For more than half a century, Tucson Meet Yourself has been the weekend when the city's many cultures crowd into the same few downtown blocks and eat, dance and argue about whose grandmother's recipe is best. This year, the festival's organizers are asking visitors to do something slightly unusual for a food-and-music blowout: slow down.
The 53rd annual Tucson Meet Yourself runs Oct. 16-18 in and around Jácome Plaza at 101 N. Stone Ave. Admission is free, as it has been since the beginning. But the footprint has been completely reimagined, and the reason is a birthday party 250 years in the making.
The festival was one of roughly 40 events nationwide selected for "Of the People: The Smithsonian Festival of Festivals," an initiative by the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage to mark the United States' semiquincentennial. Instead of asking the whole country to travel to Washington, D.C., for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival -- which for decades filled the National Mall around the Fourth of July -- the institution is taking its oldest and largest public event on the road, partnering with local festivals that already know how to celebrate their own communities. Tucson Meet Yourself will represent the Southwest and the state of Arizona, alongside collaborators including the Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival, Detroit's Concert of Colors, the Montclair Jazz Festival and the National Folk Festival in Jackson, Mississippi.
"By taking the Folklife Festival beyond Washington, we recommit to our original purpose to take the Smithsonian beyond objects and buildings; we also carry out our mission to connect communities across cultures -- cultivating curiosity, understanding, and belonging for all people," said Clifford Murphy, director of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
Organizers brought in Bryan Rafael Falcón, an award-winning director and co-founder of Tucson's Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre, as lead architect. His idea was to break the sprawling grounds into a dozen small neighborhoods, each with its own food, its own activities and its own "gravitational center" -- a stage or an open space where people actually stop and talk.
"He brought that vision of let's create villages," said Maribel Alvarez, who directed the festival from 2010 until this year, when she became a senior advisor. "Let's create spaces where people can linger and feel that they are entering a neighborhood. Let's be whimsical about that."
The whimsy shows in the names. There is Fry Town, where the fryers gather, and Wildcat Court, where University of Arizona groups run their fundraisers. The stage that always sat in the middle of Jácome Plaza is gone, its space opened up as the Gathering Greens. "Our whole goal this year was to help people slow down and go deeper," Falcón said.
That is a notable shift for a festival whose calling card has long been the food. Fifty vendors will be cooking this year, representing what organizers describe as Tucson's diverse culinary fabric -- and they are largely minority-owned businesses, cultural organizations and cooks from economically vulnerable communities. The three-day festival generates more than $1 million in revenue for those vendors, according to organizers. To make sampling affordable, the festival again offers its Taste of the Festival passport: $30 in advance, or $35 at the festival store, buys five vouchers for small plates from 15 participating vendors, among them Boriken Modern Puerto Rican Cuisine, O'odham Ladies, San Xavier Cooperative Farm and Wat Buddhametta.
The lineup runs from Muna Food's Palestinian msukhan and beef arayes to Herculean Chicken's fan-favorite fried chicken cutlet, served in a paper sack, to Jamaican oxtail and jerk chicken at Pam's Kitchen, king oyster mushroom dumplings at Huhu's House of Dumplings, and eggplant biryani at Nohpalli, a Pakistani newcomer to the festival. Dessert comes from Purple Devil Donuts, Planet of the Crepes and the smoothies at Purple Tree Truck.
New this year is the Culture Kitchen, a pavilion built into a 1930s-style metal diner on Culture Kitchen Lane, presented by Tucson Appliance. Its schedule is a reminder that food is never just food here: horticulturists Foz Chavez and Jacob Robles open Friday at 11 a.m. with a discussion of chilaquiles, followed across the weekend by sessions on Chinese tamales and albondigas, foraged mocktails and ice cream, shio koji chicken with blue corn polenta, Tucson heirloom recipes, and the rare Japanese matsutake mushroom. On Sunday at 1:30 p.m., chef Alejandre Richards makes cassava pone, one of the dishes from her Tie Kitchen dining experience.
