The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center will celebrate World Water Day on Friday and through the weekend with the new Todos Agua Water Festival featuring art, poetry, music and discussion.
Azul Barrientos, creative director of the Esperanza Center, has put together a three-day program “rooted in reverence for water,” as stated in a news release, to acknowledge the vital role of Earth’s most plentiful element in sustaining life, along with “its spiritual significance, and its profound connection to our ancestral legacy.”
Barrientos usually performs monthly at the Esperanza Center but instead hunkered down in January and February to pull together the new festival. Her goal was to bring together literary and performing artists from San Antonio with artists of the Americas.
Opening night on Friday will feature local poets Carmen Tafolla, Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson and Eduardo Garza, as well as a water policy discussion with environmental activist María Berriozábal, climate change-focused novelist Marisol Cortez and Greg Harman, the founder and editor of Deceleration News and former editor of the San Antonio Current.
The evening program will be rounded out by musicians Ceiba Ili and Los Hermanos Bonifacio from Honduras, Mazatl Cihuatl, a two-spirit Indigenous singer of Mexica and Chichimeca heritage, and harpist Juan Cabrera of Paraguay.
Artist Mauro De La Tierra, who created the poster for the event, will be on hand for live painting and an exhibition of his artwork.
Saturday evening features composer, singer and flamenco guitarist Julian Herreros Rivera visiting from Chile for a solo concert. Rivera then returns Sunday afternoon for a collaborative performance of Latin American folk music with Barrientos.
Sacred Facilitator Diana Dos Santos, also known as Goddess Heart, will lead a cacao ceremony to open Sunday’s festivities.
The festival grew out of Barrientos’ regular Noche Azul programming, her monthly culture series for the Esperanza Center. In 2021, under pandemic lockdown, Barrientos facilitated an online presentation titled Agua y Poesía that featured Tafolla and Sanderson, among other poets and musicians.
Through the pandemic and recent winter freezes in San Antonio that left some residents without access to water for days, Barrientos said she grew more conscious of the value and scarcity of water.
“I started developing this habit of saying thank you to the water,” she said. “It really got to a deeper level in my body to really understanding that it is alive within me and it is alive outside of me in the connection to all living things.”
She said the recent rains in San Antonio are a good sign for the success of the festival. “The flowers are flowering, there’s water. And that’s a very good omen.”
