “Carina took your blood when she put you on the IV drip. On top of being dehydrated and having iron deficiency anemia you also have an untreated UTI that’s bordering a kidney infection.”

“What?” Jo sits up abruptly but is immediately overcome with a wave of dizziness. Alex moves faster than her, placing one hand on her back while the other holds a basin in front of her. Head still in the basin, Jo speaks up, “Are you serious?”

Alex confirms the news once more, his hand rubbing Jo’s back gently, “She’s got you on strong meds to combat the infection and the baby is doing fine. You just need to take better care of yourself, Jo. Between work and Luna and now this baby you’re stretching yourself too thin.”

She can't help the rush of emotions she feels or the loud sob that breaks from her as Jo lets the last few weeks finally take their toll on her. Alex is quick to wrap her in his arms but even that does little to calm her down.

“I’m sorry, it’s just been really overwhelming and I’ve been doing everything alone,” Jo wipes at the tears pooling under her eyes and settles into Alex’s side. “I’m just exhausted from everything.”

“You’re not alone Jo, you have me and Mer and Link. All of us are more than willing to help you out.”

“Meredith and Link have their own families to take care of. And you live halfway across the freaking country, I can’t keep expecting you to drop everything and come to my rescue,” Jo knows that Alex wants to refute her statement but she avoids looking at him. “It’s just me and Luna and it’s so hard. I thought having a medically fragile infant was hard but that was nothing compared to all of this.”

Alex leans down and presses a kiss to Jo’s forehead, pulling her closer to him, “We’ll figure it all out, okay? I’m not letting you take all of this on by yourself.”

The words comfort Jo, if only slightly. She knows Alex has changed, knows that he really means it when he says that he’s going to take care of them. She’s not entirely sure what the future holds for them but she knows that everything will work out.

+

Meredith isn’t entirely sure what to think when she uses her key to unlock the penthouse only to find it empty. The furniture is still there but the personal items are all gone. The photos of Jo and Luna are gone, all of the drawers and closets are empty, and the place is eerily quiet. When she loops back to the living room Meredith finally notices the note taped to the fridge written in Jo’s loopy script.

Link or Meredith-

Luna and I are fine, there’s no need to worry about us. I promise we’ll call soon.

-Jo

The note gives Meredith a strange sense of deja vu, taking her back to when she had packed up Zola and Bailey and gone to San Diego. The memory instantly worries her, she can’t blame Jo for running but she also knows that their situations aren’t the same. Meredith pulls out her phone and dials Alex, hoping that he’s heard from Jo but the call goes straight to voicemail.

As she walks out of the penthouse Meredith hopes that Jo is okay, hopes that Alex knows where she is and that he’s able to help her through the rough road she has ahead of her.

+

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself. How was the flight?”

“Besides the rambunctious three-year-old and constant nausea it wasn’t too bad,” Jo grins up at Alex as he takes Luna from her arms. “I can’t believe we’re here.”

Alex lets out a laugh as he folds Jo into his arms, squeezing both girls tightly, “Finally, it only took a month of begging.”

“Yeah well I figured now was a good time, you know before I get any bigger,” at the mention of her expanding baby bump Alex lets his hand float down to the curve of her stomach. She’d hidden it well with sweaters and baggy scrubs but now there was no denying that she was pregnant. “This is kinda crazy, isn’t it?”

Alex and Jo both laugh at that, knowing that nothing they’d ever done was traditional or normal. They’d divorced almost four years ago and now found themselves with three kids between them and a fourth on the way.

“What? You moving to Kansas after we’ve only been back together for a few months? I’d say it’s not completely sane,” Alex takes in Jo’s shocked face with a smile. “What’s that look for?”

“So we’re together now are we?”

Alex laughs before he bends down and captures Jo’s lips, only parting upon Luna’s insistence, “Only if you want to be.”

“I do.”

“Good because I fully intend to have you say those words for a third time,” Jo’s jaw drops at Alex’s words and it takes everything in her to calm down her racing heart. “You think I was just gonna bring you out here without marrying you?”

“Well, I-”

Alex takes the opportunity to press another kiss to Jo’s lips, “It’s okay princess, I promise this is the last time.” Jo finds herself standing in awe as she watches Alex and Luna look for their bags on the conveyor belt in front of them. There’s a flurry of tiny flutters that erupt in her stomach, partially from the baby wiggling around but mostly from the joy, she felt at Alex’s proposition. Since their reunion in New York, all Jo has wanted is exactly this, a life with Alex. She had thought that wasn’t in the cards for them anymore but as she watched him hoist Luna onto his shoulders she knew that everything around them had worked out perfectly.

[classicparadox]

tully (2018) sentence starters. 

Wanna count with me?

Just being your own best friend?

He doesn’t hate you.

You happy now?

He’s an out-of-the-box kid. He’s quirky.

No, don’t be. He’s a dick.

Before it’s as cold and black as my womb.

You should call me sometime.

No, mommy’s joking, honey. Like a clown.

God, really? ‘Cause I feel like an abandoned trash barge.

In the eighties there was this giant boat full of garbage that just drifted up and down the East Coast for weeks. They couldn’t figure out where to dump it. Eventually, they docked the boat in Brooklyn and burned all the trash.

My boss once bought me a cup of soup. I paid him back.

Lucky little bastards.

Ooh, is it money?

How does that work? Does this lady breast-feed? Jesus, there’s nothing you people won’t outsource.

That’s because she was only here at night! They come in and out like a ninja.

You didn’t hire one of those people for me, did you?

I love you, I don’t ever want to see you that way again.

I know you think this is some bougie thing that rich assholes do. And maybe it is. But remember, I wasn’t always a rich asshole. 

I feel like these last couple of years… Someone just snuffed out a match.

You need to rest, mommy.

I get it. They’re big donors, they called in a favour. 

Do I have a kid or a fucking ukulele? 

Don’t fucking touch me, [name]. 

Oh, I leave like this every day; you just don’t know it. This is the real me, when I’m not licking your asshole. Surprise!

I’m here to take care of you.

Oh, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t want you to sustain a bruise to your ego. That’s cool. I’ll just cancel. I’ll just cancel and make another pot of coffee. We’re good. 

I feel like I don’t know her at all yet.

And so to bed.

Maybe she’s nocturnal. Like an owl.

I want to make it abundantly clear that you can’t be self-conscious around me. This won’t work if you are.

I’m just not used to people doing things for me, that’s all.

Well, boats get hurt by barnacles. But whales don’t. When a barnacle latches onto a whale, it’s harmless. It’s just a little obligate parasite doing its thing.

That makes me nervous, because it doesn’t get better for girls, you know?

Right? It sounds like a Tom Cruise movie, except shitty and kind of sad.

You’re laying bedrock; they’re planting flowers. 

Every morning I open my closet and think “Didn’t I just do this?” And that continues for the rest of the day. “Didn’t I just do this?” My life is like stuck on repeat mode. 

That’s the downside of living on a planet with a short solar day. Although Jupiter’s even shorter.

You’re like a book of fun facts for unpopular fourth graders.

I can’t fix the parts without treating the whole.

It’s just the gaping hole where the chicken’s organs used to be.

You know they make sangria in prison toilets, right?

I know, they call it ‘pruno’.

Does [name] ever ask about me?

Oh, well why don’t you guys just talk about it?

But you love him.

I know I picked the right person.

So why don’t you guys have sex?

I don’t want my kids to grow up like I did.

What kind of… stuff is he into?

I checked his browser history once, it was pretty basic stuff.

It’s so normal, I thought it would be something really fucking sinister.

You have had zero kids.

Wait, is this a fifties diner? I wanna be period accurate.

I had a dream about a camel. 

Um, she still has a father, doesn’t she?

Why are you so nice to me?

You trusted me with [name]’s life. That’s real, that means something.

I could murder you. Admit it, you’ve thought about it.

That is a fucked up thing to joke about!

Whoa, your molecules are everywhere.

No, I’m thirsty, not dirty.

Nobody wants to fuck mommy, okay?

Let’s say you were to take a wooden ship and replace one plank every year. Eventually, the ship would be made up of entirely new planks and there would be nothing left of the original ship. So is it still the same ship? Or a new ship?

Nothing is the same. It’s a new ship, baby. Nouveau bateau. 

Then what about people? When you look at your baby pictures, clearly you’re unrecognizable compared to now. But it’s you.

If every part of me has regenerated then I guess I’m not me anymore.

God, I loved her. I was really in love with her.

I just need you to stay a little bit longer, you know? I need your help. Please.

I was just here to bridge a gap. It’s time for me to move on.

So what do you have lined up? I bet you have big plans. Your twenties are great. But then your thirties come around the corner like a garbage truck at 5 a.m. Yeah. You gotta think long-term. What are you going to do when that cute little ass drops and your feet grow half a size with each pregnancy, and the whole “free spirit” thing stops being charming and starts looking ugly?

I’m not afraid of the future.

You know what your problem is? You’re convinced you’re a failure, but you actually made your biggest dream come true.

I know how bad your childhood was. So now you’re giving your kids what you never had.

Yes, you are boring. Your marriage is boring, your house is boring, and that’s incredible. That’s the big dream you had when you were young. To grow up and be dull and constant and raise your kids in that circle of safety. You made it happen. You are a steady and elegant mother. Day after day. Night after night. 

I’m not safe, I’m scared!

She won’t be the same tomorrow.

One second, we’re performing a miracle!

All we do is converse. We’re like the people in a Spanish textbook. Mario and Julio, they never shut up.

Look. You’re going to be in a soft bed in your little house before you know it. Under the same roof with your three babies, cozy and crowded. That old carpeting in your bedroom. World’s weakest shower. Home. 

Obviously we can’t keep seeing each other.

If I’m older, why are you so much wiser? 

I started learning Italian, do I forget that?

Thank you for keeping me alive.

You didn’t do anything.

I just want you to be okay.

I love us.

[lovemesomesurveys]

“I’ve got my fuzzy socks on and I’m ready for summer”

You arrive in New York at 10 AM. What's the first thing you do? Find a nice, cute cafe to get a coffee and pastry from and chill at for a bit while sorting out my plans for the day. You go by your locker & your bf/gf is cheating on you. What comes to mind? I’m not in school anymore, but hypothetically I’m sure I would feel a lot of emotions--angry, hurt, upset, confused... like wtf?? And damn, right in front of everyone, too? That would be humiliating. 

You have to take out the trash & clean your room. Your reaction? I’m 31 years old, you gotta do that kinda stuff when you’re adult. I don’t personally take out the trash because it would be really difficult for me to do in a wheelchair, but I have other stuff I have to do. I don’t particularly enjoy it, it just is what it is.

How many siblings do you have? I have two brothers.

Have you ever made fun of a homeless/ mentally challenged person? No. What a shitty thing to.

Make up a funny word with your first name in it. I don’t know.

Do you like campfires? Yes. I love the smell, it makes me think of fall. And just the coziness of it.

What's your favorite color to write with? Black.

Do you write poetry? No.

When's your 20th birthday? [Day & Month is fine. Year if you want.] I turned 20 back in July 2009.

Do you spit in public? Ew, no. I don’t spit at all except for when rinsing my mouth after brushing my teeth. It makes me gag seeing people spit. I also have to watch out for that when wheeling around outside because I would DIE if it got on my wheels and then me. akjkslfjldsfjkldsfjkl. I’m going to throw up just thinking about it.

Are you in high school/middle school/college? I’m done with school.

How many push ups can you do? Zero.

How would you react if your cat/dog died? I’ve been through that twice before with my doggos, it’s absolutely heartbreaking and devastating. My dogs are my family. It’s no different than losing any loved one; they’re a loved one, too. I had a really hard time when my dog, Brandie, passed. It was so sudden and unexpected. 

Are you trustworthy? Yes.

“when I make it shine...”

Do you play video games often? I’ve been playing Animal Crossing just about everyday since earlier this year. Prior to that, I’ve played a few other games in their entirety since having my Nintendo Switch that I got over a year ago. 

Do you like life, love, funny or boy quotes the best? I like # relatable quotes. 

Have you ever been cheated on? No.

Have you ever had fruit pizza? No.

Would you like to learn karate? No.

Do you think it would have been cool to live in the 80s? Maybe.

Do you think we'll have robots in the future? They’re already a thing, they’re just not like easily, readily available to everyone like a Rosie from The Jetsons or something.

Was the sun out today? Not yet cause it’s 5:54AM and it’s still pitch black, but it will be.

Do you know what 143 stands for? “I love you.”

Does it get up to 100 degrees where you live? Ugh, yes. And higher. D:

When you play video games, do you like the sound on or off? I generally have it low or off.

When's the last time you saw fireworks? Fourth of July.

Do you like Dr. Pepper? Yeah.

Will you be seeing the new Transformer movie? I never saw any of them. Not my thing. 

What made this week, one to never forget? Election 2020 will be talked about forever. This year in its entirety will be, but this election was a huge one.

“Tell me why you’re leaving me”

Did you wear shorts today? I don’t wear shorts.

Do you own a fur hat? No.

Do you still use the old time mail? I still receive mail, yes. I pretty much never send anything, though.

Have you ever played flag football? Yeah.

What color is your laptop? It’s silver.

Do you like Paris Hilton? I don’t have anything against her.

Did you smile at all today? Not so far, but it’s only 6AM. 

Do you have an Xbox? My brother does and I’ve used it.

When you were little did you have a magic 8 ball? Yeah.

Have you ever ate grass or birdseed? Eww, no. I wasn’t the kid that stuck everything in their mouth or ate weird stuff. 

Do you and your friends have secret codes? I don’t have any friends.

Have you ever seen the Lincoln Memorial? Not in person.

What's your profile picture on Facebook of? Me with my It/Pennywise mask on. It’s his mouth.

Do you own a yo-yo? No.

What celebrity is your fashion icon? I don’t have a fashion icon.

“How do you love someone without getting hurt?”

Do you hope you live to be the age 70 or older? I don’t want to think about dying.

Did you go to preschool? Yep.

Do you usually wear your hair up when it's hot out? Yeah. I wear my hair up all the time cause I don’t have the energy or motivation to do anything else with it.

Where were you when 9/11 happened? I was bedridden at home because I had spinal surgery a couple weeks prior.

Which would you rather play: guitar or drums? Guitar.

Have you ever gotten detention? No.

When you were little, did you used to watch Franklin? Yeah. Aww, he’s adorable.

What's the most exciting thing that's happened during your lifetime? 9/11 and this pandemic are definitely the most memorable, but I wouldn’t use the term “exciting” to describe them. A few of our blizzards, perhaps. <<< Yeah, definitely not exciting, but certainly major, life changing, go-down-in-history events. 

How high can you count in a foreign language? I could go on and on in Spanish like I could English, but let’s be real I’d stop at 100 haha.

What's the best thing to do on a hot day? Stay indoors with the AC or go to the beach.

Would you like to go to Rome? Sure.

Do you use Febreeze? Sometimes. I prefer my Bath & Body Works room sprays, though.

Have you ever been to a rainforest? No.

How many days of school are left for you? I’m done with school.

How do you usually get tan? That only happens when I go to the beach. Sadly, I didn’t get to go this year. 

“Last name ever, first name greatest”

Snickers or Twix? I like both. 

Have you ever tried to sleep on an airplane? I tried, but couldn’t.

When you were little, did you like Dr. Suess books? Yes. Those are classics.

Are you more afraid of snakes or death? Both are scary to me, but death is just a little more serious...

Would you like to go to Australia? Sure.

Do you like Drake? Yeah, I like a lot of his songs.

What color are your headphones? Black.

Do you live in the past? Yes. :/

When it's spring, do you plant flowers? No. I don’t do any gardening.

Have you ever laughed for 10 minutes? I don’t think I ever have for that long.

Do you help your friends every time they need help? I tried to as much as I could.

Ever seen a Koala Bear up close? No.

Would you rather be blind or deaf? I’d obviously rather not be either one...

Once your done, are you done for good? Really depends on what I’m attempting to be done with.

Does it annoy you when girls wear a lot of make up? No? I don’t why I would care.

“Blow the world a kiss”

Do you live by a river? No.

Do you like being outside when it's storming? I like enjoying it from inside.

Ever thought about becoming a cop? No. A cop in a wheelchair... that’d be interesting.

Have you ever tried sushi? Ew, it’s disgusting.

When you were little, did you use to roll down hills? No.

Do you like store bought cakes or homemade ones better? I’d enjoy either one.

Do you think your a good kisser? No. Now I’m really out of practice.

Do you like long or short sleeves better? I like my sleeves to be like halfway from my elbow if that makes sense. Not a quarter sleeve, but a bit above that. Unless it’s cold, then I like long sleeves. I love when the sleeves are long enough to be able to pull down over my hands, but it’s hard to get the perfect fit when you have long arms like I do.

Do you like the name Jacob for a boy? Sure.

Could you live without electricity? Like, for how long? It would be a struggle, no denying that. I’ve never experienced going more than a few hours without it. I know people have to experience long periods without it sometimes or not have it at all, so I’m definitely fortunate. 

Have you ever ate/drank something that was blue? Blue Gatorade, Pepsi Blue, the blue Mountain Dew, Kool-Aid, blue candies and cakes.

When is your last day of summer this year? I’m not in school, so no summer break anymore. However, summer is over and it has just recently started to feel like fall, so I’m quite happy about that.

Would you rather hang out with people who are loud or quiet? Quiet.

Have you ever had a pet turtle? No.

Do you want an iPad? Nah.

