Drs. Gloria Caballero & Ivor Miller, organizers.
With Lázaro Galarraga (voice), Danys Pérez and dancers with percussion
“Bomba de Aquí” with Brendaliz Cepeda and Saul Peñaloza and friends
June 13-15, 2025

Workshops: Lyman Park, Holyoke, MA. (June 13-14, 4-5PM)

Performances Holyoke Media Center, Holyoke, MA. (June 13-14, 6-8PM)

Service: Congregational Church, Old Lyme, CT. (June 15, 10AM)

We gather in Holyoke, MA., to honor the cultural systems of the circum-Caribbean as an innovating force in Our Americas. This second annual Juneteenth event highlights the spirituality of Caribbean peoples. We recognize Holyoke as an extension of the Caribbean through its contemporary Puerto Rican, Dominican, Haitian, Cuban and other island populations. Our program title, ‘Afro-Caribbean history through the arts’, is inclusive to welcome all to this occasion with some of the best folk artists of this genre, who will guide and teach us about the collective genius of Caribbean peoples, through inherited methods of evoking and memorializing their history within a sacred context.

Our artists are initiates into Afro-Caribbean systems — traditions that have developed over the centuries to teach mutual respect and co-existence — whose performance art sustains collective support
for the expression of visions and sentiments. We are celebrating Juneteenth by embracing the African heritage of the Caribbean as integral to the history of New England. As evoked by Herman Melville in Moby Dick, as exemplified by the DeWolf family of Rhode Island, as well as the Amistad ship in Mystic, Connecticut, the historic wealth of our coastal communities was developed through Atlantic shipping routes and Caribbean plantations. Today, this history is being recovered through research, for example by members of the Congregational Church of Old Lyme, who have worked to identify and memorialize the enslaved Africans and descendants in their community, as reflected in their African burial ground.

Understanding the value of ancestors in our lives (even if to appreciate the traditions and ideas they left for us), the artists will lead us through songs and dance to honor the deceased who impact our lives positively, to evoke their legacies, whether they came from the Kongo, China, Native America, Europe, and to recall how they fought colonial bondage to give us sovereignty. Responding to a sequence of images from paintings created by culture bearers in the Cuban ritual systems, the artists will then evoke the Carabalí people, whose presence in Santiago de Cuba lives through its carnival ‘comparsa’ groups, and in Havana and Matanzas through the Abakuá society for mutual aid.

Then they will evoke the West African deities known as Orishá, who are structured into a group known as the Lukumí Confederation, where they act essentially as a system of Laws to guide and heal those who serve them. Here in the northeast, the closest equivalent might be the Iroquois Confederation, or the Six Nations, an egalitarian society whose ideas have contributed greatly to North American society.