'Rooted' Latino festival plants seeds in Aspen

ASPEN, COLO. — A group of Latino artists, communicators, politicians and advocates are congregating in Colorado this week for the Raizado Festival, a gathering that seeks to address issues affecting the community in media, organizing and politics.

Organizers of the Raizado Festival — the name is Spanish for "rooted" — purposely chose Aspen, a place where powerful groups hold summits that direct the future of industry, philanthropy and civil society organizations.

"Over time, as things evolved with the pandemic, it became acutely clear that we couldn't just show up at places of consequence, we have to create them," said Mónica Ramírez, co-founder of the Latinx House, the organization behind Raizado.

"The Raizado Festival is a coming together of 250 people from across our country who are all leaders, from the farm-working women and domestic workers who are here, to the actors, the musicians, the organizers and folks in philanthropy and business," Ramírez added.

The Latinx House, an organization known primarily for its advocacy for Latino voices in film and entertainment, had previously hosted events at the Sundance Film Festival. But the Raizado Festival, a brainchild of Latinx House co-founders Ramírez and producer Olga Segura, is a standalone project focusing on a wide range of issues affecting the Hispanic community.

"The conference is important because it represents an attempt to figure out how to include the Latino narrative into the larger American narrative," said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), one of the festival attendees.

"Although Latinos make up nearly a fifth of Americans, our history and contributions to the country have hardly been told or celebrated. That's a foundational challenge that sets the stage for many other issues we deal with in education, health care, immigration and gun violence among others," Castro said.

The festival, which runs through Thursday, has the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation as its main sponsors.

Ramírez and Segura said they intend to hold the festival for at least 10 years, and Ramírez said she does not foresee changing venues, in part to give a consistent platform to the Latino community surrounding Aspen.

Out of the 250 festival tickets, 40 were reserved for members of the local Latino community, a group that leaders said often feels excluded from Aspen's high-powered events.

"We are grateful that we have an opportunity — unlike many other festivals, unlike many other events that happen in Aspen or happen on the Aspen Meadows campus — where Latinas and Latinos, the sons and daughters of the very people who clean their rooms today, cooking their food, managing their properties both on the back and the front end, rarely get a chance to participate," said Alex Sánchez, executive director of Voces Unidas de las Montañas, a local civic organization.

The location in Colorado is also strategic, in a state with a large and growing Hispanic population and competitive elections.

Ahead of the first panel Wednesday, festival co-hosts Ramírez and Segura introduced video messages from Colorado's two Democratic senators, John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, and from Gov. Jared Polis (D).

"Congratulations Latinx House on launching Raizado, and thank you for choosing beautiful Aspen, Colo., as your first location," said Hickenlooper.

Bennet touted legislation he's supported, including the Affordable Care Act, the American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act.

"Taken together, these are some very big steps for the better future for America and for the Latino community in particular," said Bennet.

"And these victories are a testament to your leadership and advocacy over many years, so more than anything I want to say thank you and ask you to keep going," he added.

The festival is scheduled to cover a wide swath of community priorities, from the efficacy of philanthropy, to diversity in media, internal racial and ethnic biases in the Hispanic community, and the role of Latinos in American society.

"I think what makes Raizado unique amongst other festivals is how they're addressing politics, culture and media in a way that's interconnected," said Carlos Mark Vera, founder of Pay Your Interns, an organization that successfully lobbied for funds to pay congressional interns.

"Oftentimes that's siloed, but our identities are not split up — the laws that are passed around the Latinx community impact us, the way that we're portrayed in media [impacts] us, so I really appreciate that we're having these interdisciplinary conversations around these issues," said Carlos Mark Vera, founder of Pay Your Interns, an organization that successfully lobbied for funds to pay congressional interns," Vera added.