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 … Read more
Our Mission We build more equitable and vibrant communities by celebrating the everyday expressions of culture, heritage, and diversity rooted in the Greater Southwest and U.S. Mexico Border Corridor. Nationally, we amplify models and methods of meaningful cultural work that center traditional knowledge, social equity, and collaboration. We do this by: What is Folklife? Folklife refers … Read more
STAFF TMY Leadership SFA BOARD Dr. Berlin Loa President Associate Professor,University of Arizona-MA Library& Information Science Eula Liane Hernandez Vice President Senior Program Manager,The Oped Project Dr. Robert Breunig Treasurer Retired Museum Director &Professor Emeritus of the Museum ofNorthern Arizona Dr. Maribel Alvarez Secretary Professor & TMY Co-Director,University of Arizona-College ofSocial Behavioral Sciences DR. Estevan … Read more
Festivals are central to SFA’s work. After all, we were founded to carry the spark ignited by Tucson Meet Yourself, one of the most beloved and longest-running folklife festivals in the country. A well-curated folklife festival is a public act of recognition of the traditions people carry and share and adapt to create meaning and belonging. … Read more
How We Support Communities At the Southwest Folklife Alliance, cultural organizing means using art, culture, and folklife practices to connect and uplift communities. We recognize residents as the primary agents in shifting harmful legacies and building the future for their communities. Culture is not separate from economic life or civic life; it is the connective … Read more
The Southwest Folklife Alliance applies folklife tools to address questions that matter in people’s lives. Our initiatives move between the intimate and the institutional, asking how cultural knowledge can inform the way we care for one another, educate the next generation, build regional networks, and measure what community-centered work actually accomplishes. The projects described here … Read more
Our Approach We center the voices of the people whose lives and traditions we document, prioritizing accuracy and care over spectacle, and treating the act of sharing stories publicly as a responsibility. Our goal through writing, video, audio, field research, and digital publishing is to make the living cultures of our region more visible, understood, … Read more
We envision a world that respects and supports traditional knowledge within a community, where artists have access to the tools they need to be successful, and where support for artists creates a sustained impact in their well-being and their community’s resiliency. We do not prescribe what traditional knowledge should look like or who gets to hold … Read more