“You look like you want to party”

Are you double jointed? My thumbs are.

Have you ever done karaoke? Definitely not publicly, but at home.

What's your middle name? I’m not sharing that.

Do you wish on stars? No. I did when I was a kid.

Do you recycle? We recycle plastic bottles and cans.

Do you believe in love at first sight? No.

What's something you'll do when your older, but not now? I don’t know. Are you currently drinking anything? I’m finishing a Starbucks Doubleshot energy drink.

What color is your shirt? Black. 

Have you ever played laser tag? Nope.

Does your best friend live within 5 minutes from you? My mom and I live together.

If you got dared to dye your hair purple, would you? No. I dye my hair red and I want to keep it that way. It would be a big, annoying process to do another color and then to go back if I wanted, so nah.

How many contacts do you have in your cell phone? Not many.

Do you own earmuffs? No. It doesn’t get cold enough for them here.

Nothing worse than being sunburnt, don’t you agree? I’ve experienced much worse, but they are awful.

[suffering-and-happy-about-it]

We Can Make Anything Work as Long as You Stand By Me (Sriracha, Part 26.)

Description: A problematic college student gets the worst summer job of the ‘83 - Jim Hopper, the Chief of police in your hometown will have you as his secretary since his old lady Flo has two months lasting holiday. It was agreed so Hopper could let you far away from all the trouble.

Part Summary: With one year anniversary approaching, Hopper decided to make something special with the help of your mom. 

Warnings: Smut, but a sweet and loving one. Also, let’s say this is one of the last happy chapters before... Well... The summer of 1985 is approaching rather quickly, don’t you think?

A/N: I feel like we hadn’t got nasty here in a long time... So... Here we go. Inspired by Foreigner and their song I Wanna Know What Love Is (IT IS 1984 GUYS, IT’S ALRIGHT, DON’T COME AFTER ME.)

Word count: 3.3 K

Tagging: @nemodoren​, @creedslove​, @missdictatorme​

Master list: H E R E

Eleven staying at your parents began to occur daily - even your father liked the girl since she was interested in his fishing set, watching him taking care of it and he could tell her about his damn sports articles for hours and she didn't seem to get bored with his enthusiasm.

It was secretive every time you took her there, making sure that she's hidden under the blanket perfectly. Since your mom stopped working at the Post office, you called her every day before taking El there - and it was never a problem. First, you let your parents take her for one day in a week, that was in early June. You or Hopper always made sure to stick around just for El to feel safe. When you were sure that she can stay there on her own the whole day, you began to drop her there on her own.

The first bigger breakthrough came when the first of July was slowly approaching - it was almost scary that you and Hopper made the things work for a year almost. That was also the evening when he got another of his batshit crazy ideas. He asked your mom when he was dropping Eleven off on Friday, letting your mom taking care of her. Aiden was enthusiastic about being an uncle - that day, he planned to draw with El and then showing her a few cool tricks he taught Lady.

"Can I ask you a favor?" - Jim asked your mom nervously as he watched Eleven taking her shirt off, almost automatically pouring herself Molly’s lemonade. She was asking all the time before she learned that she can have anything that was put on the counter - whether it was Molly’s lemonade or her famous cakes.

"Go on." - Your mom let him in, pouring him a glass of water as well. It was awfully hot on that day - even if the summer had just started. Hopper really appreciated the glass, if he had to be honest.

"God, this is awfully cringy, but..." - Hopper stepped a bit away from Eleven who watched him cautiously, having a small sunburn on her face since she loved to spend too much time in the water. - "A year of me knowin’ your daughter is comin’ by and I thought that maybe you could have El for a sleepover so I can make her a nice evenin’?" - Hopper asked, getting red on his cheeks. Your mom opened up her mouth a bit and then furrowed.

"You want to take her out on a dinner, right?" - She asked suspiciously, not letting Hopper off of her sight for a single second. Hopper almost spilled the water out of his mouth before nodding. He was thinking more like kinky fucking all over the cabin, but he couldn't tell that your mom straight to her face.

"At the Spanish restaurant in the downtown, Molly, she loves the food there." - Hopper somehow got out of his mouth, praying for your mom to leave him alone. Then, she nodded, looking at Eleven.

"It will be a pleasure to have this anger here overnight. She can sleep in Y/N’s old bed, we can watch some movies, have fun. Sure." - Molly nodded, waiting for Hop to drink the rest of the water and leaving the house, telling Eleven once again that she better be good kiddo.

And as Jim and your mom had planned, so it happened. On Sunday, you had to leave for a shift, so Hopper took Eleven to your parents’ just an hour before you were supposed to end. Joyce, again, helped him with the outfit and tips of what to say, she helped him with making the reservation of a table since Hop was clueless with these things. And let me say, that man looked handsome. Like, really handsome.

He took his beige blazer out of the wardrobe, slicked his hair, shortened his beard and Eleven helped him with choosing the right pair of jeans and a shirt - they ended up picking a white one with blue, almost invisible stripes printed all over it. Even Molly was pleasantly surprised when she saw him looking like a million bucks when he opened up the garage door.

Meanwhile, you could just describe your shift at horrendous and you were happy, once the clock had shown eight o’clock. The people were nice, it wasn't the people that visited the bistro... It was just too hot and the sun was shining the whole damn day. Yet, you wanted to buy some fireworks and celebrate the fourth of July at your parents’ as a family, so each penny you made could help you a lot.

You felt like a hot pile of a mess when you were leaving the bistro on one of Jim’s shirts with a messy hairstyle and a pair of jeans - but that didn't matter to him at all while he was waiting for you in front of the door, leaned into your car with a fucking huge flower in his palms. You didn't even realize what day it is. The first of July - you started to work at the station last year that day and Jim had proclaimed it your anniversary day. And even if you would remember what day it was, Hop didn't look a man who remembers dates and anniversaries. Your whole face lit up as soon as you realized it's him, just with shortened hair, looking smooth as ever.

"What are you... Doing here?" - You giggled, leaning closer to kiss him. - "Did you leave her all alone at home?" - You ask worriedly, taking the flower he was giving you while you let him give you yet another kiss. And that was a proper French one.

"Don't worry about anythin’ today, alrite? This day’s yours." - Jim smiled, patting your bum carefully as he threw your stuff on your backseat, shoving the flower there carefully as well. You had to sit on the co-driver’s seat because this wasn't the end of his masterful plan.

Yes, you felt kinda worried about Eleven, looking at the profile of Hopper’s face, but you knew that if she wasn't safe, he wouldn't be that calm. Foreigner was playing through the car as his hand palmed your knee when he drove towards the restaurant. This was the best looking anniversary you ever had - at least that far.

Even if you felt like you're not dressed pretty enough to have a meal at the best Spanish restaurant you've ever been, you saw in his eyes that it doesn't matter, for fuck’s sake. All that mattered was that you two were there together on a great meal, having lots of great conversation which you hadn't got in weeks... Months even. Hopper also made you laugh hard many times and... It just felt like the old times when there was no Eleven, when you lived at his trail and when nobody knew about you, although you were sitting in a restaurant full of people. It felt like that small half of the month after you got back to Hawkins from Dakota and before Jim disappeared for three whole months.

You were grateful for what you had, but it reminded you of something much simpler than what your current situation was. It made you remember the days when you could walk around completely naked, having him any time you wished to, the long nights of laughs you spent in the bed and the swims in the quarry, both of you completely naked, kissing each other, being completely lost in the moment. You missed these moments. But Eleven was now a part of your life as well and honestly, you wouldn't change that for literally anything in the world.

The bigger surprise was waiting for you in the cabin; while you had to sit in the car all alone for what seemed to be whole eternity, Hopper was doing something in the cabin. You were already happy - but your breath got pretty much stuck when you saw tens, maybe hundreds, of candles lit up with I Wanna Know What Love Is playing in the background.

"You're trying here, Mr. Hopper, I gotta say." - You whispered when you felt his fingers dip into your tensed shoulders, making you grunt with pleasure, biting your lip in the process.

"You're just worth all of this, what can I say?" - Jim smiled into the crook of your neck, letting his palm slip under your/his shirt and below the belt on your jeans.

"You’ve never seemed to be the man who does great gestures. This is such a nice surprise. You might need to do this more often, huh?" - You hummed and moved your hips in the rhythm of the song. It was a truly great choice of music; this was a song for dancing, singing, nuzzling, slow fucking, just everything. And when the main verse of the whole song was playing? You simply got lost in the moment every time.

"And I have more." - Jim smiled, taking the flower out of your hand, putting it into a vase. You had a while just to look at your man - and dear got, he was extremely hot at that moment, just doing the little everyday things. - "But you need to take a shower, darlin’."

"Do I smell, Jim?" - You giggled and hugged him from the back, smiling into his blazer. - "Now you're smelly too." - You put your chin on his shoulder, kissing the crook of his neck with a smile.

"You don't smell, I just want to see my fiancée naked. Is that a sin?" - He asked back, putting the vase on the table, watching you walk away with a nasty grin on your face. Slowly, you undid the buttons, one after one, showing him the bra you got under. Knowing this, you would take something way sexier, but you found out just after your shift ended and you were looking like a damned witch living in the deepest swamp.

That didn't stop you from undoing your jeans, unhooking the button just before you entered the bathroom, closing the door behind you. Without hesitation, Hopper picked up both your shirt and your pants, folding them without putting too much effort into it, since you taught him to do his stuff. By the time the door opened up again, you were already covered in soap bubbles, your hair was completely damp, but you had a contained smile on your lips. At least until you heard sounds of a Polaroid taking and printing a photo.

"What are you doing, you old creep?" - You mumbled, dragging him under the warm water after you - which meant that he had to put the camera away.

"Creepin' on you, I guess?" - The man smiled into your lips before kissing you, feeling as you massaged the gel onto his arms.

"Well, I hope you're not creeping on anyone else like that." - You laughed back, looking at that man getting on his knees. There literally wasn't anything hotter than Hopper on his knees; that was a fact which needed to be stated. Especially when you knew what he's about to do to you.

"So you can see this David guy, but I can’t creep on anyone else. That’s kinda unfair, missy." - Jim's mouth said into your thigh before kissing it. You haven't done anything in the shower for a hella long time. This almost felt like a redemption of sorts.

You'd swear that you started melting at the first moment his tongue touched you right on the most sensitive spot of your body. Without putting too much effort into anything, you stopped the water, swung your leg over his shoulder and gripped his hair pretty tight to make sure he won't leave his damn place. You didn't even realize how much you've missed being eaten out anytime and anywhere just because Jim said and wanted so.

Before your brain could make out what in the name of God of is happening, you had two fingers inside of you, third about to be added masterfully, his lips were sucking the living soul out of you and you had some serious trouble with standing up straight. Your fingers were playing with his hair, smoothing it from side to side as you bit your lower lip, trying not to scream too loud.

"Fuck, goddamn, Jim I love you." - You mumbled the typical nonsense you did as you were about to come, feeling that bastard just humming into your pussy. The vibrations set you off - so in the next second, you were barely standing there, screaming curses, his name, the name of the Lord, just everything as the stars flew past your closed eyes.

"Don't you pass out on me. 'Cause then I'd have to give you a mouth to mouth and that David guy would roast me for that, baby." - Hopper laughed from kneeling between your legs, watching you from the below, holding both your legs in place.

"Shut your mouth, creep." - You laughed with your eyes still closed, feeling him standing up to turn on the water. And boy, oh, he was hard as stone. But when you wanted to palm that dick, he shushed your fingers away, turning your back at him, slowly massaging the gel onto your back.

"What the hell was that, James?" - You laughed, giving into the touch of his fingers, feeling the warm water run down your spine, the small of your back and your ass. - "I'm not allowed to touch you now? You're like a moody-ass wife."

"And you're my impatient husband. Have anyone told you that patience is a gift?" - He asked with a sigh when he leaned your head backward, slowly drawing circles onto your head. That felt ridiculously hot and relaxing.

"Captain America says bullshit like this in every issue." - You said, biting your lip under that touch. It was really simple, yet somehow getting you all worked up. - "Patience is a virtue."

"It sure is." - Jim's palm slapped your ass to give you a sign that he's done. Jesus, he was in a playful mood that night - and you had his palm literally imprinted on your right buttcheek. With a sigh, you put your bathrobe on and left the bathroom, watching that fucking jackass biting his bottom lip as he tried not to laugh out loud. And God, you felt so in love when he came out of the shower, just drying his hair as you smoked by the table with one of the cabin's windows open.

"What?" - Hopper asked, smiling back at you.

"You're so handsome and I feel like I don't tell you that often enough." - You mumbled back, finishing the cigarette right after, tapping it off.

"Yeah, I'm the princess and you should be kissing my damn hand every time I swin' my breathtaking ass past you." - He agreed, making you laugh once again before he sneaked in in front of you, letting one of the towels to the ground.

"Hopper, the clothes and, ugh..." - You mumbled, bending your head backward, sighing at that man of yours.

"I'll do all of 'em tomorrow." - Jim promised, helping you to stand up before he kissed you.

"You're going to be the fucking death of me, I swear, James Hopper." - You whispered, pulling for another kiss as you tried to get the bathrobe off as quickly as you could, doing the same with the second towel around his ass.

Before you could say anything else, your back was pressed into the table while that bastard put both your knees into a fucking spread eagle. You barely remembered this position being as filling as it was - you just felt your eyes rolling backward when his dick slipped inside. This was the Jim you fell in love with - the man fucking you at a fast pace with his thumb wrapped around that small bundle of nerves between your legs.

You missed this playful sex. You loved the short pauses when he just wiggled his hips to make you shake in arousal, you lived for those small moments when he stopped to smile at you as he just pulled out and then came back in full force, making you squirm. This man was a piece of art and no-one could tell you otherwise.

"Can I come?" - You asked with a teasing smile on your lips, basically touching your ribs with your knees. You didn't know how Jim pulled that one off during each of these sessions, but he turned you into a fucking gymnast when he had his dick buried deep within you.

"Not unless I say so, I'm the law in this cabin." - Jim got out through his gritted teeth when he pulled your ankle on his shoulder, kissing it. - "Put your hand in use, I wanna try somethin' nasty I heard of from Callahan. You're gonna tell me once it'd raise a red flag." - Jim whispered you and you nodded frantically, feeling the rhythm fasten up. You put your hand on your clit, flicking it as a damn DJ vinyl and then you felt it and you screamed, making Hopper completely freeze down with shock in his eyes.

His thumb gently rubbed the back entrance - not getting in, just slowly rubbed around it. You opened up your mouth and your heart rate was literally over the top.

"You didn't like that, am I rite?" - He whispered while breathing heavily, still gently moving inside of you.

"I swear that I didn't know where this came from. It's strange... But that doesn't think I didn't like it. I just need to try more of that." - You reassured him quietly, wiggling your lips a bit.

So he tried it again. You felt a strange tightness every time he brushed over that spot. It made you jump a bit, pulling your buttcheeks together for a small second. You closed your eyes and made a high-pitched noise, shaking a bit. This was giving you a completely different dimension of love-making. It was hugging your whole torso, it wrapped around your head and made your heart beat faster. And then, without any warning, you came.

To be honest, you were basically yelling his name and you banged the back of your head into the table as you did so, shaking a good five minutes after Jim ended with you. You barely knew that Jim came on your belly and boobs because you were out of the world, your head was spinning. Damn this was a sweet treat.

"I think we need to do anniversary sex more often." - You mumbled tiredly, having your eyes closed. The whole feeling was so endearing for you that you couldn't imagine any other way Hopper could fuck you any better. He outdid himself literally every time. - "And I need to thank Callahan, because, holy fucking shit."

"I was that good?" - Jim asked cockily, making you sit up to clean you up with one of the towels.

"This was the best sex I've ever fucking had." - You smiled lazily, pulling him for another kiss. - "And I love you so damn much."

"Same here. But we should put you to sleep or you'd fall asleep right on this table and... I have to clean this damn place up because I promised to." - Jim smiled at you, hugging you tightly, letting your arms circle around his waist.

You were just two people in love and nothing could feel better at that moment.

[spacegate]

20th century 2d art pieces

Oh goodness 2d art really restricts the wildness that came from the 20th century (1901-1999), mostly sculpture, installations, and art performances. I’ll do my best to give you guys a good list of some of my favorites and finally use my art history minor lol.

1.

Guernica - Pablo Picasso (1937)

Depicting the bombing of an Basque town by the Nazis during the Spanish civil war, this piece shows the suffering of innocent people trapped between two devastating wars. Before not many people even know about the Spanish civil war, but this piece brought some attention to it. Months after the Civil war ended, World war 2 started, bringing the same pain that the common people thought was finally over. War never rests. 

2.

Nighthawks - Edward Hopper (1942)

Everyone has seen this piece parodied over and over again. Still. It’s one of my favorites. A man sits alone as a group of three are in front of him. They are interacting but he is not. Is this a form of self isolation, or is it just something that comes with city life. 

3

The Treachery of Images -  René Magritte (1928-29)

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe." is French for "This is not a pipe." Of course it’s not a pipe, it’s a painting of a pipe. But by the act of being painted, does it make the pipe real? How do you define something is real or not? There’s a picture of a pipe and it’s telling you that it’s not a pipe. It asks questions that don’t really have an answer. To me, it’s not a pipe. But to someone else. It is a pipe. Art is in the eye of the beholder and cannot be restricted by firm boundaries.

