In 1974, folklorist James S. “Big Jim” Griffith and his wife Loma founded Tucson Meet Yourself, a free annual festival celebrating the folk arts, music, dance, and food of Indigenous, immigrant, and long-established communities of Southern Arizona. The festival’s popularity, longevity and core commitment to bringing the hidden treasures of the region’s culture into the public square, eventually led to the establishment of the Southwest Folklife Alliance.
Remembering “Big Jim” Griffith
Big Jim spent his career as director of the Southwest Folklore Center at the University of Arizona, earning a PhD in cultural anthropology and art history and devoting his life to the documentation and celebration of the borderlands. His books, television programs, museum exhibitions, and decades of engaged fieldwork shaped how Southern Arizona understands and values its own cultural heritage. In recognition of his service to folklore and the state of Arizona, in 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts named him a National Heritage Fellow, one of the highest honors in American folk and traditional arts.
Jim’s worked for over four decades, upholding and expanding trusted, long-standing partnerships with more than 45 ethnically diverse cultural groups, local tribes and nations, ethnic social clubs, artists, and civic institutions across the region. Jim passed away peacefully at home on December 18, 2021. His influence continues to guide our work.
RECENT SFA milestones
2012
University of Arizona Southwest Center study (by SFA folklorist Kimi Eisele) documents an “abundant but diffuse” landscape of informal expressive arts, traditional food knowledge, and living folk traditions in the U.S. Southwest and northwest Mexico, signaling the need for greater support.
Cultural leaders led by UA folklorist Dr. Maribel Alvarez envision an organization to provide year-round support for traditional artists, document living cultural knowledge, and place culture at the center of economic vitality and social equity across the border region.
2014
Southwest Folklife Alliance (SFA), is founded as a new 501(c)3 non-profit with seed funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Surdna Foundation, and the University of Arizona’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
2015
SFA launches Master-Apprentice Artist Award, a direct investment in the transmission of traditional knowledge, pairing highly skilled master artists with apprentice learners in sustained, compensated relationships.
SFA launches BorderLore, a free online journal documenting stories about culture and heritage in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. A trusted resource for artists, educators, researchers, and the general public, it now reaches over 9,000 subscribers, six times a year.
2017
SFA begins a partnership with Regeneración, a grassroots coalition of southside Tucson residents (then operating as Tierra y Libertad), to bring participatory action research (PAR) to the La Doce corridor along South 12th Avenue. The work reveals culture not merely as celebration, but as a tool for organizing, building wealth, and restoring community agency.
Santa Rosa Gospel Singers. TMY 1979
2018
SFA develops Folklife PAR, a participatory action research methodology that trains community members how to explore and acknowledge and explore their own folklife expressions, map cultural assets, document local knowledge, and deploy that knowledge in service of social and economic change.
2020
Under the leadership of Executive Director Leia Maahs, SFA responds to COVID-19 pandemic by pivoting to virtual programming with Loom Market, an online version of Tucson Meet Yourself where heritage-based artists participate in a virtual marketplace, selling works and building networks among themselves and the
community.
2021
SFA receives a significant unrestricted gift from MacKenzie Scott, enabling an investment in a long-term future by expanding staff, deepening programming, and taking a bold step toward community land ownership.
2023
SFA purchases Louis’ Market, a historic property at 4001 S. 12th Avenue in Tucson’s La Doce corridor, using philanthropic funds and federal support. In partnership with Regeneración, the building will become the Center for Cultural Organizing and be transferred, once fully realized, to a Community Land Trust (CLT).
2025
SFA navigates the discontinuation of more than $1 million in federal funding, requiring a rapid adaptation of operational strategy to sustain all core programs without interruption and continue to launch new initiatives and deepen our community partnerships.
2026
The Smithsonian Institution augments Tucson Meet Yourself as part of the United States’ 250th anniversary commemoration, in recognition of the festival’s national significance and SFA’s place within the broader story of American cultural life.