AURORA | As notes of injera and kimchi delightfully invade nostrils, iridescent fabrics wink off sunlight, glamorously accenting their exotic shapes and styles. A fusion of sounds bounces in and out of ear drums, guitars, drums and horns melting into a harmonious crescendo. Gazing upon the many faces present, a sea smiles shines back with an aura of effervescence.
Scenes such as those and more will set the tone Saturday at the first annual Aurora Global Fest at the Aurora Municipal Center, a celebration of Aurora’s robust and growing international community. The festival will boast food, performances and traditional garb from Aurorans and other residents of the metro area who have roots in approximately 25 different
countries.
“It’s bringing all of our communities together,” said Jane-Frances Echeozo, a member of the international roundtable that helped to organize the festival. “It is very exciting, especially for all of the immigrants that now call Aurora home.”
The festival, scheduled from noon to 10 p.m., is a direct result of the collective voice and calls for unity of the nearly 71,000 immigrants that currently reside within the city.
“Events like Global Fest are coming from our own citizens,” Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan said. “They’re saying that this is what makes sense for this community called Aurora, and as a city we’re just helping to facilitate that.”
Aurora Global Fest
12 p.m. – 10 p.m. Saturday, August 23, Aurora Municipal Center 15151 E. Alameda Pkwy.
Shuttles will run a continuous loop to the festival from 10:30 a.m. – 10:20 p.m. and make stops at the Moorhead Rec. Center, 2390 Havana St. and the Martin Luther King Jr. Library, 9898 E. Colfax Ave. For shuttle questions, call Chip Scott at 303-739-7756.
However, Hogan added that proper recognition from the city has been a long time coming for parts of Aurora’s immigrant population that were previously under-appreciated. Hogan said that events like Global Fest are helping to steer the city’s relationship with its immigrant in the right direction.
“This (Global Fest) is another step forward in the maturation of this whole community,” Hogan said. “Up until couple of years ago, we really didn’t recognize our international culture. But we’ve started to realize that we’ve got just an unbelievable international culture here.”
CITY OF AURORA GLOBAL FEST WEBSITE
Tentative planning of the festival began about a year ago immediately following last summer’s flag ceremony at the municipal center, where dozens of Aurora community leaders from countries around the world came together to raise their respective flags within the building.
“The flag ceremony was mind-blowing, all of the nations came out en masse,” Echeozo said. “We had all of the flags raised in the city building, which helped show that Aurora embraces all of us.”
The dozens of flags hung at last year’s ceremony are still displayed in the Municipal Building, which in recent years has become an international hub for citizens of Aurora. Festival organizers wanted to capitalize on the Center’s growing reputation as the city’s proverbial melting pot and to continue to grow its notoriety as a space where citizens can congregate to share ideas, values and practices.
“This needs to be a place where people from different backgrounds, cultures and ideas can gather,” Sherri-Jo Stowell, marketing specialist for the Aurora parks, rec. and open space department said. “City Hall needs to be a place where people come together and make progress to continue to make Aurora great.”
Assistant City Manager Roberto Venegas echoed Stowell’s thoughts on the Municipal Center.
“We chose the Municipal Center for the whole community to see the center and the lawn as their space and their building – not just see it as a place to go to get a business license or go to traffic court,” he said.
Among the many attendees milling about the Municipal Center grounds on Saturday will be delegates from Aurora’s newest sister city, Adama, Ethiopia. After becoming defunct a number of years ago, the Sister Cities program will make its official return to Aurora at Global Fest when the city will sign into an official agreement with Adama Mayor Abreham Adula.
“At one time Aurora had several sister cities, but it was program that at that particular point in time was focused more on good will and cultural exchanges and not much else,” Mayor Hogan said. “In today’s world what we want to try to do is focus the program on tourism, education, economic development opportunities and really useful governmental exchanges.”
In addition to Adama, Aurora will soon be renewing it’s long-standing relationship with Seongnam, South Korea, continuing a decades-long tie in international friendship, according to Hogan. He pointed to the similarities both Seongnam and
Adama share with Aurora, the former boasting a booming bio-tech hub much like Aurora’s Anschutz campus, and the latter a robust education scene with 11 colleges within the city.
“We’re pleased and proud to be participating,” Hogan said of both the Sister Cities program and Global Fest. “I’m already really looking forward to seeing what’s going to be recommended for next year.”
Is there going to be any effort to reestablish relationships with San Jose, Costa Rica, and the other Sister Cities from our earlier venture with this international program? Pretending that these relationship were not established seems hypocritical at best.
So much for the melting pot. Multi-culturalism turned off the heat on it long ago.
While acknowledgement and appreciation for heritage is a fine thing, events like this ignore and dismiss a common American culture. America is one of the few places where you don’t have to have a certain ethnicity to be American. Multi-culturalism tells immigrants, “Come to America, you don’t even have to attempt to be American.” It’s Balkanization.
Add to that Stowell’s and Venegas’s statements that place the government facility as the ideal central location for the community, and you have a recipe for the exact oppressive Statist cultures many of these immigrants fled.