Fostering civic engagement: From film screenings to performances, AfroMundo brings community together

It was in January 2023 when Maritza Pérez got the official word that banjo player Hubby Jenkins would perform in Albuquerque at the AfroMundo Festival.

“This was more than a year in advance,” says Pérez, founder and director of the festival. “I’m constantly working on the programming for the festival.”

This year’s AfroMundo Festival takes place from Saturday, April 13, through Saturday, April 20, at various locations around Albuquerque.

The venues include The Albuquerque Museum, National Hispanic Cultural Center, South Broadway Cultural Center, Valle de Oro Wildlife Refuge and Three Sisters Kitchen.

Pérez says AfroMundo was born of a desire to counter alienation and marginalization by fostering civic engagement.

She says it was therefore founded on the principles of convite — an age-old collaborative tradition that enables community members to pool their talents and scarce resources for rituals of life, socialization and mutual support, whether to collectively harvest each other’s fields, erect homes, tend to the sick, bury the dead, celebrate feast days or organize festivals, thus strengthening communal bonds and ensuring that no one toils, grieves or celebrates alone.

Pérez says in the spirit of convite, which takes into account that communities are wellsprings of wisdom, talents and skills, AfroMundo is a diverse, multigenerational collective of tradition bearers, storytellers, community historians, artists, cultural specialists and humanities scholars with the shared goal of nurturing community through meaningful traditional as well as contemporary cultural, artistic, and humanities programs designed to nourish the soul, address inequities, spark informed dialogues, and establish alliances to combat racism and bias.

“With AfroMundo, we let the ancestors guide what we do,” Pérez says. “The people that come to participate in the festival, they come because they are as hungry as we are for dialog. Communal dialogs can happen when there’s a pandemic of anxiety and loneliness and oppression. We’re not the only ones hungry for it here.”

Pérez is also proud to be able to present the weeklong programming to the community for free.

Registration is required for each event at afromundo.org/festival.

“We are a very small organization made up of volunteers,” Pérez says. “We continue to grow the AfroMundo Festival for the entire community.”