4

The Problem We All Live With - Norman Rockwell. (1963)

When people think of Rockwell, they think of the illustration work he did of an ideal American life. His work was very white centrict, but there was a reason for it. Up until the early 60′s he was not able to have any depiction of a similar idealized black family be accepted by any type of publication. So once those legal shackles came off in the 60′s, he went hard. This painting is a depiction of Ruby Nell Bridges Hall (who is still alive today), and was printed with no commentary. It didn’t need one. Everyone knew what it was about. He used his art to fight and bring awareness to Americans that would just rather pretend that none of this was happening. Def one of the artists that has influenced me a lot.

5. 

Mother's pride - Henriette Ronner-Knip (1901)

Her paintings make me smile so it’s on the list. Sometimes you enjoy art for arts sake. 

6.

The Thing - Drew Struzan (1982)

If you ever saw a movie poster from the late 70′s to early 2000′s, you’ve likely seen Drew’s work. He carried the torch of hand painted movie posters all the way up to this era, where photoshop seemed to take over. His work is always an inspiration, and it was hard to pick just one. In the end, I chose The Thing due to how terrifying it is. It tells you nothing about the movie other than cold and fear, and that’s pretty much what you got. I want a poster of this.

7.

A page from the comic Uncle Sam - Alex Ross (1997)

It’s no joke about how much comics have influenced us. Art has always been used to tell a story, and Alex Ross is no exception. He’s well known for illustrating another graphic novel, Kingdom Come, but is also known for his work on Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam is about a homeless man, possibly the spirit of America, learning from the mistakes of the nation and confronting the huge, bloated, capitalistic spirit claiming to be America. Alex puts so much time and work into his paintings, and his ability to capture emotion is why I just bought and art book of his works!

8.

Return to the moon - Dr. Robert T. McCall (1991)

Dr. Robert T. McCall was a man who dreamed about the future. He has followed NASA for thirty years, painting of what has happened and what could be. He even designed some mission patches for some of the NASA missions. He has left behind a legacy that continues to inspire people to look to the stars, and dream of the future.

9. 

The Last Man on the Moon - Alan Bean (1980-99: I can’t find the exact date)

Can you tell i'm a little biased? I was actually incredibly lucky to see Alan’s work at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. Alan Bean is an actual astronaut, and was the fourth man to walk on the moon. He incorporates moon dust into his paints, working them in including bits of his suit fibers to make textures. He tends to ‘sign’ his work by putting a replica of his actual space boot onto the paint to leave an impression. Here is a moment of sadness, as Apollo 17 was the very last mission (As of 2019) to land on the moon. He recently passed away last year and I wish I could have told him how much his works have inspired me.

10.

727 - Takashi Murakami (1996)

Murakami has a special place in my heart, cause once upon a time when I was in college, a gaggle of my friends hopped on over to Brooklyn, NYC, to see the Murakami art exhibit. There, we made the guards hella nervous with how close we got, trying to see any brushstrokes. There wasn’t, because he’s known for his ‘super flat’ style of pop art. It was, really, really cool. His work is somehow cute and terrifying at the same time and you really gotta see it in person.

SO THERE some of my favorite art pieces. It took me, three goddamn hours because I wanted to actually research and talk a little bit about each painting and I hope you guys like it lol. XD

[carry-the-sky]

karen runs.

(for the lovely @thestarsbeyondthestorms and @edourado​, who requested ‘things you said with too many miles between us’ and ‘things you said on the phone at 4am’. UH THIS PROMPT COMBO. RIP ME. also posted on ao3.)

She’s had a bag packed since Fisk moved out of prison and into the penthouse. All she has to do is use it.

.

.

There are flowers, on the kitchen table. White roses. Not the ones he’d given her, but they may as well be. She can’t buy flowers anymore without thinking of him.

They catch her eye as she’s hugging Foggy, and she feels the breath leave her lungs, swooping out in the space between heartbeats. Tensile strength, she thinks. Kevin was taking AP Physics the year he died, the year she killed him. She remembers helping him study. Ultimate tensile strength, he’d recited from his flashcards, measured by the maximum amount of stress an object can withstand without breaking —

Karen leaves, and doesn’t look back.

.

.

She uses her credit card to buy a southbound bus ticket to Baltimore, hopes the paper trail will buy her a little time. Fisk and his goons have probably already started sniffing her out, but she’ll be long gone by the time they catch on.

She’s heard the Rockies are beautiful this time of year.

.

.

The plan is to lay low. The plan is to limit contact with other people, as much as possible. The plan is —

“This seat is — taken?”

Karen glances up. The woman staring down at her from the aisle reminds her sharply of Mrs. Cardenas — same toothy smile, same hopeful eyes, and Karen feels like her chest cavity has been scooped hollow.

“Uh — no,” she hears herself say. “Not taken.”

Karen left a lot behind in New York, but her inquisitive tendencies have stuck. It’s not long before she knows more than she probably should about her seatmate — Sofía Rosales, sixty-seven years young, three grandchildren with a fourth on the way. She talks with her hands and very kindly doesn’t laugh at Karen’s mangled Spanish. Karen likes her immediately, and that’s when the sirens start going off in her head, that’s when everything starts spiraling. She ruins everyone she touches, no matter her intentions, even when she tries to be kind and good, even when she tries to do the right thing it all goes wrong —

(That’s what you do, Karen. That’s what you do.)

She switches seats in the middle of the night and doesn’t talk to Mrs. Rosales again.

.

.

Karen ditched her phone before she left, but she has a few numbers memorized. Ellison, Matt, Foggy, home.

David Lieberman.

She’s not sure why his number stuck, but it’s there, burned into her hippocampus. Just one of the many details she learned about him while digging for info for Frank.

She has an hour to herself in the station in Columbus, where she’s transferring buses, so she slides into the nearest coffee shop and fidgets with the burner in her pocket, to give her hands something to do. Flips it open, then shut again. Open, shut.

She thinks of the elevator — him leaning into her, closing his eyes and aligning his breath with hers, all those unsaid things in that quiet cocoon of space — and laughs aloud.

And she sort of owes him, right? For saving her life. She owes it to him to let him know it wasn’t for nothing, that she is, in fact, still breathing.

There’s an open single seat in the very back of the new bus. She sinks into it, waits until they’re on the highway again before punching in David’s number with shaking fingers.

“Hello?”

It takes a second for her lungs to catch up with her brain. “Hello, David?” she croaks. “Is this David Lieberman?”

There’s a slight pause. “Who’s calling?”

She should hang up, now. Trash the burner, never, ever, do something this fucking stupid ever again —

“Karen?”

Every muscle in her body tenses. He sounds uncertain, but there’s something about his voice, even over the phone. Something layered beneath. Karen doesn’t know much about this guy, but he seems like the type of person who wouldn’t ask a question he doesn’t already know the answer to.

She blows out a breath. “Yes. Jesus, you’re good.”

“Holy shit. Holy— shit, it’s good to hear from you.”

“I guess you know why I’m calling, then.”

"Yeah,” David huffs out a laugh, “yeah, I have a pretty good idea. I gotta tell you, Karen, our mutual friend has been, ahh, more of a pain in the ass than usual, as of late. I’m sure you can relate.”

She’s gripping the phone so tightly her tendons are starting to burn. There’s breath somewhere in her body, right? Beneath her ribs, maybe, threaded through the struts of bone. She just has to find it. Just take a breath, Karen, just one.

“Our — friend,” she says carefully, past the lump in her trachea. “I need you to let him know that I’m okay. I’m just taking some time, away from the city. But I’m alright. If you could tell Fra —” she squeezes her eyes shut. “If you could tell him that, I would really appreciate it.”

“Karen, hey —”

“Thanks, David,” she says, and hangs up.

.

.

She’s fine.

.

.

After two nights on the bus, Karen decides she needs some actual sleep. She finds the cheapest motel she can and collapses once she’s in the room, asleep before she can even take off her coat or shoes.

She dreams about Fisk, then Kevin, and jolts awake long before the sun comes up.

There’s a pad of paper in the nightstand. You’re okay, she scribbles out, over and over.

You’re okay.

.

.

He’s never far from her thoughts. She knew she wouldn’t miss him like she misses Matt and Foggy — he exists in her mind in splinters, a kaleidoscope of sounds and images and feelings that she can’t quite piece together. She knows who Frank Castle is from a distance. It’s when she looks closer that everything gets blurry.

.

.

She cycles through her burners. The one she’d used to call David stays in the bottom of her duffel. She hasn’t turned it back on since then, but she can’t make herself get rid of it, either.

She calls Foggy, once, in a moment of weakness. The line rings and rings and she hangs up before he can answer.

She wonders if loneliness can actually kill someone.

.

.

They ride the bus with her, sometimes.

Kevin pops up the most. The first time, he’s hunched over his guitar, the one mom had given him before she died. He’s picking the strings randomly, strumming chords to life that Karen swears she’s never heard before.

“Stop showing off,” she jabs.

“Hey, it’s not my fault you don’t have a musical bone in your body,” he smiles, not looking up.

“Ouch. Where’d you learn to be so mean, kid?”

Now he snaps his eyes up. “I’m not a kid.” 

You are, she thinks. You’re just a kid, you’re so, so young. Your whole life is there, just waiting for you to fill it —

Paxton visits occasionally. He never says anything, just sits and stares out the window. They’re driving through Kansas now, nothing but grass and plains for the past day and a half. Karen wonders if her father is thinking what she’s thinking when he looks out, if he’s wondering what it would be like walk off into the sun and dust, feet to the horizon.

“Hey.”

(It says something about the state of her life that Frank’s voice does something to her, even when it’s in her head.)

“You found me,” she says, not turning. She sees him in the window, his reflection distorted slightly.

“Thought I wouldn’t?”

“Hoped.”

He rumbles a laugh between his teeth. “You know me better than that, Miss Page.”

“Why,” she says, “why are you always here?”

“I just got here, Karen, what’re you —”

“I mean, in my life.” She looks at him, finally, taking his face in like she always does in case this is the last time she sees him. “Every time you leave, you come back. I’m tired of trying to figure out why, Frank, so if you could just fucking tell me —”

His hand is warm as he slips it through hers. She can almost feel the calluses on his fingers.

“You mean somethin’ to me,” he says. “Don’t you know that?”

He’s gone, when she looks again.

.

.

She runs until she hits mountains. Denver seems as good a place as any to stop, at least for a little while. There’s people here, not like New York, but enough for her to blend in, go unnoticed. Just one face in a million.

She finds an apartment and scoops up a night shift at a local bakery. It feels good, working with her hands. Making things instead of ripping them apart.

Time passes. Karen tries counting the days at first, but soon loses track. Weeks, months. She’s still here. She’s still here.

.

.

I killed him, she growls at Wilson Fisk, again and again. Sometimes it’s him. Sometimes it’s Kevin, or Ben, or Mrs. Cardenas, or —

She’s not sure she knows who she’s hiding from, anymore.

.

.

It had to happen, eventually. A material can only be stretched so far until —

.

.

She shouldn’t do it. She knows —but she’s starting to forget people. The color of their eyes, the sound of their voices. She just needs something, something to remind her she used to have people in her life who knew her real name, who cared she existed.

She calls home.

A strange voice answers. “Hello?”

“Uh—” she sputters, thrown off. “Hi, I’m — I’m looking for Paxton Page?”

“Shit, I really need to get this number changed. He moved, about, oh, a month and a half ago? Doesn’t live here anymore.”

The pit of her stomach turns to ice. “He — he moved? He’s gone?”

“Yeah. Think he said he was going out of state, too. Didn’t leave a forwarding address, though. Sorry I can’t be of more help.”

Karen sinks, melts into the floor, lets the phone slide out from between her fingers. Stupid, stupid. He told her himself, all those years ago. I don’t want you here, Karen. She thought, maybe, maybe if enough time passed, maybe the wound would start to scab over. Maybe he’d change his mind, and they could try to be some semblance of a family again.

I don’t want you here, he said, but what he meant was —

I don’t want you.

“Fuck,” she whispers to herself, the empty room, the universe. Anyone who’s listening. The answering silence is what finally does it. She unravels, slow tears at first that quickly devolve into throaty, heaving sobs that rock up the length of her spine, fan out across her shoulders, rip through bone and marrow and every little thing that’s holding her together.

She cries until she can’t anymore.

.

.

Karen blinks and the world pieces itself together. Floor, beneath her, every muscle in her body protesting loudly as she rolls into supine. Her brain feels like it’s bursting out of her skull. She must have slept here. It’s still dark — just before four a.m., the clock on her nightstand says.

C’mon, Karen. Sit up. Just sit up.

It’s muscle memory, after that. Stand, shuffle over to the sink, splash water on face.

Cross the room, dig through the duffel in the back of the closet. Find his burner.

It’s muscle memory, switching it on.

He calls less than a minute later.

“Karen? Karen —”

“Hey, Frank,” she says.

He makes a fractured noise on the other end. “She’s here, Lieberman, she’s — christ, Karen, you’re here, I can’t — you’re okay?”

“No,” she says with a low laugh. “But I’m here.”

“I’ll take it,” he says. “It’s — shit, it’s good to hear your voice.”

“I’m sorry, Frank.” She sinks her fingers into her hair. “I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t do that. You don’t do that with me, you got it? Jesus, Karen, I — I thought that was it. Thought—” he goes quiet, and she can almost see him tilting his head down, working his jaw. She can almost imagine wrapping her arms around him, her chin on his shoulder and her hands in his hair, the smell of him, how he feels pressed against her, warm and safe.

“I miss you,” she says.

She hears him pull a ragged breath between his teeth. “You have no idea, Page.”

Her fingers are wet, when she swipes at her face. “I don’t — know what to do. I don’t know what to do, Frank, please tell me, because I can’t do this, I can’t.”

“I’m here, Karen.” His voice swells, crests like a wave, and she realizes he’s crying, too. “Right here, yeah? I’m here, always.”

Just take a breath, Karen. Just breathe.

In, out, in again — and across the miles, she can hear Frank breathing, with her.

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Summer Latin Music Festivals Offer Music And Opportunity

This year we mark our annual summer Latin music festival show with an accompanying deeper dive into the reason some of these festivals exist: lack of inclusion on the big summer festival stages.

Listen to the podcast and read how the Latinx community is dealing with representation in the music industry.

There is a growing musical movement underway, fueled by the same spirit of confronting exclusion that launched female-led music festivals like Lilith Fair in the late 1990s, this time focused on and powered by Latinx musicians. As a response to under-representation on major summer music festival stages and the lack of summer gigs in general that include Latinx culture, festivals like NuevoFest in Philadelphia, Afro-Latino Fest in New York City, RuidoFest in Chicago, Viva! Pomona in the Los Angeles area and Los Dells near Madison, Wisconsin have all popped up over the last several years

In June, the Kansas City-based band Making Movies wrapped up its very first run of a travelling collective of bands they call Carnaval. Though not on the massive scale of Lilith Fair, these game-changers feature an invigorating mélange of Latin grooves and Latin fusion.

The members of Making Movies created their annual Carnaval as a Kansas City, Mo. based mini-fest four years ago; this year it featured nine acts and two local youth performances. Along the way they had an idea: If the big, mainstream summer music festivals were not going to hire them or the bands that they invited to K.C., then they would take their music directly to Latin music fans in 21 U.S. cities.

But when Making Movies began the traveling version of Carnaval in Boulder, Colo. in May, there were not a lot of people to witness history in the making.

"When we started the tour, we played to smaller crowds of 100 or more people," says band member Diego Chi. "But by the time we got to Pomona, Calif., three weeks later, 700 folks were singing and dancing their hearts out with us. The celebrating could be heard for blocks outside the venue."

Carnaval actually began as an answer to under-representation in the Kansas City music scene: Making Movies had better luck getting gigs by promoting itself as a rock band without mentioning its brand of Latin fusion. So it set out to change things. What started as a homegrown youth music camp, with invitations to SoCal Latin alternative bands Ozomatli and Las Cafeteras to come teach, soon grew organically into a carnaval, a Latin carnival.

"It became like a jam session of like-minded musicians, then community organizations started to show up" giving the band the idea of mixing music and social activism, says Diego Chi's brother and band mate, Enrique.

Blending "folkloric performances alongside innovative international artists," they enlisted Latin Grammy-winning artists Alex Cuba and Flor de Toloache to join Making Movies and Las Cafeteras on the inaugural tour this year, and added other bands on the road.

For Enrique Chi, 21 cities is just the start.

"For me the big dream is to make it a national tour next year and create music that really fits our spiritual, musical path ... and integrate the tour more effectively with community and social justice organizations."

Social justice and cultural awareness are also at the heart of Brooklyn-based Afro-Latino Fest.

"There wasn't anything that could bring together Afro-Latinos in the community from across nationalities," says Director Amilcar Priestley, whose wife, Mai-Elka Prado Gil, founded the festival in 2013.

Priestly says identity is an essential topic because even within the Latinx community, those who have roots in the African diaspora can feel marginalized.

"There are a lot of people who don't know what Afro-Latino is. People often want to pigeonhole you, and say, 'You are this but you are not that. You are that but you're not this.'"

The first Afro-Latino Fest set up music and vendors by a subway station in 2013 to attract passers-by.

"Many engaged in the event," said founder Prado Gil in the lead-up to this year's festival, held July 13-15 in Brooklyn. "Last year the maximum of 500 people attended the conference and the concerts sold out with 1,300 people. This year we expect 1,500 for the concert, 500 again for the conference, and 800 to 1,000 for our first full film festival."

An awards ceremony included a posthumous award to Afro Brazilian activist and politician Marielle Franco, who was assassinated earlier this year.

