Southwest Folklife Alliance

Home
United States
Tucson, AZ
Southwest Folklife Alliance

Nonprofit | Culture. Community. Connection.

Celebrating everyday expressions of culture, heritage and diversity in the Greater Southwest.
🌎 Producers of Tucson Meet Yourself
👇 Explore + support The Southwest Folklife Alliance is an affiliate non-profit organization of the University of Arizona, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. We are the designated Folk Arts Partner of the Arizona Commission on the Arts with the support of the Nat

ional Endowment of the Arts. We are the parent organization of the Tucson Meet Yourself Festival held in October of each year in Downtown Tucson, Arizona. In addition to the annual Tucson Meet Yourself Festival, the Southwest Folklife Alliance provides:

*educational opportunities through place based “Citizen Folklorist” field schools.
*and supports economic development through heritage artists professional development institutes, global heritage foodways business incubator projects/initiatives, and cultural diversity training through consultations, research and cultural asset mapping projects.

08/20/2026

✨FOLKLIFE LENS✨

An agave leaf is caustic enough to burn your skin. Jesús García turns it into rope.

He’s an ethnobotanist who grew up on a ranch in Sonora, where his father — a vaquero — made rope from horsehair. Jesús carries that craft forward with something older still: fiber pulled from the desert itself. The twist that holds the rope together is the same principle that holds up the Golden Gate Bridge. Why he keeps doing it has nothing to do with bridges, and everything to do with his father.

The first portrait on the channel: the full process, raw desert plant to finished rope, and the story running underneath it.

Because what Jesús does with rope isn’t only a craft. It’s a way of seeing — what we mean by the Folklife Lens: folk art quietly reveals the curiosity, connection, and meaning already hiding in ordinary life, once you know how to look.

▶ Full making on the NEW YouTube Channel! (link in bio)
🌵 Free Folklife Lens PDF + Weekly Field Notes from Dr. Maribel Alvarez & the folklorists of the Southwest Folklife Alliance → link in bio

borderlands traditionbearers ropemaking TucsonMeetYourself FolklifeLens

08/15/2026

Adornment is what makes the ordinary extraordinary. Mariachi adornment -- embroidered lapels, sombreros with metallic trim, wide silk bow ties, engraved belts, and botonadura, or buttonry -- might be as essential to the artform as the grito. In this episode of How We Belong on KXCI Community Radio John Contreras, mariachi musician and director of Mariachi Aztlán de Pueblo High School gives a tour of the program’s storage closet and explains the history of the “traje de charro” and other adornment on mariachi performance attire. (Listen to the whole episode here: https://kxci.org/podcast/mariachi-bling/)

08/04/2026

✨️ Staff Highlight✨️: Jocelyn Retamoza Gonzvar

In February 2025, Tucson native Gonzvar became SFA’s Managing Director, after serving for 2 years as a Community Board Member.

5 Fun Facts About Jocelyn:

• She has a deep appreciation for the cultural diversity of the city and the border
region.
• She brings more than 12 years of experience in the restaurant, hospitality, and nonprofit sectors,
• She has a Master of Business Administration from the University of Arizona.
• She and her family have represented Peru as food vendors in past Tucson Meet Yourself Festivals.
• She’s a self-proclaimed foodie!

Thank you Jocelyn for your guidance and leadership as we continue on our journey to support living culture!

08/01/2026

The art of flamenco is soulful, mournful, exuberant all at once. Much of that mix comes via its incredible journey from the Romani people of India, through Spain with Moorish and Jewish influences, and across the world. In Tucson, flamenco artist Angelina Ramirez has practiced the form for thirty years. In Episode 5 of How We Belong, Angelina he shares the sounds of the artform, in which the body itself becomes an instrument to communication both hardship and celebration. Listen here: https://kxci.org/podcast/flamenco-sounds/

07/29/2026

✨️ SFA Program✨️: Border Lore

If you haven’t read SFA’s free, monthly online journal, here’s a sneak peek of the treasures you’ll find:

In April, Maribel Alvarez wrote a tribute to her mentor—and founder of the annual Tucson Meet Yourself Folklife Festival—James “Big Jim” Griffith.

After he passed away in December 2021, his wife Loma invited friends and colleagues to pick small keepsakes from his home office as remembrances. She selected his personal Rolodex.

