By RAY QUIROGA
publisher@sbnewspaper.com
exas Folklife organizers want a bigger and better presence in the Rio Grande Valley, and they took the first steps towards that goal during a brainstorming session held at San Benito’s Texas Conjunto Music Hall of Fame & Museum earlier this month.
The Tuesday evening table talk workshop was helmed by San Antonio-based, three-time Grammy-Award-winning Tejano artist Sunny Sauceda, who was recently appointed as the organization’s director of music and heritage.
According to a post by Texas Folklife on its official Facebook page, in his role at Texas Folklife, Sauceda is tasked with spotlighting the voices, stories, and sounds that define Texas’s rich cultural landscape.
A nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and promoting the state’s diverse cultural heritage, Texas Folklife strives to showcase the traditions, arts, and stories of communities across the state through various programs and events.
According to its mission statement, Texas Folklife’s purpose is to cultivate, promote, encourage, and sponsor the preservation, understanding, appreciation, and public presentation of the folk arts, folklore, and folk life of Texas and its associated regions where appropriate; to initiate research and public programming projects which identify, document, present, and preserve the folk arts, folklore, and folk life of Texas.
Texas Folklife is a statewide non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and presenting the diverse cultures and living heritage of the Lone Star State.
Founded in 1984, Texas Folklife cultivates and documents the state’s rich cultural legacy through a vibrant mix of performances, exhibitions, education programs, multimedia projects, fiscal sponsorships, capacity building, archival holdings, and more.
With a 40-year history of conducting folk and traditional arts programming and outreach, Texas Folklife benefits from a strong reputation among regional and national peers and colleagues in the arts.
The organization was invited by the American Folklife Center in Washington D.C. on numerous occasions to present Texas artists at the Library of Congress and Kennedy Center in their “Home Grown: The Music of the Americas” series, and Texas Folklife programs have been consistently funded by the NEA, including “Stories from Deep in the Heart” (since 2008) and “Foodways: A Place at the Table.”
An annual flagship offering, Texas Folklife Apprenticeships in the Folk and Traditional Arts Program, is key to ensuring a far-reaching and inclusive folk arts infrastructure statewide, with a long-lasting impact.
This is well complimented by Texas Folklife’s spearheading of the Folklife Network of Texas, a statewide group of folk and traditional art stakeholders established in 2019.
In the Rio Grande Valley, Texas Folklife is arguably best known for organizing the popular Big Squeeze, an accordion competition. It’s considered a celebration of the bright stars shaping the future of accordion music in Texas. Dedicated to supporting and showcasing the diverse talents of young accordionists statewide, the competition highlights the rich musical traditions that make Texas unique.
Applications are open through March 1, 2025, 11:59 p.m. For more information, visit Texas Folklife’s website.
The newly crowned Big Squeeze Youth Ambassador will have a unique opportunity to perform at the Accordion Kings & Queens (AKQ) showcase. Additionally, the ambassador will engage with the Texas Folklife audience and inspire future participants by creating content for social media platforms and participating in Texas Folklife events throughout 2025-2026.
During the Tuesday night workshop, representatives were on hand from a variety of entertainment and cultural fields from music promoters, event organizers, museum and cultural center directors to music instructors, educators and members of the media, including San Benito’s own Avila family from the Texas Conjunto Hall of Fame & Museum, whose facility hosted the event, to San Benito Cultural Arts Department Director Aleida L. Garcia.
Also on hand was San Benito native and Director of the Narciso Martinez Cultural Arts Center Rogelio Nunez. The Center was founded in San Benito but is now in Los Fresnos were the annual NMCAC Conjunto Festival is now held. When the festival was held in San Benito, it was immortalized by the Smithsonian, which recorded a live album featuring the various Conjunto artists that performed during the multi-day festival.
Released in 1999, that CD, entitled, Taquachito Nights: Conjunto Music from South Texas, is available on the Smithsonian website, on CD or in digital downloadable format.
According to Sauceda, the workshop was intended to create a “safe space” for the attendees to share ways Texas Folklife can better serve the Valley and their entities. Among the ideas shared with Sauceda was the concern that sometimes Texas Folklife events compete with local events and that better communication and coordination needs to come from organizers to better plan for events, especially when they involve students.
Overall, however, the consensus was for more availability of funding, possibly in the form of grants. Sauceda left the meeting promising to return for more brainstorming sessions and to inquire about the possibility of acquiring the services of a grant writer to better fund Valley cultural endeavors.
“If we want to go fast, we go alone, but if we want to go far, we go together, and that’s what we are doing here,” Sauceda explained while addressing the event’s attendees.
According to a study commissioned by the Texas Cultural Trust, the arts and cultural entertainment industry generates upwards of $6 billion annually for Texas alone.