Magos Herrera plays at Joe's Pub.
Claudia Norman launched Celebrate Mexico Now! in 2004.
Liza Monroy's reading of her debut novel "Mexican High" kicks off the festival on Sept. 8.
In 2003, Claudia Norman was already the artistic director of the Queens Latino Cultural Festival and a series at Lincoln Center when she noticed a vacuum in Mexican-themed events in the city.
The Mexico City native held a meeting with 60 cultural institutions, from the Brooklyn Academy of Music to the defunct Carlito’s café in East Harlem, to see when they last had presented contemporary work from Mexico.
“There was a complete void,” said Norman, 43, of that meeting. “It was very important to respond to the new reality of New York and all that audience that was part of their neighborhoods.”
“All that audience” is the roughly 350,000 Mexicans who call New York City home today, a spectacular increase from the 61,000 Mexican residents counted by the 1990 census.
To fill the gap, Norman launched in the fall of 2004 Celebrate Mexico Now!, the city’s first festival of contemporary Mexican music, dance, film and literature that kicks off its sixth edition next Tuesday.
The festival's focus this year is mostly on artists who were born and raised in Mexico but have moved here, where they have “developed and changed their language with the experience of New York,” Norman explained.
Such is the case of Carlos A. Cruz Velázquez, a former folk dancer in Puebla who came to the city in 2006 on a Fulbright scholarship to attend NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
In the process, he ended up “completely changing his career to become a choreographer and contemporary dancer,” she said.
Velázquez and his five-year-old company, colectivodoszeta, were selected in a very competitive process to perform at Joyce SoHo this season. Their four-day run there starting on Sept. 17 wraps up Celebrate Mexico Now! on Sept. 20.
The festival also features a Restaurant Week, a chance to experience top-quality Mexican food at 30 participating eateries. “Chefs have an important artistic part,” said Norman, who moved to New York in 1989.
For 11 years, she has been the artistic director of the Chase Latino Cultural Festival in Queens and for nine the curator of La Casita series at Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors. Both present performers from across the Latin American spectrum.
But Celebrate Mexico Now!, a joint effort with cultural institutions across the city, is mostly about artists rooted in her homeland — though her approach is far from nostalgic.
“For six years, we have been putting in context the Mexican contemporary art presence,” Norman said. “What’s being done today — they can be expressions with indigenous traits or with electronic traits, but it’s what people, young and old, are breathing here today and around the world.”
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