“When I picked up Jim’s Rolodex, I was not schooled on the details of corporate lore, but I knew enough about the significance and symbolism of the artifact in popular culture,” she wrote. “I knew, too, that at the height of Jim’s career as a folklorist of the borderlands, his list of contacts became a golden asset that revealed human connections, trust, and respectability.”

Read more about the history of the rolodex and other stories about folklife practices often “hidden in plain view.” https://borderlore.org/artifact-the-rolodex/

Got a story you want us to tell?
Send ideas to [email protected].

Images:
1. "Big Jim" Griffith's rolodex
2."Big Jim" Griffith's rolodex
3. Maribel Alvarez
4. "Big Jim" Griffith. Photo by Steven Meckler

07/28/2026

One of our newest Loom Network members, Chezale Rodriguez, is a member of the selected 2026 SaludArte Artist Team presenting “Humans Being Well Community Engagements: Reframing Stigma, Renaming Substance, Reclaiming Resilience.” The workshops are of limited capacity & at no cost to participants.

ChezSpirit (Chezale Rodriguez & Wade Antonio Colwell), in collaboration with Nicci Radhe, invites community members to connect through diverse, thoughtful and transformative engagements. Facilitated by each artist team member, we face together the harmful impacts of substance misuse and stigma through an artful experience of Hope, Heart & Healing, offering the possibility for positive personal and social change.

07/27/2026

✨️ Partner Highlight✨️ : Latinos in Heritage Conservation

🎉 SFA is honored to receive a Nuestra Herencia Project Planning grant!

What does this mean for SFA and the Tucson community?

We are now planning for the long-term preservation and community stewardship of Louis' Market on Tucson's Southside.

In April, the historic south side corner market reopened as the Louis Market Center for Cultural Organizing—the result of two decades of community work by SFA and Regeneración

Thank you, Latinos in Heritage—for empowering nonprofits and community groups like SFA that are working to protect and uplift Latinx history and cultural contributions.

07/25/2026

The most meaningful research happens in partnership with communities.

We would love to hear from educators and researchers who share our commitment to reciprocal, community-centered inquiry.

Here are 5 ways to get involved:

1. Become a community-based researcher. SFA brings a folklorist’s lens to Participatory Action Research (PAR). Everyday people, learning together, sharing cultural expression to make long-term change.

2. Explore an academic partnership. SFA is an affiliate of the U of A’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and has active partnerships across departments, programs, and research centers.

3. Write or assign BorderLore. SFA’s free online journal welcomes contributions from educators and reseathers who want to share their work with a public audience of 9,000+ readers.

4. Explore opportunities at TMY. Tucson Meet Yourself (TMY) brings together 500+ artists from 65+ cultural communities each October for demonstration, performance, and exchange.

5. Research or republish from our archives. SFA maintains an archive of ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, publications, and documentary materials gathered across decades of work in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Learn more about these 5 ways to get involved with SFA!

07/22/2026

It takes a community to build more vibrant and equitable communities!

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Southwest Folklife Alliance relies on community support to sustain traditional arts and preserve living cultural knowledge.

✨️ Your tax-deductible donation helps fund:

🎨 Direct support for heritage artists and culture bearers
🤝 Programs that strengthen communities through cultural expression
🎉 Celebrations like Tucson Meet Yourself that bring us together through food, music, art, and storytelling
🌍️ Opportunities to share the rich cultural traditions of the Greater Southwest with the world (a Kazakhstan artist exchange story is coming next week 👀)

Here are two ways you can support SFA: Make a Donation or Become a Member.

Donate Today:
https://southwestfolklife.org/support/

Image: Georgette Tabu performing with the Shalom Choir at Tucson Meet Yourself 2026. Photo by Steven Meckler.

07/20/2026

The saladito! In this episode of How We Belong, we talk to Feng Feng Yeh, Tucson artist and culinary activist of the famed Chinese Chorizo Project about these salty, sweet and sour treats, a favorite playground snack across the borderlands. Made with salted dried plum served atop half a lemon or orange, this snack reveals the long and circuitous journeys so many of our foods travel before they arrive in our mouths. Tune in to learn about this “Chinese candy” and how it carries ancestral knowledge and history.

Address

Tucson, AZ
85733

Website

http://www.southwestfolklife.org/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Southwest Folklife Alliance posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Organization

Send a message to Southwest Folklife Alliance:

Want your organization to be the top-listed Non Profit Organization in Tucson?