Dia de Los Muertos is a highly celebrated and significant holiday held throughout Mexico, Latin America and the Southwest. It is a day when homage is paid with prayers, offerings of food and the building of altars to those who have gone before us. Join Zarco and his unique masked characters as they celebrate Día […]

Come have a taste of the rich and savory history of these food favorites, explore how early peoples used them, and how they have evolved and spread to all corners of the world. Food is a portal into culture and can convey a range of cultural meaning including occasion, social status, ethnicity, and wealth depending […]

From the time humans began to live in communities myths and legends have sought to explain the universe and teach social values. “Arizona Legends, Myths, and Folklore” presents stories from Hopi, Navajo, Apache, and Tohono O’odham cultures as well as Hispanic, Euro-American and others. You will learn about Navajo constellations, Spider Woman, Hopi katsinas, the […]

Using storytelling, historical artifacts and songs, this presentation will depict the ingenuity and resiliency used by those involved in the Underground Railroad to help over 100,000 enslaved people escape to freedom between 1810 and 1850. We’ll then fast forward to the Jim Crow era and explore the Overground Railroad created by the Green Book which […]

Turquoise has a long standing tradition amongst Native cultures of the Southwest, holding special significance and profound meanings to specific individual tribes. Even before the more contemporary tradition of combining silver with turquoise, cultures throughout the southwest used turquoise in necklaces, earrings, mosaics, fetishes, medicine pouches, and made bracelets of basketry stems lacquered with piñon […]

Francisco Garcés, a Franciscan friar, arrived in what is now Arizona in 1768. Assigned to the church at San Xavier del Bac south of present-day Tucson, he traveled widely throughout Arizona and California, charting overland routes that later travelers would follow. Near where Garcés would meet his death in 1781, an American soldier named Joseph […]

In a narrative and musical portrait of working-class music, Dr. Craváth explores its roots and rhythms in our state. From Hopi basket songs, the Yavapai acorn gathering songs, to the cotton fields of Chandler and the crooked streets of Jerome, songs were companions to the immigrants who   explored and built our state. Through performance and […]