Produced and Edited by: Sarah Arellano
For the past 50 years, the Tucson Meet Yourself festival has taken over downtown for three days to celebrate the multitude of cultures and communities that shape Tucson.
A major part of the festival is the performances, featuring everything from live music to traditional dances and instrumental showcases.
Performance Curator Kate Alexander has been a key figure in coordinating many of these collective performances since 2018. She first became involved with the festival when the festival’s director at the time, Maribel Alvarez, asked if she would be interested in working as the performance curator, after having only moved to Tucson a year before.
Under Alexander’s guidance, the performance program has grown to highlight both long-standing traditions and emerging voices. Each year, audiences can experience an evolving lineup of artists who bring their culture to the stage, creating a vibrant, shared celebration of Tucson’s rich cultural tapestry.
“Our goal with the festival is to make sure that we’re allowing communities—that— who have such long deep histories here to continue to have a place to showcase culture, to meet around culture, to create memories around culture,” says Alexander, “Having an annual moment to shine at this sort of big city wide scale and it’s also a place where newer communities to Tucson can also have a place to be introduced to the community to become part of the community’s fabric.”
Over the years, the festival has steadily built a strong reputation of trust within the community by consistently delivering meaningful experiences and creating spaces where people feel welcomed and represented.
One of the longest-running performances at the festival is the Yaqui Ceremonial Deer Dance. The deer dance comes from the Yaqui and Mayo people of Sonora, Mexico, and is understood more as a ceremonial blessing than a dance. Because of the relationship with the Yaqui/Yome people, the Tucson Meet Yourself festival is one of the only places where this dance may be seen outside the context of its ritual ceremony. The performance is closely monitored, and no photos are allowed because of its deep cultural meaning.
This doesn’t stop them from sharing their culture with the rest of the community. If anything, it further demonstrates why Tucson Meet Yourself has been going on for so long. It isn’t only the performance curators and performers who make the festival what it is and has continued to be; it’s the people who care about and appreciate the diverse culture that makes up the Tucson Community.