"More are coming into their own and identifying as Afro-Latino," says Priestly. "The conversation about Afro-Latinidad has exploded, here in the U.S. especially, and we're at an important time. I think we've been fortunate to be a bit ahead of the curve in the conversation and how it pushes forward."

A short drive down the New Jersey turnpike the same weekend as Afro-Latino Fest, NuevoFest has been moving the needle on inclusion and integration in the City of Brotherly Love. Since its launch six summers ago, the annual Latin music festival has drawn a healthy cross-section of Philadelphians to the one-day free concert.

It was founded by Marángeli Mejía-Rabelland Rahsaan Lucas of AfroTaino Productions in association with NPR member station WXPN's Latin Roots program. The acts have ranged from traditional to alternative Latin music.

According to Mejía-Rabell, "We went from 50 guests in our first year, consisting of mostly locals, to 1,500+ guests throughout the event's duration, and a lot are coming from out of the city: New York, D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia and the outer Pennsylvania burbs."

"Here's what I think is problematic with major festivals," Mejía-Rabell says. "My perception is that sometimes people take the concept of inclusion very lightly; like with a Band-Aid approach. I'm not saying that every time it's malicious, but I think it's taken for granted, like a quota they gotta meet: 'Let me throw in a Latino act. Or let me throw some color in there.'

"This is not something you can fake. With those who [approach] it with a clear intention and respect — mindfully and with integrity — you get to see a different outcome; a different kind of investment."

The lesson for mainstream curators: Develop trust and relevancy with the Latinx concert-goer.

"You have to make an insightful investment in building relationships with content creators, with programmers, with artists and planners to curate experiences" Mejía-Rabell says. "Never compromise the integrity and what needs to happen to meet that criteria [for Latinx audiences]."

It's a lesson that has seemingly been learned and applied in Chicago, where Ruido Fest was developed outside the Latino community. It's a partnership between Chicago-based production company Metronome Chicago, corporate event producers StarEvents, who organize the once-grassroots punk-rock enterprise Riot Fest, along with Eduardo Calvillo, a Latin alternative promoter and the founder of the Chicago radio show Sin Anestesia.

The June festival, now in its fourth year, features top Latin alternative acts and a new focus on developing stronger local talent. Metronome Chicago owner Max Wagner says its debut attracted some 25,000 thousand festival-goers over three days to the heavily Mexican American community of Pilsen. He says the next year drew 30,000 and then 35,000 last year, with a projected increase of 10% for 2018.

"You're smart to work with people who live and breathe that art," says Wagner, who works with Calvillo to curate the line-up.

"Latin Americans are no different than other Americans. They have broad interests in tastes in music and culture. Sometimes they have a connection to Spanish and sometimes they don't .... It's important to have the fan's perspective. We want to be relevant and important and a cultural touchstone for our niche audience," Wagner says. He adds that "a burgeoning local scene should, in the long run, help to create more opportunities for those same artists in mainstream venues."

On the outskirts of Los Angeles, Viva! Pomona, held in August, is becoming a destination for emerging Latinx artists. The bilingual festival was founded by skateboarder Rene Contreras seven years ago in association with local nightclub The Glass House. It began with Contreras' desire to "bring people to the burbs" with punk bands and no budget and quickly blossomed into an international multi-genre Latin music exchange that "graduates" bands into the indie market.

Contreras says he launched it on a cover charge basis. "It started off with 14 local bands in three stages and took over the block in downtown Pomona. Like 400 people showed up." By the second year talent bookers and artists were contacting him. "Some bands offered to come on their own dime with only a guarantee to play – just to have that platform." Since then City Hall has allowed him to use its main stage, and the festival has doubled in size. One turning point he describes seeing is "when the opener would move up on the lineup; like an ecosystem to headline the show."

Contreras curates the show, books the bands, and markets everything. "The biggest challenge is the process," he says. "It's like a triathalon."

Contreras was doing such a good job at curation that two years ago the mega-mainstream summer festival Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival took notice of his upstart festival in Pomona and hired him to help them reach out to Latin musicians. They also decided to create a mini festival in April called Chella featuring four Latin music bands for the local Indio, Calif. community. It drew 4,000 people, "primarily Latino and largely farmworkers ... from grandmothers to kids."

"If done right, Latin music in major festivals is a must and it's important to the U.S. and the world," he says.

The five days of panels, workshops, networking and deal-making attracts thousands of industry people, bands from the U.S. and throughout the Spanish-speaking world as well as international media.

There are also numerous concerts and performances that feature hundreds of Latin alternative artists around Manhattan's clubs and theaters, plus major concerts in Brooklyn in conjunction with summer-long Celebrate Brooklyn concert series and SummerStage in Central Park.

Two years ago, the LAMC, Nacional Records and Cookman's management company came under the umbrella of Industria Works, an artist development partnership. Industria Works General Manager Jennifer Sarkissian, who oversees LAMC now, says it takes time build a presence. She helped put together the first Supersónico festival in Los Angeles a few years ago. "It sold out, so we did it again and it sold out again, so we'll be bringing it back this [fall]. It's exciting to see more Latin-focused fests around the country. And I think LAMC helped pave the way for that."

Sarkissian says she'd also "like to see major festivals featuring more lineups with Anglo and Latin artists side-by-side."

Among major mainstream festivals, South By Southwest (SXSW) is the only festival that has been significantly increasing it's Latin music presence. Thanks to Latinx curator Alicia Zertuche, it kicked off the festival season this year featuring some 200 Latin music artists — its largest booking yet — out of some 2,000 artists overall.

"The audience is there for that," Sarkissian says. "The time is right. That's the world we live in now."

So, until those bigger stages become more diverse, these festivals offer lots of music for long time fans and adventurous new comers as well.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

[krissysbookshelf]

Enjoy An Exclusive Sneek Peek of: Gem & Dixie by Sara Zarr!

Gem has never known an adult she can rely on, the one constant in her life has been her sister, Dixie. Gem grew up taking care of her sister when no one else could. Even as Gem and Dixie have grown apart, they've always had each other. When their dad returns home for the first time in years, Gem finds herself with an unexpected opportunity: three days with Dixie—on their own in Seattle and beyond. But this short trip soon becomes something more, as Gem discovers that that to save herself, she may have to sever the one bond she's tried so hard to keep.  

LEARN MORE

  WHERE ARE we going? Dixie would ask.

The forest, I’d say. Or, Space.

She never questioned me.

We need to pack survival rations, I’d tell her.

What’s that?

Food and water and gum and stuff.

She’d help me make butter-and-jelly sandwiches on soft, white bread. If we had chocolate chips, we’d sprinkle those in, too, and mash the bread down hard so they wouldn’t fall out. I’d lift her to the kitchen sink so she could fill a bottle with water, and I’d roll up a beach towel; then we’d put it all into the picnic basket that was really just a paper grocery bag on which I’d drawn a basket weave pattern with a green marker—badly, crookedly.

We would put on our jackets and shoes, and I’d make her close her eyes and I’d lead her around the apartment and spin her in circles and then say:

We’re here. Open your eyes.

I knew, and she knew, we weren’t in space or the forest or Narnia or anywhere other than our shitty apartment. Still, when she opened her eyes, they’d go big and bright. She was good at make-believe. My favorite thing was how she always skipped into whatever fantasy place we’d gone to. As soon as her eyes were open, she’d start skipping all around the living room and up and down the hall.

We’re in space, I might say. You can’t skip in space.

I can.

Okay, but you can only skip really slow in space because there’s no gravity.

Mid-skip she’d switch to slow motion and try to make her arms and legs more floaty. Then she’d get tired of it and get hot in her jacket and say it was time to go home.

No, we’re not going home. We’re never going home. I don’t remember when I started saying that part.

She’d stop squirming. What about Mom? And Daddy?

We’ll leave a note.

Then we’d spread the beach towel on the living room floor and if I forgot to bring crayons or markers to space I’d run into our room and get them, and we’d draw a good-bye note, our stick figures flying up to the moon and holding hands as we waved good-bye forever to our parents. Dixie liked to draw stars behind our heads like halos.

She used to play along. She used to believe everything I told her, and do anything I said.

She used to need me to take care of her, and I liked doing it. I liked doing it because, then, I thought I was the one who could. Even though nobody was taking care of me.

1.

NINE QUARTERS.

They were the last of what had been left in the jar of laundry money that Dixie and I kept in our room, the jar that had never quite lost the smell of pickle relish. I counted and recounted the quarters in my pocket with my fingertips as the lunch line moved forward, as I’d counted and recounted them through English, physiology, and government. I counted because things in my life had a way of disappearing on me, and I’d learned not to trust what I thought was there.

What was there wasn’t enough—three quarters short of the cost of lunch—but I stayed in the line anyway as it moved me toward the food. Lunch roulette. Luca, the cafeteria worker on the register, might find seventy-five cents for me in his pocket. Or someone else in line might cover it, out of impatience or pity, which were just as good as kindness on a day that hungry. I hadn’t eaten more than a candy bar since the potluck in my fourth-period Spanish class the day before.

Denny Miller and Adam Johnson—freshmen—stood right in front of me in the line; Tremaine Alvarado and Katy Plant, juniors like me, stood behind. Tremaine was on my PE volleyball team. She’d stare through me on the court, or jostle me while we rotated to the serve, without saying sorry or excuse me or anything else that showed she thought of me as an actual person with a name. Katy Plant thought it was funny to call me “Jim” and got other people to do it, too. I don’t know what’s worse—people acting like you don’t have a name, or them saying it wrong on purpose. The point is I wouldn’t be asking Katy or Tremaine for a handout.

Not that I wanted to ask anyone for a handout. But being hungry—I mean really hungry—had a way of erasing a lot of the embarrassment. And Denny and Adam were easy, being the kind of undersized freshmen who still looked more like seventh graders.

“Denny,” I said.

Both Denny and Adam turned around. I could see them wondering how I knew his name. I knew it because they were both listed on a program from the last band concert, and it was posted in one of the display cases outside the counseling office, under a picture of the band. I spent a lot of time there. I knew not only their names, but that Adam played clarinet and Denny played trumpet and had a solo in “Stars and Stripes Forever.” They both had floppy hair and bad skin. Adam was taller, which helped me tell them apart.

“Can I borrow seventy-five cents?” I asked quietly.

“Me?” Denny pointed to himself.

“Either of you.”

The line moved and the smell of ravioli and garlic bread got stronger. My stomach seemed to fold in on itself.

“I use a lunch card,” Denny said.

“Yeah,” Adam said. “Me too.”

They turned their backs to me. Just because their parents loaded up cafeteria cards with money didn’t mean they didn’t also have some cash. I checked on Katy and Tremaine behind me; Katy was busy showing Tremaine something on her phone. I leaned closer to Denny. “But maybe you have some change or something?”

He drew back and shook his head. I wondered whether I’d tell Mr. Bergstrom about this in our appointment later and if I did, how I would describe it in a way that made me not look too bad.

I tried Adam. “Do you know Dixie True?”

That got his attention. “Um, yeah.”

“She’s in our social studies class,” Denny added, facing me again. “And English.”

“That’s my sister.” Maybe if they knew that, I would seem more interesting than weird.

They exchanged a glance.

“Really?” Denny’s voice cracked on the end of the word. Adam laughed through his nose.

“Ask her next time you see her.”

They wouldn’t, not boys like this, zit-faced and probably still playing with action figures in secret. They might sneak looks at Dixie but they wouldn’t dare say a word to her.

Denny pulled a wrinkled dollar bill from his pocket. “You can pay me back tomorrow, though, right?”

“I’ll look for you,” I promised, taking the money.

A couple of minutes later I had my tray of ravioli and garlic bread, a sad iceberg salad with two croutons, and a carton of milk. When I got to Luca at the register, he shook his head. “I saw that.”

I handed him the bill plus eight of the quarters. He shifted on his stool, the sleeves of his green school jacket swishing against his sides while he rang me up. “If you don’t have money,” he said, “you should get your parents to fill out the form online so you can get free lunch. How many times I gotta tell you?”

I stared at the peeling yellow school logo over his heart. Half of a lion’s mane, a third of its face. “Okay.”

“‘Okay,’” he said, imitating me. “You say ‘okay,’ then you’ll be back here hustling quarters in line tomorrow, these poor little freshmen.” He wasn’t talking loud but not quiet, either, and I imagined Katy hearing every word.

“Those are my sister’s friends,” I said, and decided that’s what I’d tell Mr. Bergstrom if it came up. “I’m going to pay him back.”

 “You always had money in the fall. What happened?”

 “I saved from my job last summer. That’s all gone.”

Since January.

His hands hovered around the register drawer for a second. Then he said, “Here’s your change.”

“But—” I was sure I’d given him three dollars exactly.

“Here’s your change, Gem,” he said again, putting four quarters in my palm.

“Thank you.”

He waved me away, and I took my ravioli to a quiet corner to eat.

“Is that supposed to be me?”

Mr. Bergstrom had gotten a new whiteboard. He’d drawn a stick figure, falling. I knew it was falling from the way the stick arms and stick legs pointed slightly upward, like gravity was pulling on its stick middle.

“I’m not a great artist but, yes, it’s meant to represent you. Here . . .” Bergstrom added some strands of hair that flew up, then capped his dry-erase marker and sat back down. “Is it at least close? Is this how you feel?”

“I don’t know.” In the way that she was alone, maybe, but even falling she looked more free than I felt. I got up and held my hand out for the marker. I drew a box around the falling girl. That didn’t look right, either. “This is dumb.” I picked up the eraser and wiped it all away.

“Maybe.” He smiled. He had a good smile and a good face, and a way of looking right at me without making me feel like I was being studied in some lab. He was way better than old Mr. Skaarsgard, the school psychologist he’d replaced at the beginning of the school year. Skaarsgard would always furrow his white eyebrows at me and make me feel like nothing I said made sense. Maybe it didn’t, but at least Mr. Bergstrom tried.

Normally I saw him a couple of times a week, not always on the same days, sometimes after school and sometimes during it, depending what was going on. I know it was a lot. Some kids at school could go a whole semester, even all of high school, without seeing him once. But right at the beginning of freshman year I sort of had this incident in pre-algebra, and my teacher referred me and then I was on the permanent rotation, first with Skaarsgard, now Bergstrom.

“What’s the box?” he asked. “That’s what it was, right?”

I shrugged.

“You feel . . .” He trailed off and I knew I was supposed to complete the sentence.

“I mean, you can’t put me on there with nothing else,” I said, pointing at the blank whiteboard. “You have to draw Dixie and my mom, and our apartment and school.”

“Earlier, you said you felt alone.”

“I do.” My hands curled up on my knees, my nails pressed into my palms. This office was always hot and small. I shook my head, not knowing how to explain feeling alone but also trapped in the middle of people and places that didn’t let me move or breathe.

Mr. Bergstrom had plain brown eyes, a little bit small for his face, but I could almost always see sympathy in them, like now. “It’s okay, Gem,” he said. “I know it’s hard to put into words.”

I opened my hands and took a breath.

“Do you want to update me on things with your mom?” he asked.

“They’re fine.”

“Fine? Last time we talked you seemed pretty worried about her. And Dixie.”

Sometimes, at our appointments, I’d tell him a lot, and it felt good in the moment, finally saying the things I’d had stuck in my head all that week. But then I’d be in bed those nights, and a smothering kind of panic would settle on me that I’d said too much. Like I’d given away something I needed and couldn’t get back.

“You said not to worry, so I stopped.”

“Well. I think I said it wasn’t your job to worry about your mom, it’s her job to worry about you. But I know it’s not that simple. Especially with Dixie.” He smiled again. “And I know you didn’t just stop worrying, Gem.”

I looked at the clock. “I have to go to detention. My bus was late this morning.”

He nodded. “Okay.” He wheeled his chair back. “We’re not scheduled again until next week, but come say hi anytime.” That’s how he always ended our meetings. Come say hi anytime. I liked knowing I could.

By the time I got home, it was twilight. Detention had made me miss my bus connection, so I’d walked, the chill and damp of Seattle a force I pressed against with every step. It was March, and things would get better and lighter soon, just not yet. Having to walk meant I missed my afternoon cigarette, too, on my bench in my park. The smoking time, which no one but me knew about, was when I didn’t feel the cage or the box or whatever it was. It made space for me and my thoughts. Without it I felt like part of me was left behind, trying to catch up.

The security gate at the front of our apartment building stood ajar despite the signs all over the entryway reminding residents in capital letters to MAKE SURE the gate stayed LOCKED SECURELY because there had been CRIMINAL INCIDENTS. The dark corridor between the gate and our stairwell always scared me, especially when the gate was left open.

I pulled it closed behind me, then checked the lock. Then I checked the lock again and told myself I could stop checking. But halfway down the corridor I went back to check it again. Then, grasping the pepper spray on my key chain, I went up the three flights of stairs—past all the handwriten notes old Mrs. Wu left everywhere about noise, garbage, pets, smoking—and into our apartment.

Dixie was home. She had the TV on and a sandwich in one hand, her phone in the other, homework all over the floor where she sat. She’d changed clothes since I’d seen her at school that morning—from jeans and a hoodie to shorts over tights and a green V-neck T-shirt that showed a lot. I had on baggy jeans and a plain blue sweater that would have hidden everything if there’d been anything to hide. As usual, she looked like the older sister.

She looked up. “I heard you stole money from some freshman today.”

Dixie had ways of knowing nearly everything that happened to me at school.

“Borrowed money,” I clarified.

“Why’d you have to tell them I was your sister?”

