Summer Latin Music Festivals Offer Music And Opportunity

This year we mark our annual summer Latin music festival show with an accompanying deeper dive into the reason some of these festivals exist: lack of inclusion on the big summer festival stages.

Listen to the podcast and read how the Latinx community is dealing with representation in the music industry.

There is a growing musical movement underway, fueled by the same spirit of confronting exclusion that launched female-led music festivals like Lilith Fair in the late 1990s, this time focused on and powered by Latinx musicians. As a response to under-representation on major summer music festival stages and the lack of summer gigs in general that include Latinx culture, festivals like NuevoFest in Philadelphia, Afro-Latino Fest in New York City, RuidoFest in Chicago, Viva! Pomona in the Los Angeles area and Los Dells near Madison, Wisconsin have all popped up over the last several years

In June, the Kansas City-based band wrapped up its very first run of a travelling collective of bands they call Carnaval. Though not on the massive scale of Lilith Fair, these game-changers feature an invigorating mélange of Latin grooves and Latin fusion.