Festival celebrates, shares Latino culture

During this year’s Festival Latino, Penn students learned from famous authors, explored diversity — and even spoke a little Spanglish.

This year marked the 28th anniversary of Festival Latino, a week-long celebration of Latino culture on campus. The festival’s theme was “EsPENNglish,” a pun on the term Spanglish.

This theme was chosen because “at the end of the day, you’re still a Penn student, and Penn becomes your community just as much as your family and your culture,” Latino Coalition Chairwoman and Wharton junior Wendy de la Rosa said.

“Sancocho” — a yearly event during which the Latino interest groups on campus come together with food from their respective Latin American regions — kicked off this year’s festivities.

The Coalition’s goal in planning the events was to teach the larger Penn community about Latino culture, de la Rosa said. To highlight this level of accessibility, admission to all events was free.

One of the major ways that the Latino Coalition attempted to reach out to Penn students was by bringing Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, as a speaker.

Other, smaller events included a taco-eating contest, movie screenings, an art exhibition, a Latin dance class and a quinceanera.

Columbia University’s Grupo Quisqueyano and Mex@Penn worked together to bring Bill Santiago, comedian and author of Pardon My Spanglish: One Man’s Guide to Speaking the Habla to perform on Friday in Bodek Lounge.

Santiago’s jokes were accessible not only to the Latino community, but the Penn community in general, College junior Ben Steinberg said.

Although he admitted that the attendees of the Festival Latino events were mostly of Latin American origin, there was a strong base of non-Latinos in Santiago’s audience.

Being one of the few Jewish students at the events made the week “even more interesting” than if he were Latino, Steinberg said.

Despite some of the events having strong non-Latino turnout, there was “definitely a majority of Latinos,” Wharton and Engineering senior Ashish Sharma said. “It’s unfortunate because the point of these events should be to expose people” who aren’t already familiar with the culture, he added.

This year’s turnout, however, is an improvement over other years’, College senior and former Latino Coalition board member Atenas Burrola said. She attributed this to the prominence of this year’s speaker and the catchiness of this year’s theme.

De la Rosa, on the other hand, attributed this primarily to the appeal of Latin American culture. “I’m biased, but I think Latino culture’s awesome and that everyone can find something they love about it,” she said.

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