Music and dance remain the spine of the thing. More than 500 artists and musicians will perform across five main stages, three of them devoted to music and dance. The Stone Stage in Barrio Commons, supported by the University of Arizona, hosts international folk music spanning Irish, Chinese, Brazilian bossa nova and Kazakh ethno-folk, plus dance from Mexican folklórico to belly dancing and line dancing. Friday's headliner is the West African duo Jaliya -- World Contemporary Music, Elijah Ndoye and Yacouba Traore, at 9 p.m. Saturday at 8:30 p.m. brings Yaqui classical guitarist Gabriel Ayala. The Gathering Green, sponsored by the Southwest Folklife Alliance, is where traditions get demonstrated and discussed rather than merely performed, including the Yoeme/Yaqui Ritual Deer Dance and the Aztec Chichimeca Dance beginning at 4 p.m. Saturday, with Japanese Obon and Indian Bollywood taking the spotlight that day. Waila band Gertie and the T.O. Boyz headline Friday at 8:45 p.m.; African roots reggae singer General Tchefary plays Saturday at 8:30 p.m.; and the tejano big band Suerteaz closes things out Sunday at 5 p.m. The University of Arizona cheerleaders and mascots Wilbur and Wilma kick off the whole weekend at noon Friday.
One of the festival's most personal new spaces is Big Jim Square, home to the Church Stage, named for the man who started all of this. Tucson Meet Yourself was founded in 1974 by University of Arizona folklorist and anthropologist Dr. James S. "Big Jim" Griffith and his wife, Loma. Griffith, who died in December 2021 at 86, was a singular figure in Southwestern folklore -- a banjo player and tall-tale teller who studied the folk architecture and music of the Tohono O'odham, his neighbors near San Xavier Mission, and who helped launch the first national tour of cowboy poets. He named respect as the guiding principle of his fieldwork and of the festival. "Our chivos are your chivos," he liked to say of his archives. The Church Stage will feature the music he adored, with local legend Ted Warmbrand the first to perform there at 11 a.m. Friday.
The Smithsonian's presence is concentrated in the Of the People Village, where blacksmiths and glassblowers from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival will demonstrate their crafts, and where a "Faces of the Festival" gallery wall will hang. The Folklife Here Stage hosts facilitated civic conversations on work, culture, belonging and public life. At noon Saturday, the festival will introduce Tucson and University High School interns who worked with the festival and the Smithsonian to research historical occupations. Tucson interdisciplinary artist and zine maker Ames Meeks, who led the local "We Hold These Truths" initiative, discusses that effort in "Zines as Truth Telling" at 5 p.m. Saturday -- part of a Smithsonian request that partner festivals create a traveling kiosk inviting community members to reflect on the beliefs and values they hold true. Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre, which Falcón founded with his wife, Elizabeth, in 2016, performs "War of the Worlds" at 7:30 p.m. Friday, with an encore at 4:30 p.m. Sunday. Other sessions cover the Tucson City of Gastronomy, stories of the Santa Cruz River, border reporting with The Border Chronicle and Tucson Sentinel, turning buffelgrass into homes, disability cultures, and accessibility in the outdoors with Saguaro National Park and Friends.
For anyone who wants a structure to wander by, there is a scavenger hunt across the 10 villages, with landmarks to find in each: "The TMY Letters" in TMY Plaza, the diner window on Culture Kitchen Lane, the giant Orbs on Native Nations Way, the "You Belong In Tucson" neon sign in Homelife Park, the Coyote wall in the Global Artists Triangle, the Frytown sign, the Stone Stage in Barrio Commons, the "Come for the Culture" neon at Big Jim Square, and the Crossroads sign at the center of the grounds, the designated meeting spot if your group splits up.
Alvarez framed the whole undertaking as a question of how a country celebrates itself. "They're embracing this principle: of the people," she said of the Smithsonian. "The celebration of America 250 is a celebration of how we celebrate, how we eat, how we play." In Tucson, that has looked roughly the same since 1974: neighbors rubbing elbows, in public, for free.