“You are my sister.”

“Thanks for embarrassing me.”

“You’re welcome.”

In our bedroom I put my backpack on my pillow with the straps toward the wall. My keys went on top of the cardboard box on its side that I used as a sort of nightstand. My shoes went inside the box, laces hanging out. I hung my jacket on the closet doorknob and put on the thick socks I always wore around our apartment. Whenever Dixie saw me doing this stuff, or checking the gate lock more than twice, she’d tease me and say I had OCD. But Mr. Bergstrom asked me a bunch of questions about it and said I didn’t fit the diagnosis, that it was more like I had a few rituals that helped me feel in control, and they didn’t interfere with my life, and it wasn’t the same thing. “Plus, from what you’ve told me about where you live,” he’d said, “checking the gate lock sounds like plain common sense.”

I confirmed one more thing—that my stash of cigarettes was still under the bed—then went back to the living room. The onion smell of Dixie’s sandwich made me salivate.

“Did you get that from Napoleon?” I asked.

She chewed and stared at me like, Obviously. Napoleon was the older guy who worked at the deli down the block and had a crush on Dixie—like a hundred other guys.

“Can I have some?” The ravioli from lunch seemed forever ago.

“No,” she said, but held it out anyway. I sat on the floor next to her and took a bite. Then another. Roast beef. Avocado. Cheddar cheese. Thin-sliced red onion and a hard sourdough roll. It was perfect, as if all of Napoleon’s craving for Dixie had been slathered onto that sandwich. I swallowed huge pieces of it, half chewed and sharp with mustard.

Dixie watched me eat. “You can finish that if you’ll go down and get the laundry from the dryer.”

“You did laundry? With what money?”

“Money I had.”

“I’m not going down there at night,” I said.

“It’s not night.”

She tried to take the sandwich away from me; I held it out of her reach. “It’s dark, though.”

“I washed some of your clothes, too, Gem. Do you want them to get stolen?” She lunged again for the sandwich.

“O-kay,” I said. I finished it and went the five steps to the kitchenette to throw away the white paper it had been wrapped in.

“Did you see your shrink today?”

“He’s not a shrink. He’s just a school psychologist.” I opened the fridge. There were a few stale corn tortillas, an opened bag of green beans, ketchup, and a white plastic butter dish with maybe a teaspoon of butter left, crumbs stuck all over it. Same as that morning.

“You should get him to send you to a real shrink. Say you need Adderall. You could sell it at school and then you’d have some money.” I’d heard that Dixie helped some seniors sell their prescriptions at school. I didn’t want to know. “I can tell you what symptoms to have,” she said.

“No thanks.”

I imagined going down to the laundry room. The lights could have burned out again. Sometimes there were noises that might be a zipper clanging against the dryer door, or might be rats or a creepy neighbor.

“Let’s go get the laundry together,” I said to Dixie.

She looked up from her homework. “You always do that.”

“What?”

“‘What?’” she repeated, in a bad imitation of my voice. “I already took my shoes off.”

“So did I. Put them back on.”

I went to the bedroom to get mine. When I came out, Dixie stood by the door forcing her flip-flops over her tights.

“You’re going to fall down the stairs and die,” I said as she shuffle-walked to me.

She shrugged.

I knelt to tie my laces. “Where’s Mom?”

“Out.”

“I know. Out where?”

“Work, I guess?”

I straightened up and we faced each other.

“Do you think Napoleon would give me a sandwich?”

She laughed. “Well, you might have to flash your boobs.”

“Is that what you do?”

“No! I’m joking, Gem, obviously. Do you really—” She shook her head. “You never get my jokes.”

It didn’t matter. I knew exactly why Dixie got sandwiches and why I wouldn’t.

Dixie is pretty. No one in our family is beautiful the way movie stars are beautiful, but she’s the type of girl who gets second, third, fourth looks—as many looks as people can get away with before she stares them down. She’s soft in the sense of being curvy, and hard in the sense of not taking any shit. She’s cute—her hair, her clothes, the faces she makes when she’s surprised or mad or thinks something is funny. And intimidating. She exudes a sexuality, but in a way where it’s like it’s for her, not for anyone else. It started in junior high, and by the time she got to high school, people couldn’t spend five minutes with Dixie before they wanted to give her things, feed her, touch her, get her to smile, be her friend, be her boyfriend. She got sandwiches, she got her cell phone bill paid, she got attention when she wanted and deflected it when she didn’t.

Whereas I still hadn’t figured out how to make and keep a friend.

I stared, she stared back. For her it was a game. She thought I was trying to get her to look away first. But really it was me trying to see who I was through Dixie’s eyes, me wondering if she evaluated me and my face and clothes and body, the ways I made it through the world, like I evaluated hers.

Did she look for herself in me, the way I looked for myself in her?

Finally she broke, and laughed. “You’re such a weirdo, Gem,” she said. “You probably scared that freshman with your creepy eyes.”

I didn’t want her to see I couldn’t take a joke, so I bugged my eyes at her to make them even creepier.

“Ew,” she said with an exaggerated shudder. “Let’s go downstairs before the rats come out.”

  Original post: http://ift.tt/2rtqEnb

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2qvq4YB

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Summer Latin Music Festivals Offer Music And Opportunity

This year we mark our annual summer Latin music festival show with an accompanying deeper dive into the reason some of these festivals exist: lack of inclusion on the big summer festival stages.

Listen to the podcast and read how the Latinx community is dealing with representation in the music industry.

There is a growing musical movement underway, fueled by the same spirit of confronting exclusion that launched female-led music festivals like Lilith Fair in the late 1990s, this time focused on and powered by Latinx musicians. As a response to under-representation on major summer music festival stages and the lack of summer gigs in general that include Latinx culture, festivals like NuevoFest in Philadelphia, Afro-Latino Fest in New York City, RuidoFest in Chicago, Viva! Pomona in the Los Angeles area and Los Dells near Madison, Wisconsin have all popped up over the last several years

In June, the Kansas City-based band Making Movies wrapped up its very first run of a travelling collective of bands they call Carnaval. Though not on the massive scale of Lilith Fair, these game-changers feature an invigorating mélange of Latin grooves and Latin fusion.

The members of Making Movies created their annual Carnaval as a Kansas City, Mo. based mini-fest four years ago; this year it featured nine acts and two local youth performances. Along the way they had an idea: If the big, mainstream summer music festivals were not going to hire them or the bands that they invited to K.C., then they would take their music directly to Latin music fans in 21 U.S. cities.

But when Making Movies began the traveling version of Carnaval in Boulder, Colo. in May, there were not a lot of people to witness history in the making.

"When we started the tour, we played to smaller crowds of 100 or more people," says band member Diego Chi. "But by the time we got to Pomona, Calif., three weeks later, 700 folks were singing and dancing their hearts out with us. The celebrating could be heard for blocks outside the venue."

Carnaval actually began as an answer to under-representation in the Kansas City music scene: Making Movies had better luck getting gigs by promoting itself as a rock band without mentioning its brand of Latin fusion. So it set out to change things. What started as a homegrown youth music camp, with invitations to SoCal Latin alternative bands Ozomatli and Las Cafeteras to come teach, soon grew organically into a carnaval, a Latin carnival.

"It became like a jam session of like-minded musicians, then community organizations started to show up" giving the band the idea of mixing music and social activism, says Diego Chi's brother and band mate, Enrique.

Blending "folkloric performances alongside innovative international artists," they enlisted Latin Grammy-winning artists Alex Cuba and Flor de Toloache to join Making Movies and Las Cafeteras on the inaugural tour this year, and added other bands on the road.

For Enrique Chi, 21 cities is just the start.

"For me the big dream is to make it a national tour next year and create music that really fits our spiritual, musical path ... and integrate the tour more effectively with community and social justice organizations."

Social justice and cultural awareness are also at the heart of Brooklyn-based Afro-Latino Fest.

"There wasn't anything that could bring together Afro-Latinos in the community from across nationalities," says Director Amilcar Priestley, whose wife, Mai-Elka Prado Gil, founded the festival in 2013.

Priestly says identity is an essential topic because even within the Latinx community, those who have roots in the African diaspora can feel marginalized.

"There are a lot of people who don't know what Afro-Latino is. People often want to pigeonhole you, and say, 'You are this but you are not that. You are that but you're not this.'"

The first Afro-Latino Fest set up music and vendors by a subway station in 2013 to attract passers-by.

"Many engaged in the event," said founder Prado Gil in the lead-up to this year's festival, held July 13-15 in Brooklyn. "Last year the maximum of 500 people attended the conference and the concerts sold out with 1,300 people. This year we expect 1,500 for the concert, 500 again for the conference, and 800 to 1,000 for our first full film festival."

An awards ceremony included a posthumous award to Afro Brazilian activist and politician Marielle Franco, who was assassinated earlier this year.

"More are coming into their own and identifying as Afro-Latino," says Priestly. "The conversation about Afro-Latinidad has exploded, here in the U.S. especially, and we're at an important time. I think we've been fortunate to be a bit ahead of the curve in the conversation and how it pushes forward."

A short drive down the New Jersey turnpike the same weekend as Afro-Latino Fest, NuevoFest has been moving the needle on inclusion and integration in the City of Brotherly Love. Since its launch six summers ago, the annual Latin music festival has drawn a healthy cross-section of Philadelphians to the one-day free concert.

It was founded by Marángeli Mejía-Rabelland Rahsaan Lucas of AfroTaino Productions in association with NPR member station WXPN's Latin Roots program. The acts have ranged from traditional to alternative Latin music.

According to Mejía-Rabell, "We went from 50 guests in our first year, consisting of mostly locals, to 1,500+ guests throughout the event's duration, and a lot are coming from out of the city: New York, D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia and the outer Pennsylvania burbs."

"Here's what I think is problematic with major festivals," Mejía-Rabell says. "My perception is that sometimes people take the concept of inclusion very lightly; like with a Band-Aid approach. I'm not saying that every time it's malicious, but I think it's taken for granted, like a quota they gotta meet: 'Let me throw in a Latino act. Or let me throw some color in there.'

"This is not something you can fake. With those who [approach] it with a clear intention and respect — mindfully and with integrity — you get to see a different outcome; a different kind of investment."

The lesson for mainstream curators: Develop trust and relevancy with the Latinx concert-goer.

"You have to make an insightful investment in building relationships with content creators, with programmers, with artists and planners to curate experiences" Mejía-Rabell says. "Never compromise the integrity and what needs to happen to meet that criteria [for Latinx audiences]."

It's a lesson that has seemingly been learned and applied in Chicago, where Ruido Fest was developed outside the Latino community. It's a partnership between Chicago-based production company Metronome Chicago, corporate event producers StarEvents, who organize the once-grassroots punk-rock enterprise Riot Fest, along with Eduardo Calvillo, a Latin alternative promoter and the founder of the Chicago radio show Sin Anestesia.

The June festival, now in its fourth year, features top Latin alternative acts and a new focus on developing stronger local talent. Metronome Chicago owner Max Wagner says its debut attracted some 25,000 thousand festival-goers over three days to the heavily Mexican American community of Pilsen. He says the next year drew 30,000 and then 35,000 last year, with a projected increase of 10% for 2018.

"You're smart to work with people who live and breathe that art," says Wagner, who works with Calvillo to curate the line-up.

"Latin Americans are no different than other Americans. They have broad interests in tastes in music and culture. Sometimes they have a connection to Spanish and sometimes they don't .... It's important to have the fan's perspective. We want to be relevant and important and a cultural touchstone for our niche audience," Wagner says. He adds that "a burgeoning local scene should, in the long run, help to create more opportunities for those same artists in mainstream venues."

On the outskirts of Los Angeles, Viva! Pomona, held in August, is becoming a destination for emerging Latinx artists. The bilingual festival was founded by skateboarder Rene Contreras seven years ago in association with local nightclub The Glass House. It began with Contreras' desire to "bring people to the burbs" with punk bands and no budget and quickly blossomed into an international multi-genre Latin music exchange that "graduates" bands into the indie market.

Contreras says he launched it on a cover charge basis. "It started off with 14 local bands in three stages and took over the block in downtown Pomona. Like 400 people showed up." By the second year talent bookers and artists were contacting him. "Some bands offered to come on their own dime with only a guarantee to play – just to have that platform." Since then City Hall has allowed him to use its main stage, and the festival has doubled in size. One turning point he describes seeing is "when the opener would move up on the lineup; like an ecosystem to headline the show."

Contreras curates the show, books the bands, and markets everything. "The biggest challenge is the process," he says. "It's like a triathalon."

Contreras was doing such a good job at curation that two years ago the mega-mainstream summer festival Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival took notice of his upstart festival in Pomona and hired him to help them reach out to Latin musicians. They also decided to create a mini festival in April called Chella featuring four Latin music bands for the local Indio, Calif. community. It drew 4,000 people, "primarily Latino and largely farmworkers ... from grandmothers to kids."

"If done right, Latin music in major festivals is a must and it's important to the U.S. and the world," he says.

The five days of panels, workshops, networking and deal-making attracts thousands of industry people, bands from the U.S. and throughout the Spanish-speaking world as well as international media.

There are also numerous concerts and performances that feature hundreds of Latin alternative artists around Manhattan's clubs and theaters, plus major concerts in Brooklyn in conjunction with summer-long Celebrate Brooklyn concert series and SummerStage in Central Park.

Two years ago, the LAMC, Nacional Records and Cookman's management company came under the umbrella of Industria Works, an artist development partnership. Industria Works General Manager Jennifer Sarkissian, who oversees LAMC now, says it takes time build a presence. She helped put together the first Supersónico festival in Los Angeles a few years ago. "It sold out, so we did it again and it sold out again, so we'll be bringing it back this [fall]. It's exciting to see more Latin-focused fests around the country. And I think LAMC helped pave the way for that."

Sarkissian says she'd also "like to see major festivals featuring more lineups with Anglo and Latin artists side-by-side."

Among major mainstream festivals, South By Southwest (SXSW) is the only festival that has been significantly increasing it's Latin music presence. Thanks to Latinx curator Alicia Zertuche, it kicked off the festival season this year featuring some 200 Latin music artists — its largest booking yet — out of some 2,000 artists overall.

"The audience is there for that," Sarkissian says. "The time is right. That's the world we live in now."

So, until those bigger stages become more diverse, these festivals offer lots of music for long time fans and adventurous new comers as well.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Summer Latin Music Festivals Offer Music And Opportunity

This year we mark our annual summer Latin music festival show with an accompanying deeper dive into the reason some of these festivals exist: lack of inclusion on the big summer festival stages.

Listen to the podcast and read how the Latinx community is dealing with representation in the music industry.

There is a growing musical movement underway, fueled by the same spirit of confronting exclusion that launched female-led music festivals like Lilith Fair in the late 1990s, this time focused on and powered by Latinx musicians. As a response to under-representation on major summer music festival stages and the lack of summer gigs in general that include Latinx culture, festivals like NuevoFest in Philadelphia, Afro-Latino Fest in New York City, RuidoFest in Chicago, Viva! Pomona in the Los Angeles area and Los Dells near Madison, Wisconsin have all popped up over the last several years

In June, the Kansas City-based band Making Movies wrapped up its very first run of a travelling collective of bands they call Carnaval. Though not on the massive scale of Lilith Fair, these game-changers feature an invigorating mélange of Latin grooves and Latin fusion.

The members of Making Movies created their annual Carnaval as a Kansas City, Mo. based mini-fest four years ago; this year it featured nine acts and two local youth performances. Along the way they had an idea: If the big, mainstream summer music festivals were not going to hire them or the bands that they invited to K.C., then they would take their music directly to Latin music fans in 21 U.S. cities.

But when Making Movies began the traveling version of Carnaval in Boulder, Colo. in May, there were not a lot of people to witness history in the making.

"When we started the tour, we played to smaller crowds of 100 or more people," says band member Diego Chi. "But by the time we got to Pomona, Calif., three weeks later, 700 folks were singing and dancing their hearts out with us. The celebrating could be heard for blocks outside the venue."

Carnaval actually began as an answer to under-representation in the Kansas City music scene: Making Movies had better luck getting gigs by promoting itself as a rock band without mentioning its brand of Latin fusion. So it set out to change things. What started as a homegrown youth music camp, with invitations to SoCal Latin alternative bands Ozomatli and Las Cafeteras to come teach, soon grew organically into a carnaval, a Latin carnival.

"It became like a jam session of like-minded musicians, then community organizations started to show up" giving the band the idea of mixing music and social activism, says Diego Chi's brother and band mate, Enrique.

Blending "folkloric performances alongside innovative international artists," they enlisted Latin Grammy-winning artists Alex Cuba and Flor de Toloache to join Making Movies and Las Cafeteras on the inaugural tour this year, and added other bands on the road.

For Enrique Chi, 21 cities is just the start.

"For me the big dream is to make it a national tour next year and create music that really fits our spiritual, musical path ... and integrate the tour more effectively with community and social justice organizations."

Social justice and cultural awareness are also at the heart of Brooklyn-based Afro-Latino Fest.

"There wasn't anything that could bring together Afro-Latinos in the community from across nationalities," says Director Amilcar Priestley, whose wife, Mai-Elka Prado Gil, founded the festival in 2013.

Priestly says identity is an essential topic because even within the Latinx community, those who have roots in the African diaspora can feel marginalized.

"There are a lot of people who don't know what Afro-Latino is. People often want to pigeonhole you, and say, 'You are this but you are not that. You are that but you're not this.'"

