This Saturday, Nov. 29, voices from across Abya Yala—Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Cuba—will weave together music, theater, community media, poetry, and ancestral memory in the Sixth Festival for the Dignity of the Peoples: Arts to Breathe 2025.
Streaming live on social media, the festival is more than a cultural event. It is a collective breath—an act of resistance, reflection, and shared imagination at a time when many communities across the continent are facing intensifying extractivism, political repression, climate disruption, and social fragmentation.
Now in its sixth year, the Festival for the Dignity of the Peoples has grown into a transnational fabric of art and struggle. Since its beginnings during the early years of the pandemic, the festival has connected 117 grassroots experiences from 21 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and six more across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States. Organizers describe it as a living process—one that nourishes itself with “fresh air, water, earth, and vital fire.”
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At its heart, the festival is about sovereignty and self-determination, the central theme of this 2025 edition. It asks urgent questions: How do communities defend their territories? How do they nourish life in spaces where systems of death—capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and extractivism—have taken root? And how does art help communities not only survive, but regenerate?
Urban Ayllus and Ancestral Time in the City
Among this year’s participating collectives is Ayllu Urbano Nina Mayu of Bolivia, an urban community that revives the ancestral Andean ayllu as a living social organism in the city. Their work is rooted in the understanding that community includes not only humans, but Pachamama—Mother Earth—and the Uywiris, the sacred life-givers.
Their daily practices follow the rhythms of the agricultural cycle, even within the constraints of urban life. By weaving Indigenous time back into the modern city, they are helping imagine what intercultural cities could look like during an era of climate upheaval.
Food, Memory, and Youth in the Suburbs of El Salvador
From El Salvador comes Colectivo Micelio Suburbano, an intergenerational youth collective working at the intersections of food sovereignty, environmental education, and the human right to the city. Through urban gardens, composting, herbal medicine, and environmental awareness, young people are reclaiming knowledge that sustains both land and community.
In Argentina’s outskirts, El Culebrón Timbal operates as a cultural school and community production hub. With an elementary school rooted in Cultura Viva Comunitaria, a radio station, and artistic productions in theater, film, and comics, they cultivate expression as a tool of transformation from early childhood onward.
Art as Political Voice in Guatemala
In Guatemala, Grupo MAIX embodies the festival’s spirit of dignified rebellion. Made up of Maya and mestizo artists, the group uses music, poetry, dance, and visual arts as political instruments, refusing silence in the face of injustice. For MAIX, art is not decoration—it is a weapon forged from voices, critical lyrics, and collective indignation.
Environmental Art and Community Healing in Cuba
Two Cuban initiatives will also be part of the gathering. Huellas Azules, a socio-cultural project working with children, youth, adults, and people with disabilities, uses visual arts to promote environmental care, cultural identity, and social justice. Meanwhile, Red EPA Voces Ambientales brings together popular environmental educators seeking to strengthen ecological ethics and territorial defense across Cuban communities.
Song, Theater, and Afro-Descendant Identity
Singer-songwriter Jorge Vlankho of El Salvador contributes socially rooted music addressing human rights, economic justice, and environmental defense, shaped by years of work with theater companies, cultural centers, and schools.
From Mexico, Mulato Teatro, directed by Marisol Castillo Castillo, offers theater as a space of refuge, memory, and Afro-descendant pride, where neighbors of all ages find safety, dignity, and collective creation beyond social divisions of race and class.
Also from Mexico, Vertientes Medios, a community journalism platform, amplifies narratives of hope and resistance, defending cultural rights and challenging the silencing of grassroots voices.
From Chile, ONG Tejiendo Huellas centers artistic education as an emancipatory force, empowering communities to understand and defend their social rights through collective creation.
Joy as Rebellion, Dignity as Celebration
Beyond the artistic program, the Festival for the Dignity of the Peoples stands on a shared ethical commitment. The organizing collective openly names what they resist—capitalism, patriarchy, racism, fascism, extractivism, and all forms of violence—and what they defend: territories, water, forests, community economies, and the dignity of all peoples.
They also affirm something radical in these times: joy itself as rebellion, righteous anger as a form of dignity, and celebration as a political act. They lift up ancestral economies rooted in reciprocity, barter, ayni (collective work), food sovereignty, and self-management, offering living alternatives to destruction-based systems.
A Continental Circle, Streaming Across Time Zones
The festival will stream live this Saturday, November 29:
- 2:00 p.m. Mexico & Central America
- 3:00 p.m. Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama
- 4:00 p.m. Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba & the Caribbean
- 5:00 p.m. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay
- 11:00 p.m. Palestine
In many places, communities will also gather for collective screenings and dialogue circles, extending the festival beyond the digital into embodied spaces of reflection and shared dreaming.
This festival is organized by the Collective of the Festival of the Dignity of the Peoples: made up of CEAAL, Red de la Diversidad – Wayna Tambo (Bolivia), CEP Parras Jiménez (Mexico), Radio Imagina (Mexico), Casita “Caminos del Corazón” (Peru), Cultura Viva Comunitaria, Recrearte (Mexico), Coamil Federalismo (Mexico), Rede PACRA – Arte e Cultura na Reforma Agrária (Brazil) and IMDEC A.C. (Mexico).
In a world struggling for breath—from Gaza to the Amazon, from urban barrios to threatened forests—this festival offers what it names: Arts to Breathe. A reminder that even in conditions of suffocation, peoples continue to sing, plant, imagine, and rise together.
Arts to Breathe 2025 Festival for the Dignity of the Peoples
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