The cultural heartbeat of the Corazón Latino Festival

On April 9, the Corazón Latino Festival was held in Founders Park in downtown Johnson City, partnered with Slocumb Galleries, Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Roots Music Studies at ETSU and the 2022 String Band Summit.

The festival serves an opportunity for people in the region to get a taste of the Latin American culture from South America and Mexico. This is represented through food, song, dance and art.

The chilly temperatures on Saturday did not deter the crowd of people from across the region from coming out to a yearly favorite festival.

The phrase “one voice, one heart, one beat” accurately explains the idea and motivation for the event within the community.

The festival is about embracing cultures of people that exist in their own separate worlds. The East Tennessee area is home to a number of communities, many of them being of Hispanic heritage.

This event paired well with the String Band Summit that was happening at ETSU during the same weekend. The group of attendees joined with ETSU’s Language and Culture Resource Center and the Center for Popular Music to present string artists Belen Escobedo and Lua Project at the Corazón Latino Festival.

Belen Escobedo is known for sticking to tradition. She is gaining much attention in the music community for being one of the only – if not the only – musician still playing traditional Tejano conjunto fiddle music.

Lua Project writes on their website, “Lua is a cultural pollinator, bridging together musical styles from different continents and different centuries. They write about contemporary themes, about families, and people and work and loss, but draw on the musical traditions of their own families’ past. The music is inspired by Mexican Son, Appalachian song forms, Jewish and Eastern European tonalities, baroque melodic ideas, and Scotch-Irish narrative storytelling approaches.”

This event is important to not only the Latinx community of the Tri-Cities and Eastern Tennessee region, but it is also important for the other ethnic groups of the area to learn about and appreciate the Latinx culture as well.