The first Afro-Latino Fest set up music and vendors by a subway station in 2013 to attract passers-by.

"Many engaged in the event," said founder Prado Gil in the lead-up to this year's festival, held July 13-15 in Brooklyn. "Last year the maximum of 500 people attended the conference and the concerts sold out with 1,300 people. This year we expect 1,500 for the concert, 500 again for the conference, and 800 to 1,000 for our first full film festival."

An awards ceremony included a posthumous award to Afro Brazilian activist and politician Marielle Franco, who was assassinated earlier this year.

"More are coming into their own and identifying as Afro-Latino," says Priestly. "The conversation about Afro-Latinidad has exploded, here in the U.S. especially, and we're at an important time. I think we've been fortunate to be a bit ahead of the curve in the conversation and how it pushes forward."

A short drive down the New Jersey turnpike the same weekend as Afro-Latino Fest, NuevoFest has been moving the needle on inclusion and integration in the City of Brotherly Love. Since its launch six summers ago, the annual Latin music festival has drawn a healthy cross-section of Philadelphians to the one-day free concert.

It was founded by Marángeli Mejía-Rabelland Rahsaan Lucas of AfroTaino Productions in association with NPR member station WXPN's Latin Roots program. The acts have ranged from traditional to alternative Latin music.

According to Mejía-Rabell, "We went from 50 guests in our first year, consisting of mostly locals, to 1,500+ guests throughout the event's duration, and a lot are coming from out of the city: New York, D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia and the outer Pennsylvania burbs."

"Here's what I think is problematic with major festivals," Mejía-Rabell says. "My perception is that sometimes people take the concept of inclusion very lightly; like with a Band-Aid approach. I'm not saying that every time it's malicious, but I think it's taken for granted, like a quota they gotta meet: 'Let me throw in a Latino act. Or let me throw some color in there.'

"This is not something you can fake. With those who [approach] it with a clear intention and respect — mindfully and with integrity — you get to see a different outcome; a different kind of investment."

The lesson for mainstream curators: Develop trust and relevancy with the Latinx concert-goer.

"You have to make an insightful investment in building relationships with content creators, with programmers, with artists and planners to curate experiences" Mejía-Rabell says. "Never compromise the integrity and what needs to happen to meet that criteria [for Latinx audiences]."

It's a lesson that has seemingly been learned and applied in Chicago, where Ruido Fest was developed outside the Latino community. It's a partnership between Chicago-based production company Metronome Chicago, corporate event producers StarEvents, who organize the once-grassroots punk-rock enterprise Riot Fest, along with Eduardo Calvillo, a Latin alternative promoter and the founder of the Chicago radio show Sin Anestesia.

The June festival, now in its fourth year, features top Latin alternative acts and a new focus on developing stronger local talent. Metronome Chicago owner Max Wagner says its debut attracted some 25,000 thousand festival-goers over three days to the heavily Mexican American community of Pilsen. He says the next year drew 30,000 and then 35,000 last year, with a projected increase of 10% for 2018.

"You're smart to work with people who live and breathe that art," says Wagner, who works with Calvillo to curate the line-up.

"Latin Americans are no different than other Americans. They have broad interests in tastes in music and culture. Sometimes they have a connection to Spanish and sometimes they don't .... It's important to have the fan's perspective. We want to be relevant and important and a cultural touchstone for our niche audience," Wagner says. He adds that "a burgeoning local scene should, in the long run, help to create more opportunities for those same artists in mainstream venues."

On the outskirts of Los Angeles, Viva! Pomona, held in August, is becoming a destination for emerging Latinx artists. The bilingual festival was founded by skateboarder Rene Contreras seven years ago in association with local nightclub The Glass House. It began with Contreras' desire to "bring people to the burbs" with punk bands and no budget and quickly blossomed into an international multi-genre Latin music exchange that "graduates" bands into the indie market.

Contreras says he launched it on a cover charge basis. "It started off with 14 local bands in three stages and took over the block in downtown Pomona. Like 400 people showed up." By the second year talent bookers and artists were contacting him. "Some bands offered to come on their own dime with only a guarantee to play – just to have that platform." Since then City Hall has allowed him to use its main stage, and the festival has doubled in size. One turning point he describes seeing is "when the opener would move up on the lineup; like an ecosystem to headline the show."

Contreras curates the show, books the bands, and markets everything. "The biggest challenge is the process," he says. "It's like a triathalon."

Contreras was doing such a good job at curation that two years ago the mega-mainstream summer festival Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival took notice of his upstart festival in Pomona and hired him to help them reach out to Latin musicians. They also decided to create a mini festival in April called Chella featuring four Latin music bands for the local Indio, Calif. community. It drew 4,000 people, "primarily Latino and largely farmworkers ... from grandmothers to kids."

"If done right, Latin music in major festivals is a must and it's important to the U.S. and the world," he says.

The five days of panels, workshops, networking and deal-making attracts thousands of industry people, bands from the U.S. and throughout the Spanish-speaking world as well as international media.

There are also numerous concerts and performances that feature hundreds of Latin alternative artists around Manhattan's clubs and theaters, plus major concerts in Brooklyn in conjunction with summer-long Celebrate Brooklyn concert series and SummerStage in Central Park.

Two years ago, the LAMC, Nacional Records and Cookman's management company came under the umbrella of Industria Works, an artist development partnership. Industria Works General Manager Jennifer Sarkissian, who oversees LAMC now, says it takes time build a presence. She helped put together the first Supersónico festival in Los Angeles a few years ago. "It sold out, so we did it again and it sold out again, so we'll be bringing it back this [fall]. It's exciting to see more Latin-focused fests around the country. And I think LAMC helped pave the way for that."

Sarkissian says she'd also "like to see major festivals featuring more lineups with Anglo and Latin artists side-by-side."

Among major mainstream festivals, South By Southwest (SXSW) is the only festival that has been significantly increasing it's Latin music presence. Thanks to Latinx curator Alicia Zertuche, it kicked off the festival season this year featuring some 200 Latin music artists — its largest booking yet — out of some 2,000 artists overall.

"The audience is there for that," Sarkissian says. "The time is right. That's the world we live in now."

So, until those bigger stages become more diverse, these festivals offer lots of music for long time fans and adventurous new comers as well.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Summer Latin Music Festivals Offer Music And Opportunity

This year we mark our annual summer Latin music festival show with an accompanying deeper dive into the reason some of these festivals exist: lack of inclusion on the big summer festival stages.

Listen to the podcast and read how the Latinx community is dealing with representation in the music industry.

There is a growing musical movement underway, fueled by the same spirit of confronting exclusion that launched female-led music festivals like Lilith Fair in the late 1990s, this time focused on and powered by Latinx musicians. As a response to under-representation on major summer music festival stages and the lack of summer gigs in general that include Latinx culture, festivals like NuevoFest in Philadelphia, Afro-Latino Fest in New York City, RuidoFest in Chicago, Viva! Pomona in the Los Angeles area and Los Dells near Madison, Wisconsin have all popped up over the last several years

In June, the Kansas City-based band Making Movies wrapped up its very first run of a travelling collective of bands they call Carnaval. Though not on the massive scale of Lilith Fair, these game-changers feature an invigorating mélange of Latin grooves and Latin fusion.

The members of Making Movies created their annual Carnaval as a Kansas City, Mo. based mini-fest four years ago; this year it featured nine acts and two local youth performances. Along the way they had an idea: If the big, mainstream summer music festivals were not going to hire them or the bands that they invited to K.C., then they would take their music directly to Latin music fans in 21 U.S. cities.

But when Making Movies began the traveling version of Carnaval in Boulder, Colo. in May, there were not a lot of people to witness history in the making.

"When we started the tour, we played to smaller crowds of 100 or more people," says band member Diego Chi. "But by the time we got to Pomona, Calif., three weeks later, 700 folks were singing and dancing their hearts out with us. The celebrating could be heard for blocks outside the venue."

Carnaval actually began as an answer to under-representation in the Kansas City music scene: Making Movies had better luck getting gigs by promoting itself as a rock band without mentioning its brand of Latin fusion. So it set out to change things. What started as a homegrown youth music camp, with invitations to SoCal Latin alternative bands Ozomatli and Las Cafeteras to come teach, soon grew organically into a carnaval, a Latin carnival.

"It became like a jam session of like-minded musicians, then community organizations started to show up" giving the band the idea of mixing music and social activism, says Diego Chi's brother and band mate, Enrique.

Blending "folkloric performances alongside innovative international artists," they enlisted Latin Grammy-winning artists Alex Cuba and Flor de Toloache to join Making Movies and Las Cafeteras on the inaugural tour this year, and added other bands on the road.

For Enrique Chi, 21 cities is just the start.

"For me the big dream is to make it a national tour next year and create music that really fits our spiritual, musical path ... and integrate the tour more effectively with community and social justice organizations."

Social justice and cultural awareness are also at the heart of Brooklyn-based Afro-Latino Fest.

"There wasn't anything that could bring together Afro-Latinos in the community from across nationalities," says Director Amilcar Priestley, whose wife, Mai-Elka Prado Gil, founded the festival in 2013.

Priestly says identity is an essential topic because even within the Latinx community, those who have roots in the African diaspora can feel marginalized.

"There are a lot of people who don't know what Afro-Latino is. People often want to pigeonhole you, and say, 'You are this but you are not that. You are that but you're not this.'"

The first Afro-Latino Fest set up music and vendors by a subway station in 2013 to attract passers-by.

"Many engaged in the event," said founder Prado Gil in the lead-up to this year's festival, held July 13-15 in Brooklyn. "Last year the maximum of 500 people attended the conference and the concerts sold out with 1,300 people. This year we expect 1,500 for the concert, 500 again for the conference, and 800 to 1,000 for our first full film festival."

An awards ceremony included a posthumous award to Afro Brazilian activist and politician Marielle Franco, who was assassinated earlier this year.

"More are coming into their own and identifying as Afro-Latino," says Priestly. "The conversation about Afro-Latinidad has exploded, here in the U.S. especially, and we're at an important time. I think we've been fortunate to be a bit ahead of the curve in the conversation and how it pushes forward."

A short drive down the New Jersey turnpike the same weekend as Afro-Latino Fest, NuevoFest has been moving the needle on inclusion and integration in the City of Brotherly Love. Since its launch six summers ago, the annual Latin music festival has drawn a healthy cross-section of Philadelphians to the one-day free concert.

It was founded by Marángeli Mejía-Rabelland Rahsaan Lucas of AfroTaino Productions in association with NPR member station WXPN's Latin Roots program. The acts have ranged from traditional to alternative Latin music.

According to Mejía-Rabell, "We went from 50 guests in our first year, consisting of mostly locals, to 1,500+ guests throughout the event's duration, and a lot are coming from out of the city: New York, D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia and the outer Pennsylvania burbs."

"Here's what I think is problematic with major festivals," Mejía-Rabell says. "My perception is that sometimes people take the concept of inclusion very lightly; like with a Band-Aid approach. I'm not saying that every time it's malicious, but I think it's taken for granted, like a quota they gotta meet: 'Let me throw in a Latino act. Or let me throw some color in there.'

"This is not something you can fake. With those who [approach] it with a clear intention and respect — mindfully and with integrity — you get to see a different outcome; a different kind of investment."

The lesson for mainstream curators: Develop trust and relevancy with the Latinx concert-goer.

"You have to make an insightful investment in building relationships with content creators, with programmers, with artists and planners to curate experiences" Mejía-Rabell says. "Never compromise the integrity and what needs to happen to meet that criteria [for Latinx audiences]."

It's a lesson that has seemingly been learned and applied in Chicago, where Ruido Fest was developed outside the Latino community. It's a partnership between Chicago-based production company Metronome Chicago, corporate event producers StarEvents, who organize the once-grassroots punk-rock enterprise Riot Fest, along with Eduardo Calvillo, a Latin alternative promoter and the founder of the Chicago radio show Sin Anestesia.

The June festival, now in its fourth year, features top Latin alternative acts and a new focus on developing stronger local talent. Metronome Chicago owner Max Wagner says its debut attracted some 25,000 thousand festival-goers over three days to the heavily Mexican American community of Pilsen. He says the next year drew 30,000 and then 35,000 last year, with a projected increase of 10% for 2018.

"You're smart to work with people who live and breathe that art," says Wagner, who works with Calvillo to curate the line-up.

"Latin Americans are no different than other Americans. They have broad interests in tastes in music and culture. Sometimes they have a connection to Spanish and sometimes they don't .... It's important to have the fan's perspective. We want to be relevant and important and a cultural touchstone for our niche audience," Wagner says. He adds that "a burgeoning local scene should, in the long run, help to create more opportunities for those same artists in mainstream venues."

On the outskirts of Los Angeles, Viva! Pomona, held in August, is becoming a destination for emerging Latinx artists. The bilingual festival was founded by skateboarder Rene Contreras seven years ago in association with local nightclub The Glass House. It began with Contreras' desire to "bring people to the burbs" with punk bands and no budget and quickly blossomed into an international multi-genre Latin music exchange that "graduates" bands into the indie market.

Contreras says he launched it on a cover charge basis. "It started off with 14 local bands in three stages and took over the block in downtown Pomona. Like 400 people showed up." By the second year talent bookers and artists were contacting him. "Some bands offered to come on their own dime with only a guarantee to play – just to have that platform." Since then City Hall has allowed him to use its main stage, and the festival has doubled in size. One turning point he describes seeing is "when the opener would move up on the lineup; like an ecosystem to headline the show."

Contreras curates the show, books the bands, and markets everything. "The biggest challenge is the process," he says. "It's like a triathalon."

Contreras was doing such a good job at curation that two years ago the mega-mainstream summer festival Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival took notice of his upstart festival in Pomona and hired him to help them reach out to Latin musicians. They also decided to create a mini festival in April called Chella featuring four Latin music bands for the local Indio, Calif. community. It drew 4,000 people, "primarily Latino and largely farmworkers ... from grandmothers to kids."

"If done right, Latin music in major festivals is a must and it's important to the U.S. and the world," he says.

The five days of panels, workshops, networking and deal-making attracts thousands of industry people, bands from the U.S. and throughout the Spanish-speaking world as well as international media.

There are also numerous concerts and performances that feature hundreds of Latin alternative artists around Manhattan's clubs and theaters, plus major concerts in Brooklyn in conjunction with summer-long Celebrate Brooklyn concert series and SummerStage in Central Park.

Two years ago, the LAMC, Nacional Records and Cookman's management company came under the umbrella of Industria Works, an artist development partnership. Industria Works General Manager Jennifer Sarkissian, who oversees LAMC now, says it takes time build a presence. She helped put together the first Supersónico festival in Los Angeles a few years ago. "It sold out, so we did it again and it sold out again, so we'll be bringing it back this [fall]. It's exciting to see more Latin-focused fests around the country. And I think LAMC helped pave the way for that."

Sarkissian says she'd also "like to see major festivals featuring more lineups with Anglo and Latin artists side-by-side."

Among major mainstream festivals, South By Southwest (SXSW) is the only festival that has been significantly increasing it's Latin music presence. Thanks to Latinx curator Alicia Zertuche, it kicked off the festival season this year featuring some 200 Latin music artists — its largest booking yet — out of some 2,000 artists overall.

"The audience is there for that," Sarkissian says. "The time is right. That's the world we live in now."

So, until those bigger stages become more diverse, these festivals offer lots of music for long time fans and adventurous new comers as well.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Summer Latin Music Festivals Offer Music And Opportunity

This year we mark our annual summer Latin music festival show with an accompanying deeper dive into the reason some of these festivals exist: lack of inclusion on the big summer festival stages.

Listen to the podcast and read how the Latinx community is dealing with representation in the music industry.

There is a growing musical movement underway, fueled by the same spirit of confronting exclusion that launched female-led music festivals like Lilith Fair in the late 1990s, this time focused on and powered by Latinx musicians. As a response to under-representation on major summer music festival stages and the lack of summer gigs in general that include Latinx culture, festivals like NuevoFest in Philadelphia, Afro-Latino Fest in New York City, RuidoFest in Chicago, Viva! Pomona in the Los Angeles area and Los Dells near Madison, Wisconsin have all popped up over the last several years

In June, the Kansas City-based band Making Movies wrapped up its very first run of a travelling collective of bands they call Carnaval. Though not on the massive scale of Lilith Fair, these game-changers feature an invigorating mélange of Latin grooves and Latin fusion.

The members of Making Movies created their annual Carnaval as a Kansas City, Mo. based mini-fest four years ago; this year it featured nine acts and two local youth performances. Along the way they had an idea: If the big, mainstream summer music festivals were not going to hire them or the bands that they invited to K.C., then they would take their music directly to Latin music fans in 21 U.S. cities.

But when Making Movies began the traveling version of Carnaval in Boulder, Colo. in May, there were not a lot of people to witness history in the making.

"When we started the tour, we played to smaller crowds of 100 or more people," says band member Diego Chi. "But by the time we got to Pomona, Calif., three weeks later, 700 folks were singing and dancing their hearts out with us. The celebrating could be heard for blocks outside the venue."

Carnaval actually began as an answer to under-representation in the Kansas City music scene: Making Movies had better luck getting gigs by promoting itself as a rock band without mentioning its brand of Latin fusion. So it set out to change things. What started as a homegrown youth music camp, with invitations to SoCal Latin alternative bands Ozomatli and Las Cafeteras to come teach, soon grew organically into a carnaval, a Latin carnival.

