Celebrate Mexico Now festival showcases music, film, readings, art and some surprising food

Published: Thursday, September 16, 2010, 7:30 AM

Claudia Norman, the director of New York City’s Celebrate Mexico Now, has an intriguing recipe for the annual festival, which is designed to showcase the diversity of her native country’s culture.

You curate strong musical performances, ranging from pop to avant-garde.

You add some multilingual literary events and screen some award-winning films.

And you throw in a sprinkling of worms.

“Worms contain the highest levels of protein — more than any meat,” said Norman, who, as an adjunct to Celebrate Mexico Now’s usual New York Authentic Mexican Restaurant Week, has programmed two “worm” events: “Mónica Martínez: Wurmhaus,” an art exhibit at the Eyelevel BQE Gallery in Brooklyn that creates a “micro-architectural habitat for the edible mealworm,” and a presentation at the Brooklyn Kitchen by chef and visual artist Phillip Ross, who will prepare a four-course menu based on worms grown by Martínez.

“Ross sees it as the food of the future, because it’s ecologically sustainable,” said Norman. “The Mayans and other indigenous people ate this way centuries ago, and he thinks we should go in that direction.”

Celebrate Mexico Now, coinciding with Hispanic Heritage Month (which began yesterday) as well as the bicentennial of Mexican Independence, always has been a festival that focuses on the dynamism of urban Mexico while never losing sight of the country’s regional diversity. Featuring 15 events spread over three weekends in several venues, this seventh annual version of the festival wants to engage the tri-state area with a Mexico they never knew existed.

“There has been a large increase in the Mexican community in the New York area,” said Norman, “but a large part of it is a middle-class intellectual community that creates a need for arts programming. Many people come to the festival and make new friends in the Latin-American community — we even have a couple that met at the festival that is now engaged.”

One of the main draws of the festival is the music programming; Norman also has served as the curator/director of the Queens Latino Festival, which has drawn an eclectic array of top talent from Latin America for the last 14 years. This year, alternative rockers Ely Guerra, Natalia Lafourcade, and Moona Luna (an alter ego of local band Pistolera) have come to reclaim their audience, while the more classically oriented Tambuco Percussion Ensemble and Juan Pablo Villa make rare New York appearances.

Continuing a Celebrate Mexico Now tradition, the festival will screen the winners of the previous year’s Morelia International Film Festival. There is a special anticipation for the documentary “Hasta el Último Trago . . . Corazón,” which translates as “Till the Last Drop . . . My Love.” The film is an intimate look at treasured female singers Chavela Vargas, Lila Downs, Eugenia León, Astrid Hadad, La Negra Graciana, Chayito Valdez and Iraida Noriega, touching not only on their talents but also on their part in changing women’s roles in Mexican society.

The festival’s literary component is also thoughtful and vital. Editor and writer Paco Ignacio Taibo does a reading and presentation of “Mexico City Noir,” an anthology of mystery stories about our hemisphere’s biggest megalopolis. In addition, Norman has curated a presentation of “The New Songs of the Ceiba,” a trilingual (Spanish, English, Mayan) anthology of short stories, essays, poetry and plays co-edited by Carlos Montemayor, an advocate of indigenous literature who passed away earlier this year.

There will also be a special panel featuring Columbia University professor Jean Franco and “La Jornada” cartoonist Rafael Barajas, among others, called “Reading Carlos Monsiváis in New York.”

The legacy of Monsiváis, an enigmatic public intellectual who also died this year, will no doubt instigate a lively debate. “Exactly what his legacy will be will create the most controversy,” said Norman.

But the debate surely won’t be as controversial as the worms.

“It’s a nouvelle cuisine, not like the way they have them in the traditional mercados (markets) in Oaxaca,” said Norman. “Down there, they’re alive and moving — you have to catch them to eat them. Surely, this is not the traditional taco al pastor (pork taco). But from the point of view of a nutritionist, it could be more horrendous to eat pork meat than an insect.”