UPDATE 10/5 – DUE TO RAIN FORECAST, THE EVENT IS CANCELLED – Sponsored Post – You’re Invited To LatinXtravaganza At FDR Four Freedoms Park October 7 – A Free, Fun, Family Festival Celebrating Diversity Of Latino Experience In America With Mural Unveiling On Grand Staircase, Music, Dance, Food, Children’s Story Time, Face Painting, Domino Tournament & More Wonderful Activities
On the occasion of Hispanic Heritage Month, September 15-October 15, the Four Freedoms Park Conservancy
will host a LatinXtravaganza family festival curated by Pulitzer Prize
finalist and Brooklynite Xochitl Gonzalez
at Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park on Roosevelt Island, October
7 from 11:00 am to 4 pm.
A newly commissioned mural by Mata Ruda
entitled Esta Tierra Es Nuestra Tierra (This Land is Our Land),
celebrating the diversity of Latino experience in America and featuring Latino
New Yorkers representing FDRs Four Freedoms, will be unveiled. The
LatinXtravaganza family festival is FREE with registration.
The Festival will include wonderful activities, including a Latino Banned Book
Library from Lush and a pop-up bookstore from Cafe con Libros. It will also
feature Children’s Story Time by Alyssa Reynoso-Morris, a musical performance
from Bomba y Plena, dance lessons with Ballet Hispnico
and Salsa Salsa Dance School, a domino tournament organized by NYC Dominoes, live
mariachi music, poetry readings, food trucks, face painting, a set from DJ
Christian Mrtir and a composting exhibit by iDig2Learn.
When I first contacted Xochitl about the idea of curating a public art
installation and event at FDR Four Freedoms State Park, she seized the
opportunity. By transforming a presidential monument designed completely in
white granite by the great American modernist Louis Kahn, she recognized that
her words, sentences and paragraphs that are her craft could be put to
influential public purpose, said Howard Axel, Chief Executive Office of Four
Freedoms Park Conservancy. Working together, Mata Ruda and Xochitl created an
important, temporary intervention, just 1,500ft from the United Nations, that
reminds every visitor to the park of a more accurate and inclusive history.
In the absence of our own official monuments, murals have allowed us to
assert and celebrate our histories, origin stories and heroes, said Xochitl Gonzalez, cultural critic, producer, screenwriter, and New York Times
bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming.
Not as they are seen from the outside, but from within. It felt, given this
context, the most appropriate medium to reflect the multitude of voices in our
community, and when I encountered Mata Rudas work, I knew that we would be in
caring, passionate hands.
It is really important to figure out how these versions of history the
white granite presentation of history and the rich, under-celebrated history
embodied by the Nueva Yorquinos on our mural can exist side by side. This
public work seeks to reclaim our space through a generative, additive,
annotative process rather than one of subtraction and erasure, Gonzalez
added.
Despite our history in this country that can be counted now in centuries,
this myth of Latino otherness perpetuates. This unique opportunity to
visually transform part of the New York City landscape with a celebration of
us felt like a small, but meaningful restorative act towards correcting the
erasure of nuestra voices, said Gonzalez.
The mural features Latino New Yorkers, embodying FDRs Four Freedoms: freedom
of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom
from fear.
Dr. Marta Moreno Vega: Freedom of religion As a writer, educator, cultural
leader and Yoruba priestess, she has done unquantifiable work to
destigmatize and contextualize Santeria and other Afro- diasporic faiths.
Lorena Borjas: Freedom from fear She protected countless transgender women
from being trafficked, of falling ill, or being deported.
Candido Arcngel: Freedom from want For 14 years, the Brooklyn bodega
owner turned his basement into a makeshift homeless shelter for men who had
fallen on hard times.
Olga Garriga: Freedom of speech From our past, a Brooklynite turned
freedom-fighter, jailed for speaking in defense of Puerto Rican liberation
under the gag laws of the late 1940s.
The last figure on the mural is a dreamer who represents an every man who
refuses to be relegated to the margins. I decided to work with a variety of
brown earth tones against the blue shadow. Conceptually, my thinking is that
these tones will contrast with the white granite steps challenging the
classical, Western architecture of the site, said artist Mata Ruda. With
the title Esta Tierra Es Nuestra Tierra, the earth tones so closely weave
with the concepts of the piece and resemble clay, dirt, soil and adobe. It
also ties in with the medium I work with to paint the pieces adobe powder,
plaster, and wood stain.
This special program marks the launch of an ongoing series, Art4Freedoms. This
new Four Freedoms Park Conservancy project invites artists and social justice
leaders to re-envision FDRs Four Freedoms for a new generation. Click here for more information on Four Freedoms Park Conservancy.
