Mestizo: Breaking the Caste – El Sueno @ Mini Mart City Park (Seattle – Georgetown)

A multi-disciplinary evening of collected stories of the Mexican-American experience. Mestizo is a Mexican term for a “mixed” person. It was a term used to devalue people whose ancestry includes Indigenous bloodlines. As Mexican people, our histories are painfully entwined with both our Indigenous ancestors and our Spanish colonizers. So much of our Indigenous history was stripped from us through centuries of cultural erasure and genocide. Assimilation was the way we survived extinction, but defiance and resilience was threaded in the ways we stealthily passed our cultural practices through the colonial lens. Mestizo bravely reclaims our Indigenous heritage and reframes Mexican history as one that is rich with an abundance of ancestral knowledge, resilience and imagination.

Mestizo will include visual arts, film, music, dance, and ceremony that powerfully weave together our collective experiences. Audiences will be guided through the various spaces throughout the gallery to explore the collected stories of the Mexican experience. The gallery contains an altar created in collaboration between all participating artists. It features a huge braid climbing up a wall– a symbol of American Indian pride. The evening includes a premiere of El Sueño’s site-specific work featuring four Mexican American women claiming their place and power within contemporary American society.

Location: Mini Mart City Park (6525 Ellis Ave S, Seattle)

Tickets $15-$41 (sliding scale offered for all) here.