VIRTUAL PROGRAMMING
Check out this library of virtual interviews, talks, and workshops featured during past years of Fiesta Cultural.
Bilingual Storytime Online
Presented by Eugene LRCS
Online: Eugene Public Library’s YouTube (www.YouTube.com/EugeneLRCS)
Join Toña Aguilar online for fun stories, songs, and rhymes in Spanish and English. She is an experienced local teacher and currently coordinates the Nutrition Services Program at The Village School. She was born and raised in the Willamette Valley; her father was an activist for migrant farmworker rights and her mother was a bilingual elementary school educator. Enjoy this video anytime on Eugene Public Library’s YouTube (www.YouTube.com/EugeneLRCS).
Lane Arts Council Artist Happy Hour featuring Antonio Huerta
Lane Arts Council’s Facebook
Join this special Live Stream Happy Hour as Fiesta Cultural grabs hold of the ropes! Jill Torres interviews Antonio Huerta, who practices Charrería. Charrería is an art form involving the use of ropes in horsemanship and cattle work, dating back to the 1500s. Learn more about the history of this sport, as well as some of the other work Antonio has done in the community during this Happy Hour.
Comunidad y Herencia Cultural https://www.nochecultural.com/
Lane Arts Council Artist Happy Hour featuring Erick Wonderly Varela
Lane Arts Council’s Facebook
Erick Wonderly Varela’s work is inspired by his experience working in a fish market, an appreciation for food illustration, his Honduran family background, and his love of the natural world. His preferred medium is gouache paint. As a cartoonist/illustrator, his work is bright and colorful with subject matter that evokes both whimsy and dreamy adventurism.
Erick Wonderly Varela on Instagram erick_ink
Lane Arts Council Artist Happy Hour featuring Fernell López
Lane Arts Council’s Facebook
Fernell López started his musical journey over 40 years ago in México City. He has been an artist and educator in Eugene since he arrived in 1984. He currently works as a Human Services coordinator at Kelly Middle School and teaches Mariachi Music at the Shedd Institute. Grab a beer, wine, cocktail, soda or seltzer – and join us for this special Fiesta Cultural Happy Hour Takeover with host Jill Torres!
Lane Arts Council Artist Happy Hour featuring Jessica Zapata
Lane Arts Council’s Facebook or YouTube
For this Fiesta Cultural Livestream Happy Hour, Jill Torres interviews Jessica Zapata! Jessica Zapata was born in Mexico, a wonderful country extremely rich in culture, traditions, legends, music, art, architecture, literature and gastronomy. Currently based in Eugene, Oregon, she is a fervent cultural promoter and manager, architect and educator and has facilitated an extensive cultural promotion link between Mexico and various cities in the Northwest United States. In 2007, she founded Eugene Arte Latino, whose mission is to promote the music, dance, art, and values of Mexican and Latin American traditions in a warm and vibrant environment for the entire Lane County community. Jessica is also a mentor for several organizations and several Spanish-speaking youth. She offers monthly bilingual art workshops for Spanish-speaking children and youth and mothers.
Eugene Arte Latino https://www.facebook.com/eugeneartelatino/
Lane Arts Council Artist Happy Hour featuring Lalo Lira & Pamela Garcia
Lane Arts Council’s Facebook or YouTube
Pamela Garcia & Lalo Lira are dancers visiting from Mexico! Jill Torres interviews the artists to learn about their current creative projects, how they got here, and their artistic collaborations.
Lane Arts Council Artist Happy Hour featuring Marina Hajek
Lane Arts Council’s Facebook
For this Artist Happy Hour, Jill Torres interviews sculptress and art restorer Marina Hajek. Marina recently had a show at the Adell McMillan Gallery.
Marina Hajek, https://www.facebook.com/marinasartstudio1/
Lane Arts Council Artist Happy Hour featuring Mary Sollo
Lane Arts Council’s Facebook
Host Jill Torres welcomes Mary Sollo, who is a cultural promoter and producer, artist, dancer, radio personality, musician, and a voice of indigenous women and her community.
Lane Arts Council Artist Happy Hour featuring Michael Garcia of Dominican Delights
Lane Arts Council’s Facebook
Michael is the owner of Dominican Delights, a local business that has been part of this city for 6 years!
Dominican Delights, https://dominican-delights.square.site/
Puerto Rican Cooking Online
Presented by Eugene LRCS
Eugene Public Library’s YouTube
Sara Cintron demonstrates Puerto Rican cooking in “Nice Urban Spice, Lesson 1.” Learn how to make two traditional dishes, mofongo and tembleque, to satisfy both savory and sweet tastes. Explore a new way to cook with plantains, coconut, and the spices of Puerto Rican cuisine for a rich and tasty cultural experience. Enjoy this English-language video anytime on Eugene Public Library’s YouTube.
Windfall Reading Series: Amalia Gladhart
Presented by Eugene LRCS
Watch online
FREE!
Join Lane Literary Guild and Eugene Public Library for a livestream of the Windfall Reading Series, a monthly gathering highlighting local and regional writers. As a part of Fiesta Cultural, this Windfall featured Amalia Gladhart: translator and writer, reading her translations from Spanish and her original stories.