"It became like a jam session of like-minded musicians, then community organizations started to show up" giving the band the idea of mixing music and social activism, says Diego Chi's brother and band mate, Enrique.

Blending "folkloric performances alongside innovative international artists," they enlisted Latin Grammy-winning artists Alex Cuba and Flor de Toloache to join Making Movies and Las Cafeteras on the inaugural tour this year, and added other bands on the road.

For Enrique Chi, 21 cities is just the start.

"For me the big dream is to make it a national tour next year and create music that really fits our spiritual, musical path ... and integrate the tour more effectively with community and social justice organizations."

Social justice and cultural awareness are also at the heart of Brooklyn-based Afro-Latino Fest.

"There wasn't anything that could bring together Afro-Latinos in the community from across nationalities," says Director Amilcar Priestley, whose wife, Mai-Elka Prado Gil, founded the festival in 2013.

Priestly says identity is an essential topic because even within the Latinx community, those who have roots in the African diaspora can feel marginalized.

"There are a lot of people who don't know what Afro-Latino is. People often want to pigeonhole you, and say, 'You are this but you are not that. You are that but you're not this.'"

The first Afro-Latino Fest set up music and vendors by a subway station in 2013 to attract passers-by.

"Many engaged in the event," said founder Prado Gil in the lead-up to this year's festival, held July 13-15 in Brooklyn. "Last year the maximum of 500 people attended the conference and the concerts sold out with 1,300 people. This year we expect 1,500 for the concert, 500 again for the conference, and 800 to 1,000 for our first full film festival."

An awards ceremony included a posthumous award to Afro Brazilian activist and politician Marielle Franco, who was assassinated earlier this year.

"More are coming into their own and identifying as Afro-Latino," says Priestly. "The conversation about Afro-Latinidad has exploded, here in the U.S. especially, and we're at an important time. I think we've been fortunate to be a bit ahead of the curve in the conversation and how it pushes forward."

A short drive down the New Jersey turnpike the same weekend as Afro-Latino Fest, NuevoFest has been moving the needle on inclusion and integration in the City of Brotherly Love. Since its launch six summers ago, the annual Latin music festival has drawn a healthy cross-section of Philadelphians to the one-day free concert.

It was founded by Marángeli Mejía-Rabelland Rahsaan Lucas of AfroTaino Productions in association with NPR member station WXPN's Latin Roots program. The acts have ranged from traditional to alternative Latin music.

According to Mejía-Rabell, "We went from 50 guests in our first year, consisting of mostly locals, to 1,500+ guests throughout the event's duration, and a lot are coming from out of the city: New York, D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia and the outer Pennsylvania burbs."

"Here's what I think is problematic with major festivals," Mejía-Rabell says. "My perception is that sometimes people take the concept of inclusion very lightly; like with a Band-Aid approach. I'm not saying that every time it's malicious, but I think it's taken for granted, like a quota they gotta meet: 'Let me throw in a Latino act. Or let me throw some color in there.'

"This is not something you can fake. With those who [approach] it with a clear intention and respect — mindfully and with integrity — you get to see a different outcome; a different kind of investment."

The lesson for mainstream curators: Develop trust and relevancy with the Latinx concert-goer.

"You have to make an insightful investment in building relationships with content creators, with programmers, with artists and planners to curate experiences" Mejía-Rabell says. "Never compromise the integrity and what needs to happen to meet that criteria [for Latinx audiences]."

It's a lesson that has seemingly been learned and applied in Chicago, where Ruido Fest was developed outside the Latino community. It's a partnership between Chicago-based production company Metronome Chicago, corporate event producers StarEvents, who organize the once-grassroots punk-rock enterprise Riot Fest, along with Eduardo Calvillo, a Latin alternative promoter and the founder of the Chicago radio show Sin Anestesia.

The June festival, now in its fourth year, features top Latin alternative acts and a new focus on developing stronger local talent. Metronome Chicago owner Max Wagner says its debut attracted some 25,000 thousand festival-goers over three days to the heavily Mexican American community of Pilsen. He says the next year drew 30,000 and then 35,000 last year, with a projected increase of 10% for 2018.

"You're smart to work with people who live and breathe that art," says Wagner, who works with Calvillo to curate the line-up.

"Latin Americans are no different than other Americans. They have broad interests in tastes in music and culture. Sometimes they have a connection to Spanish and sometimes they don't .... It's important to have the fan's perspective. We want to be relevant and important and a cultural touchstone for our niche audience," Wagner says. He adds that "a burgeoning local scene should, in the long run, help to create more opportunities for those same artists in mainstream venues."

On the outskirts of Los Angeles, Viva! Pomona, held in August, is becoming a destination for emerging Latinx artists. The bilingual festival was founded by skateboarder Rene Contreras seven years ago in association with local nightclub The Glass House. It began with Contreras' desire to "bring people to the burbs" with punk bands and no budget and quickly blossomed into an international multi-genre Latin music exchange that "graduates" bands into the indie market.

Contreras says he launched it on a cover charge basis. "It started off with 14 local bands in three stages and took over the block in downtown Pomona. Like 400 people showed up." By the second year talent bookers and artists were contacting him. "Some bands offered to come on their own dime with only a guarantee to play – just to have that platform." Since then City Hall has allowed him to use its main stage, and the festival has doubled in size. One turning point he describes seeing is "when the opener would move up on the lineup; like an ecosystem to headline the show."

Contreras curates the show, books the bands, and markets everything. "The biggest challenge is the process," he says. "It's like a triathalon."

Contreras was doing such a good job at curation that two years ago the mega-mainstream summer festival Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival took notice of his upstart festival in Pomona and hired him to help them reach out to Latin musicians. They also decided to create a mini festival in April called Chella featuring four Latin music bands for the local Indio, Calif. community. It drew 4,000 people, "primarily Latino and largely farmworkers ... from grandmothers to kids."

"If done right, Latin music in major festivals is a must and it's important to the U.S. and the world," he says.

The five days of panels, workshops, networking and deal-making attracts thousands of industry people, bands from the U.S. and throughout the Spanish-speaking world as well as international media.

There are also numerous concerts and performances that feature hundreds of Latin alternative artists around Manhattan's clubs and theaters, plus major concerts in Brooklyn in conjunction with summer-long Celebrate Brooklyn concert series and SummerStage in Central Park.

Two years ago, the LAMC, Nacional Records and Cookman's management company came under the umbrella of Industria Works, an artist development partnership. Industria Works General Manager Jennifer Sarkissian, who oversees LAMC now, says it takes time build a presence. She helped put together the first Supersónico festival in Los Angeles a few years ago. "It sold out, so we did it again and it sold out again, so we'll be bringing it back this [fall]. It's exciting to see more Latin-focused fests around the country. And I think LAMC helped pave the way for that."

Sarkissian says she'd also "like to see major festivals featuring more lineups with Anglo and Latin artists side-by-side."

Among major mainstream festivals, South By Southwest (SXSW) is the only festival that has been significantly increasing it's Latin music presence. Thanks to Latinx curator Alicia Zertuche, it kicked off the festival season this year featuring some 200 Latin music artists — its largest booking yet — out of some 2,000 artists overall.

"The audience is there for that," Sarkissian says. "The time is right. That's the world we live in now."

So, until those bigger stages become more diverse, these festivals offer lots of music for long time fans and adventurous new comers as well.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Summer Latin Music Festivals Offer Music And Opportunity

This year we mark our annual summer Latin music festival show with an accompanying deeper dive into the reason some of these festivals exist: lack of inclusion on the big summer festival stages.

Listen to the podcast and read how the Latinx community is dealing with representation in the music industry.

There is a growing musical movement underway, fueled by the same spirit of confronting exclusion that launched female-led music festivals like Lilith Fair in the late 1990s, this time focused on and powered by Latinx musicians. As a response to under-representation on major summer music festival stages and the lack of summer gigs in general that include Latinx culture, festivals like NuevoFest in Philadelphia, Afro-Latino Fest in New York City, RuidoFest in Chicago, Viva! Pomona in the Los Angeles area and Los Dells near Madison, Wisconsin have all popped up over the last several years

In June, the Kansas City-based band Making Movies wrapped up its very first run of a travelling collective of bands they call Carnaval. Though not on the massive scale of Lilith Fair, these game-changers feature an invigorating mélange of Latin grooves and Latin fusion.

The members of Making Movies created their annual Carnaval as a Kansas City, Mo. based mini-fest four years ago; this year it featured nine acts and two local youth performances. Along the way they had an idea: If the big, mainstream summer music festivals were not going to hire them or the bands that they invited to K.C., then they would take their music directly to Latin music fans in 21 U.S. cities.

But when Making Movies began the traveling version of Carnaval in Boulder, Colo. in May, there were not a lot of people to witness history in the making.

"When we started the tour, we played to smaller crowds of 100 or more people," says band member Diego Chi. "But by the time we got to Pomona, Calif., three weeks later, 700 folks were singing and dancing their hearts out with us. The celebrating could be heard for blocks outside the venue."

Carnaval actually began as an answer to under-representation in the Kansas City music scene: Making Movies had better luck getting gigs by promoting itself as a rock band without mentioning its brand of Latin fusion. So it set out to change things. What started as a homegrown youth music camp, with invitations to SoCal Latin alternative bands Ozomatli and Las Cafeteras to come teach, soon grew organically into a carnaval, a Latin carnival.

"It became like a jam session of like-minded musicians, then community organizations started to show up" giving the band the idea of mixing music and social activism, says Diego Chi's brother and band mate, Enrique.

Blending "folkloric performances alongside innovative international artists," they enlisted Latin Grammy-winning artists Alex Cuba and Flor de Toloache to join Making Movies and Las Cafeteras on the inaugural tour this year, and added other bands on the road.

For Enrique Chi, 21 cities is just the start.

"For me the big dream is to make it a national tour next year and create music that really fits our spiritual, musical path ... and integrate the tour more effectively with community and social justice organizations."

Social justice and cultural awareness are also at the heart of Brooklyn-based Afro-Latino Fest.

"There wasn't anything that could bring together Afro-Latinos in the community from across nationalities," says Director Amilcar Priestley, whose wife, Mai-Elka Prado Gil, founded the festival in 2013.

Priestly says identity is an essential topic because even within the Latinx community, those who have roots in the African diaspora can feel marginalized.

"There are a lot of people who don't know what Afro-Latino is. People often want to pigeonhole you, and say, 'You are this but you are not that. You are that but you're not this.'"

The first Afro-Latino Fest set up music and vendors by a subway station in 2013 to attract passers-by.

"Many engaged in the event," said founder Prado Gil in the lead-up to this year's festival, held July 13-15 in Brooklyn. "Last year the maximum of 500 people attended the conference and the concerts sold out with 1,300 people. This year we expect 1,500 for the concert, 500 again for the conference, and 800 to 1,000 for our first full film festival."

An awards ceremony included a posthumous award to Afro Brazilian activist and politician Marielle Franco, who was assassinated earlier this year.

"More are coming into their own and identifying as Afro-Latino," says Priestly. "The conversation about Afro-Latinidad has exploded, here in the U.S. especially, and we're at an important time. I think we've been fortunate to be a bit ahead of the curve in the conversation and how it pushes forward."

A short drive down the New Jersey turnpike the same weekend as Afro-Latino Fest, NuevoFest has been moving the needle on inclusion and integration in the City of Brotherly Love. Since its launch six summers ago, the annual Latin music festival has drawn a healthy cross-section of Philadelphians to the one-day free concert.

It was founded by Marángeli Mejía-Rabelland Rahsaan Lucas of AfroTaino Productions in association with NPR member station WXPN's Latin Roots program. The acts have ranged from traditional to alternative Latin music.

According to Mejía-Rabell, "We went from 50 guests in our first year, consisting of mostly locals, to 1,500+ guests throughout the event's duration, and a lot are coming from out of the city: New York, D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia and the outer Pennsylvania burbs."

"Here's what I think is problematic with major festivals," Mejía-Rabell says. "My perception is that sometimes people take the concept of inclusion very lightly; like with a Band-Aid approach. I'm not saying that every time it's malicious, but I think it's taken for granted, like a quota they gotta meet: 'Let me throw in a Latino act. Or let me throw some color in there.'

"This is not something you can fake. With those who [approach] it with a clear intention and respect — mindfully and with integrity — you get to see a different outcome; a different kind of investment."

The lesson for mainstream curators: Develop trust and relevancy with the Latinx concert-goer.

"You have to make an insightful investment in building relationships with content creators, with programmers, with artists and planners to curate experiences" Mejía-Rabell says. "Never compromise the integrity and what needs to happen to meet that criteria [for Latinx audiences]."

It's a lesson that has seemingly been learned and applied in Chicago, where Ruido Fest was developed outside the Latino community. It's a partnership between Chicago-based production company Metronome Chicago, corporate event producers StarEvents, who organize the once-grassroots punk-rock enterprise Riot Fest, along with Eduardo Calvillo, a Latin alternative promoter and the founder of the Chicago radio show Sin Anestesia.

The June festival, now in its fourth year, features top Latin alternative acts and a new focus on developing stronger local talent. Metronome Chicago owner Max Wagner says its debut attracted some 25,000 thousand festival-goers over three days to the heavily Mexican American community of Pilsen. He says the next year drew 30,000 and then 35,000 last year, with a projected increase of 10% for 2018.

"You're smart to work with people who live and breathe that art," says Wagner, who works with Calvillo to curate the line-up.

"Latin Americans are no different than other Americans. They have broad interests in tastes in music and culture. Sometimes they have a connection to Spanish and sometimes they don't .... It's important to have the fan's perspective. We want to be relevant and important and a cultural touchstone for our niche audience," Wagner says. He adds that "a burgeoning local scene should, in the long run, help to create more opportunities for those same artists in mainstream venues."

On the outskirts of Los Angeles, Viva! Pomona, held in August, is becoming a destination for emerging Latinx artists. The bilingual festival was founded by skateboarder Rene Contreras seven years ago in association with local nightclub The Glass House. It began with Contreras' desire to "bring people to the burbs" with punk bands and no budget and quickly blossomed into an international multi-genre Latin music exchange that "graduates" bands into the indie market.

Contreras says he launched it on a cover charge basis. "It started off with 14 local bands in three stages and took over the block in downtown Pomona. Like 400 people showed up." By the second year talent bookers and artists were contacting him. "Some bands offered to come on their own dime with only a guarantee to play – just to have that platform." Since then City Hall has allowed him to use its main stage, and the festival has doubled in size. One turning point he describes seeing is "when the opener would move up on the lineup; like an ecosystem to headline the show."

Contreras curates the show, books the bands, and markets everything. "The biggest challenge is the process," he says. "It's like a triathalon."

Contreras was doing such a good job at curation that two years ago the mega-mainstream summer festival Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival took notice of his upstart festival in Pomona and hired him to help them reach out to Latin musicians. They also decided to create a mini festival in April called Chella featuring four Latin music bands for the local Indio, Calif. community. It drew 4,000 people, "primarily Latino and largely farmworkers ... from grandmothers to kids."

"If done right, Latin music in major festivals is a must and it's important to the U.S. and the world," he says.

The five days of panels, workshops, networking and deal-making attracts thousands of industry people, bands from the U.S. and throughout the Spanish-speaking world as well as international media.

There are also numerous concerts and performances that feature hundreds of Latin alternative artists around Manhattan's clubs and theaters, plus major concerts in Brooklyn in conjunction with summer-long Celebrate Brooklyn concert series and SummerStage in Central Park.

Two years ago, the LAMC, Nacional Records and Cookman's management company came under the umbrella of Industria Works, an artist development partnership. Industria Works General Manager Jennifer Sarkissian, who oversees LAMC now, says it takes time build a presence. She helped put together the first Supersónico festival in Los Angeles a few years ago. "It sold out, so we did it again and it sold out again, so we'll be bringing it back this [fall]. It's exciting to see more Latin-focused fests around the country. And I think LAMC helped pave the way for that."

Sarkissian says she'd also "like to see major festivals featuring more lineups with Anglo and Latin artists side-by-side."

Among major mainstream festivals, South By Southwest (SXSW) is the only festival that has been significantly increasing it's Latin music presence. Thanks to Latinx curator Alicia Zertuche, it kicked off the festival season this year featuring some 200 Latin music artists — its largest booking yet — out of some 2,000 artists overall.

"The audience is there for that," Sarkissian says. "The time is right. That's the world we live in now."

So, until those bigger stages become more diverse, these festivals offer lots of music for long time fans and adventurous new comers as well.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Summer Latin Music Festivals Offer Music And Opportunity

This year we mark our annual summer Latin music festival show with an accompanying deeper dive into the reason some of these festivals exist: lack of inclusion on the big summer festival stages.

Listen to the podcast and read how the Latinx community is dealing with representation in the music industry.

There is a growing musical movement underway, fueled by the same spirit of confronting exclusion that launched female-led music festivals like Lilith Fair in the late 1990s, this time focused on and powered by Latinx musicians. As a response to under-representation on major summer music festival stages and the lack of summer gigs in general that include Latinx culture, festivals like NuevoFest in Philadelphia, Afro-Latino Fest in New York City, RuidoFest in Chicago, Viva! Pomona in the Los Angeles area and Los Dells near Madison, Wisconsin have all popped up over the last several years

In June, the Kansas City-based band Making Movies wrapped up its very first run of a travelling collective of bands they call Carnaval. Though not on the massive scale of Lilith Fair, these game-changers feature an invigorating mélange of Latin grooves and Latin fusion.

