For year two of The Brooklyn Cumbia Fest, we’re back and better than ever. We have satellite events across Manhattan but are prioritizing the heart of the festival in our borough- Brooklyn. This year's events will take place in the Summer of 2024. These events will focus on sharing Latin America's diverse music through workshops, performances, talkbacks, food, and visual art. The musical anchor of the event will be Cumbia, a style of music with roots in African drumming and indigenous singing and instrumentation. Cumbia was born in Colombia and was created as a communal form of celebration and resistance. The style has since traveled to every country in Latin America, the United States, and across the world, where it has evolved and been influenced by taste, technology, and the particularities of each region. In the last two years, we have worked with various Brooklyn-based musicians who specialize in different forms of Cumbia. We want to hold a festival that brings these musicians together while sharing and teaching about this diverse art form. 

Although often treated like a monolith, the Latin American community is incredibly diverse and not always a united front. Through experience and exploration, Cumbia is one of the common denominators of our cultures. So, we want to use the musical form to create a space to discuss our similarities and differences. This festival will once again bring awareness to the history and contributions of Afro-Latinos and indigenous communities through celebrations and conversations that highlight how much of our culture was born from these ancestries. We want this festival to be about starting difficult conversations that can carry on beyond the event.