The event begins with Gladhart’s translation of Angélica Gorodischer (Argentina, 1928-2022), a renowned voice in feminist and speculative fiction throughout Latin America, whose inventive, troubling works explore power differences based on gender, and the poetics of writing. Gorodischer’s many books include novels, short story collections, and essays. Her national and international awards include the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Gilgamesh Prize, and the Dignity Prize for work on behalf of women’s equality from the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights (Argentina).
Gladhart reads from her prize-winning translation, Jaguars’ Tomb: a novel that presents both an intriguing puzzle and a meditation on how to write about, or through, violence, injustice, and loss. The selection of Gorodischer’s novel in Spanish, Tumba de jaguares, is read by Marina Peñalosa Montero (doctoral candidate at the University of Oregon, specializing in Latin American literature and culture).
Amalia Gladhart then reads from her own witty, often satirical short fiction (written in English). Her work has been widely published in journals including The Common, Cordella Magazine, Saranac Review, and Portland Review’s anthology, Unchartable: On Environmental Unknowns. Her Detours is a collection of prose poems, and Best Laid Plans, a novella set at the (perhaps?) fictional Flagship U., appears online at The Fantasist: A Magazine of Fantasy Novellas. Gladhart is Professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon and recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She has translated two novels by Alicia Yánez Cossío (Ecuador), The Potbellied Virgin and Beyond the Islands, and two by Angélica Gorodischer, Trafalgar and the recent Jaguars’ Tomb, the newly announced winner of the prestigious Queen Sofía Spanish Institute’s Translation Prize 2022, for best English translation of a work written originally in the Spanish language.
Amalia Gladhart, https://www.amaliagladhart.com/
Windfall Reading Series: Carlos Castro Jo and Ana-Maurine Lara
Presented by Eugene LRCS
Watch onlin
Join Lane Literary Guild and Eugene Public Library for a livestream of the Windfall Reading Series. The first half is in English and Spanish, and the second half is in English.
Poet and sociologist Carlos Castro Jo writes in Spanish, “mostly about people I know, like my neighbors and friends, real people who live their lives freely and fully, but are nearly invisible to the dominant Mestizo heterosexual paradigm of Nicaraguan society.” Allyson Lima will present her English translations of his poems.
Award-winning poet, novelist and Black feminist scholar Ana-Maurine Lara reads from her new novel, “Injured Stone” (in English). A longtime LGBTQ advocate, she writes poetry and prose suffused with poetic evocations of Black and Indigenous freedom.
Windfall Reading Series: Poet María Concepción Sámano Patiño
Presented by Eugene LRCS
Watch online
Join Lane Literary Guild and Eugene Public Library for a livestream of the Windfall Reading Series, a monthly gathering highlighting local and regional writers. This month’s program is part of Lane Arts Council’s Fiesta Cultural.
María Concepción Sámano Patiño will read poems in the original Spanish from her latest collection “Winter in the Window,” joined by Vere McCarty who will present his English translations. The book is illustrated with Sámano’s own land- and town-scape photos.
Intimate, lyrical, existentialist, and rich in imagery, Sámano’s poetry has been widely published and honored with awards from the Instituo de Cultura Oregoniana (Institute of Spanish-Language Culture in Oregon) and the Oregon Poetry Association. Her previous Spanish-language poetry collections are “The Days of Yellow Light,” “Melusina or the Perennial Aroma of Carnations, and The Darkness of Origin,” and “The Body That Takes Me.”
Originally from Jaral del Progreso in rural Guanajuato, Mexico, Sámano Patiño now lives in Salem, where she is active with the Salem Poetry Project, directs the creative writing workshop Migranta for Mexican women, and works professionally as a recovery and mental health mentor and in literacy training. She is an activist with groups including Piñeros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN, Oregon’s Farmworkers Union) and hosts a weekly program on Radio Poder. She describes herself as a “tireless traveler and seeker for meaning in this world and our existence.”
Vere McCarty shares, “My translating work with Concepción is made enjoyable by the quality of her poems. I start with her poesía and her English translation, then look for the expressions and rhythms that best fit her original ideas. We talk each line and stanza back and forth until it sounds accurate and lively.” In addition to his work as a translator, McCarty is a writer and songwriter.
Telling Our Stories Workshop
Presented by Wordcrafters in Eugene & Springfield Public Library
Virtual
Website
Got a family story you don’t want to be lost? In this workshop, author Dante Zúñiga-West talks about oral and written storytelling traditions and helps you compose your story.
This Workshop is offered by the nonprofit Wordcrafters in Eugene, as part of StoryHelix, and Springfield Public Library, and funded in part by Lane Arts Council. Find out more at storyhelix.wordcrafters.org
Dante Zúñiga-West, https://www.dantezunigawest.com/
Skelly Doll Workshop
Presented by Mija Matriz
Video tutorial
Watch this video tutorial to learn how to make your very own skelly doll, with Mija Matriz. See the video description for a full supply list and a link to the pattern.
Mija Matriz, https://mijamatriz.com/