The members of Making Movies created their annual Carnaval as a Kansas City, Mo. based mini-fest four years ago; this year it featured nine acts and two local youth performances. Along the way they had an idea: If the big, mainstream summer music festivals were not going to hire them or the bands that they invited to K.C., then they would take their music directly to Latin music fans in 21 U.S. cities.

But when Making Movies began the traveling version of Carnaval in Boulder, Colo. in May, there were not a lot of people to witness history in the making.

"When we started the tour, we played to smaller crowds of 100 or more people," says band member Diego Chi. "But by the time we got to Pomona, Calif., three weeks later, 700 folks were singing and dancing their hearts out with us. The celebrating could be heard for blocks outside the venue."

Carnaval actually began as an answer to under-representation in the Kansas City music scene: Making Movies had better luck getting gigs by promoting itself as a rock band without mentioning its brand of Latin fusion. So it set out to change things. What started as a homegrown youth music camp, with invitations to SoCal Latin alternative bands Ozomatli and Las Cafeteras to come teach, soon grew organically into a carnaval, a Latin carnival.

"It became like a jam session of like-minded musicians, then community organizations started to show up" giving the band the idea of mixing music and social activism, says Diego Chi's brother and band mate, Enrique.

Blending "folkloric performances alongside innovative international artists," they enlisted Latin Grammy-winning artists Alex Cuba and Flor de Toloache to join Making Movies and Las Cafeteras on the inaugural tour this year, and added other bands on the road.

For Enrique Chi, 21 cities is just the start.

"For me the big dream is to make it a national tour next year and create music that really fits our spiritual, musical path ... and integrate the tour more effectively with community and social justice organizations."

Social justice and cultural awareness are also at the heart of Brooklyn-based Afro-Latino Fest.

"There wasn't anything that could bring together Afro-Latinos in the community from across nationalities," says Director Amilcar Priestley, whose wife, Mai-Elka Prado Gil, founded the festival in 2013.

Priestly says identity is an essential topic because even within the Latinx community, those who have roots in the African diaspora can feel marginalized.

"There are a lot of people who don't know what Afro-Latino is. People often want to pigeonhole you, and say, 'You are this but you are not that. You are that but you're not this.'"

The first Afro-Latino Fest set up music and vendors by a subway station in 2013 to attract passers-by.

"Many engaged in the event," said founder Prado Gil in the lead-up to this year's festival, held July 13-15 in Brooklyn. "Last year the maximum of 500 people attended the conference and the concerts sold out with 1,300 people. This year we expect 1,500 for the concert, 500 again for the conference, and 800 to 1,000 for our first full film festival."

An awards ceremony included a posthumous award to Afro Brazilian activist and politician Marielle Franco, who was assassinated earlier this year.

"More are coming into their own and identifying as Afro-Latino," says Priestly. "The conversation about Afro-Latinidad has exploded, here in the U.S. especially, and we're at an important time. I think we've been fortunate to be a bit ahead of the curve in the conversation and how it pushes forward."

A short drive down the New Jersey turnpike the same weekend as Afro-Latino Fest, NuevoFest has been moving the needle on inclusion and integration in the City of Brotherly Love. Since its launch six summers ago, the annual Latin music festival has drawn a healthy cross-section of Philadelphians to the one-day free concert.

It was founded by Marángeli Mejía-Rabelland Rahsaan Lucas of AfroTaino Productions in association with NPR member station WXPN's Latin Roots program. The acts have ranged from traditional to alternative Latin music.

According to Mejía-Rabell, "We went from 50 guests in our first year, consisting of mostly locals, to 1,500+ guests throughout the event's duration, and a lot are coming from out of the city: New York, D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia and the outer Pennsylvania burbs."

"Here's what I think is problematic with major festivals," Mejía-Rabell says. "My perception is that sometimes people take the concept of inclusion very lightly; like with a Band-Aid approach. I'm not saying that every time it's malicious, but I think it's taken for granted, like a quota they gotta meet: 'Let me throw in a Latino act. Or let me throw some color in there.'

"This is not something you can fake. With those who [approach] it with a clear intention and respect — mindfully and with integrity — you get to see a different outcome; a different kind of investment."

The lesson for mainstream curators: Develop trust and relevancy with the Latinx concert-goer.

"You have to make an insightful investment in building relationships with content creators, with programmers, with artists and planners to curate experiences" Mejía-Rabell says. "Never compromise the integrity and what needs to happen to meet that criteria [for Latinx audiences]."

It's a lesson that has seemingly been learned and applied in Chicago, where Ruido Fest was developed outside the Latino community. It's a partnership between Chicago-based production company Metronome Chicago, corporate event producers StarEvents, who organize the once-grassroots punk-rock enterprise Riot Fest, along with Eduardo Calvillo, a Latin alternative promoter and the founder of the Chicago radio show Sin Anestesia.

The June festival, now in its fourth year, features top Latin alternative acts and a new focus on developing stronger local talent. Metronome Chicago owner Max Wagner says its debut attracted some 25,000 thousand festival-goers over three days to the heavily Mexican American community of Pilsen. He says the next year drew 30,000 and then 35,000 last year, with a projected increase of 10% for 2018.

"You're smart to work with people who live and breathe that art," says Wagner, who works with Calvillo to curate the line-up.

"Latin Americans are no different than other Americans. They have broad interests in tastes in music and culture. Sometimes they have a connection to Spanish and sometimes they don't .... It's important to have the fan's perspective. We want to be relevant and important and a cultural touchstone for our niche audience," Wagner says. He adds that "a burgeoning local scene should, in the long run, help to create more opportunities for those same artists in mainstream venues."

On the outskirts of Los Angeles, Viva! Pomona, held in August, is becoming a destination for emerging Latinx artists. The bilingual festival was founded by skateboarder Rene Contreras seven years ago in association with local nightclub The Glass House. It began with Contreras' desire to "bring people to the burbs" with punk bands and no budget and quickly blossomed into an international multi-genre Latin music exchange that "graduates" bands into the indie market.

Contreras says he launched it on a cover charge basis. "It started off with 14 local bands in three stages and took over the block in downtown Pomona. Like 400 people showed up." By the second year talent bookers and artists were contacting him. "Some bands offered to come on their own dime with only a guarantee to play – just to have that platform." Since then City Hall has allowed him to use its main stage, and the festival has doubled in size. One turning point he describes seeing is "when the opener would move up on the lineup; like an ecosystem to headline the show."

Contreras curates the show, books the bands, and markets everything. "The biggest challenge is the process," he says. "It's like a triathalon."

Contreras was doing such a good job at curation that two years ago the mega-mainstream summer festival Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival took notice of his upstart festival in Pomona and hired him to help them reach out to Latin musicians. They also decided to create a mini festival in April called Chella featuring four Latin music bands for the local Indio, Calif. community. It drew 4,000 people, "primarily Latino and largely farmworkers ... from grandmothers to kids."

"If done right, Latin music in major festivals is a must and it's important to the U.S. and the world," he says.

The five days of panels, workshops, networking and deal-making attracts thousands of industry people, bands from the U.S. and throughout the Spanish-speaking world as well as international media.

There are also numerous concerts and performances that feature hundreds of Latin alternative artists around Manhattan's clubs and theaters, plus major concerts in Brooklyn in conjunction with summer-long Celebrate Brooklyn concert series and SummerStage in Central Park.

Two years ago, the LAMC, Nacional Records and Cookman's management company came under the umbrella of Industria Works, an artist development partnership. Industria Works General Manager Jennifer Sarkissian, who oversees LAMC now, says it takes time build a presence. She helped put together the first Supersónico festival in Los Angeles a few years ago. "It sold out, so we did it again and it sold out again, so we'll be bringing it back this [fall]. It's exciting to see more Latin-focused fests around the country. And I think LAMC helped pave the way for that."

Sarkissian says she'd also "like to see major festivals featuring more lineups with Anglo and Latin artists side-by-side."

Among major mainstream festivals, South By Southwest (SXSW) is the only festival that has been significantly increasing it's Latin music presence. Thanks to Latinx curator Alicia Zertuche, it kicked off the festival season this year featuring some 200 Latin music artists — its largest booking yet — out of some 2,000 artists overall.

"The audience is there for that," Sarkissian says. "The time is right. That's the world we live in now."

So, until those bigger stages become more diverse, these festivals offer lots of music for long time fans and adventurous new comers as well.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Summer Latin Music Festivals Offer Music And Opportunity

This year we mark our annual summer Latin music festival show with an accompanying deeper dive into the reason some of these festivals exist: lack of inclusion on the big summer festival stages.

Listen to the podcast and read how the Latinx community is dealing with representation in the music industry.

There is a growing musical movement underway, fueled by the same spirit of confronting exclusion that launched female-led music festivals like Lilith Fair in the late 1990s, this time focused on and powered by Latinx musicians. As a response to under-representation on major summer music festival stages and the lack of summer gigs in general that include Latinx culture, festivals like NuevoFest in Philadelphia, Afro-Latino Fest in New York City, RuidoFest in Chicago, Viva! Pomona in the Los Angeles area and Los Dells near Madison, Wisconsin have all popped up over the last several years

In June, the Kansas City-based band Making Movies wrapped up its very first run of a travelling collective of bands they call Carnaval. Though not on the massive scale of Lilith Fair, these game-changers feature an invigorating mélange of Latin grooves and Latin fusion.

The members of Making Movies created their annual Carnaval as a Kansas City, Mo. based mini-fest four years ago; this year it featured nine acts and two local youth performances. Along the way they had an idea: If the big, mainstream summer music festivals were not going to hire them or the bands that they invited to K.C., then they would take their music directly to Latin music fans in 21 U.S. cities.

But when Making Movies began the traveling version of Carnaval in Boulder, Colo. in May, there were not a lot of people to witness history in the making.

"When we started the tour, we played to smaller crowds of 100 or more people," says band member Diego Chi. "But by the time we got to Pomona, Calif., three weeks later, 700 folks were singing and dancing their hearts out with us. The celebrating could be heard for blocks outside the venue."

Carnaval actually began as an answer to under-representation in the Kansas City music scene: Making Movies had better luck getting gigs by promoting itself as a rock band without mentioning its brand of Latin fusion. So it set out to change things. What started as a homegrown youth music camp, with invitations to SoCal Latin alternative bands Ozomatli and Las Cafeteras to come teach, soon grew organically into a carnaval, a Latin carnival.

"It became like a jam session of like-minded musicians, then community organizations started to show up" giving the band the idea of mixing music and social activism, says Diego Chi's brother and band mate, Enrique.

Blending "folkloric performances alongside innovative international artists," they enlisted Latin Grammy-winning artists Alex Cuba and Flor de Toloache to join Making Movies and Las Cafeteras on the inaugural tour this year, and added other bands on the road.

For Enrique Chi, 21 cities is just the start.

"For me the big dream is to make it a national tour next year and create music that really fits our spiritual, musical path ... and integrate the tour more effectively with community and social justice organizations."

Social justice and cultural awareness are also at the heart of Brooklyn-based Afro-Latino Fest.

"There wasn't anything that could bring together Afro-Latinos in the community from across nationalities," says Director Amilcar Priestley, whose wife, Mai-Elka Prado Gil, founded the festival in 2013.

Priestly says identity is an essential topic because even within the Latinx community, those who have roots in the African diaspora can feel marginalized.

"There are a lot of people who don't know what Afro-Latino is. People often want to pigeonhole you, and say, 'You are this but you are not that. You are that but you're not this.'"

The first Afro-Latino Fest set up music and vendors by a subway station in 2013 to attract passers-by.

"Many engaged in the event," said founder Prado Gil in the lead-up to this year's festival, held July 13-15 in Brooklyn. "Last year the maximum of 500 people attended the conference and the concerts sold out with 1,300 people. This year we expect 1,500 for the concert, 500 again for the conference, and 800 to 1,000 for our first full film festival."

An awards ceremony included a posthumous award to Afro Brazilian activist and politician Marielle Franco, who was assassinated earlier this year.

"More are coming into their own and identifying as Afro-Latino," says Priestly. "The conversation about Afro-Latinidad has exploded, here in the U.S. especially, and we're at an important time. I think we've been fortunate to be a bit ahead of the curve in the conversation and how it pushes forward."

A short drive down the New Jersey turnpike the same weekend as Afro-Latino Fest, NuevoFest has been moving the needle on inclusion and integration in the City of Brotherly Love. Since its launch six summers ago, the annual Latin music festival has drawn a healthy cross-section of Philadelphians to the one-day free concert.

It was founded by Marángeli Mejía-Rabelland Rahsaan Lucas of AfroTaino Productions in association with NPR member station WXPN's Latin Roots program. The acts have ranged from traditional to alternative Latin music.

According to Mejía-Rabell, "We went from 50 guests in our first year, consisting of mostly locals, to 1,500+ guests throughout the event's duration, and a lot are coming from out of the city: New York, D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia and the outer Pennsylvania burbs."

"Here's what I think is problematic with major festivals," Mejía-Rabell says. "My perception is that sometimes people take the concept of inclusion very lightly; like with a Band-Aid approach. I'm not saying that every time it's malicious, but I think it's taken for granted, like a quota they gotta meet: 'Let me throw in a Latino act. Or let me throw some color in there.'

"This is not something you can fake. With those who [approach] it with a clear intention and respect — mindfully and with integrity — you get to see a different outcome; a different kind of investment."

The lesson for mainstream curators: Develop trust and relevancy with the Latinx concert-goer.

"You have to make an insightful investment in building relationships with content creators, with programmers, with artists and planners to curate experiences" Mejía-Rabell says. "Never compromise the integrity and what needs to happen to meet that criteria [for Latinx audiences]."

It's a lesson that has seemingly been learned and applied in Chicago, where Ruido Fest was developed outside the Latino community. It's a partnership between Chicago-based production company Metronome Chicago, corporate event producers StarEvents, who organize the once-grassroots punk-rock enterprise Riot Fest, along with Eduardo Calvillo, a Latin alternative promoter and the founder of the Chicago radio show Sin Anestesia.

The June festival, now in its fourth year, features top Latin alternative acts and a new focus on developing stronger local talent. Metronome Chicago owner Max Wagner says its debut attracted some 25,000 thousand festival-goers over three days to the heavily Mexican American community of Pilsen. He says the next year drew 30,000 and then 35,000 last year, with a projected increase of 10% for 2018.

"You're smart to work with people who live and breathe that art," says Wagner, who works with Calvillo to curate the line-up.

"Latin Americans are no different than other Americans. They have broad interests in tastes in music and culture. Sometimes they have a connection to Spanish and sometimes they don't .... It's important to have the fan's perspective. We want to be relevant and important and a cultural touchstone for our niche audience," Wagner says. He adds that "a burgeoning local scene should, in the long run, help to create more opportunities for those same artists in mainstream venues."

On the outskirts of Los Angeles, Viva! Pomona, held in August, is becoming a destination for emerging Latinx artists. The bilingual festival was founded by skateboarder Rene Contreras seven years ago in association with local nightclub The Glass House. It began with Contreras' desire to "bring people to the burbs" with punk bands and no budget and quickly blossomed into an international multi-genre Latin music exchange that "graduates" bands into the indie market.

Contreras says he launched it on a cover charge basis. "It started off with 14 local bands in three stages and took over the block in downtown Pomona. Like 400 people showed up." By the second year talent bookers and artists were contacting him. "Some bands offered to come on their own dime with only a guarantee to play – just to have that platform." Since then City Hall has allowed him to use its main stage, and the festival has doubled in size. One turning point he describes seeing is "when the opener would move up on the lineup; like an ecosystem to headline the show."

Contreras curates the show, books the bands, and markets everything. "The biggest challenge is the process," he says. "It's like a triathalon."

Contreras was doing such a good job at curation that two years ago the mega-mainstream summer festival Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival took notice of his upstart festival in Pomona and hired him to help them reach out to Latin musicians. They also decided to create a mini festival in April called Chella featuring four Latin music bands for the local Indio, Calif. community. It drew 4,000 people, "primarily Latino and largely farmworkers ... from grandmothers to kids."

"If done right, Latin music in major festivals is a must and it's important to the U.S. and the world," he says.

The five days of panels, workshops, networking and deal-making attracts thousands of industry people, bands from the U.S. and throughout the Spanish-speaking world as well as international media.

There are also numerous concerts and performances that feature hundreds of Latin alternative artists around Manhattan's clubs and theaters, plus major concerts in Brooklyn in conjunction with summer-long Celebrate Brooklyn concert series and SummerStage in Central Park.

Two years ago, the LAMC, Nacional Records and Cookman's management company came under the umbrella of Industria Works, an artist development partnership. Industria Works General Manager Jennifer Sarkissian, who oversees LAMC now, says it takes time build a presence. She helped put together the first Supersónico festival in Los Angeles a few years ago. "It sold out, so we did it again and it sold out again, so we'll be bringing it back this [fall]. It's exciting to see more Latin-focused fests around the country. And I think LAMC helped pave the way for that."

Sarkissian says she'd also "like to see major festivals featuring more lineups with Anglo and Latin artists side-by-side."

Among major mainstream festivals, South By Southwest (SXSW) is the only festival that has been significantly increasing it's Latin music presence. Thanks to Latinx curator Alicia Zertuche, it kicked off the festival season this year featuring some 200 Latin music artists — its largest booking yet — out of some 2,000 artists overall.

"The audience is there for that," Sarkissian says. "The time is right. That's the world we live in now."

So, until those bigger stages become more diverse, these festivals offer lots of music for long time fans and adventurous new comers as well.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.