São Paulo – The culture and traditions of the Arab colony in Brazil will be featured in the 19th Immigrant Fest, due next Sunday (20th) and on the following weekend, on July 26th and 27th at Museu da Imigração (Museum of Immigration) in São Paulo. The event will feature cuisine, music, dancing and handicraft from over 40 different countries, some of them Arab.
Food from Egypt, Lebanon and Syria will be served at the stands, and Saudi Arabia and Syria will feature their handicraft. The groups Souham and Espaço Artístico Malaika will present Arab dance performances. Different nationalities will be represented by culture-oriented groups.
Museu da Imigração’s executive director Marília Bonas claims that the Arab community’s participation is growing. “Their community is a very organized one; they preserve their culture in a beautiful, systematic, documented way. Their strength in preserving their culture from generation to generation becomes evident in the festival,” says Bonas.
Last year, the Immigrant Fest lasted three days, and will again in 2014. The event will feature 43 cuisine-oriented groups, 41 music and dance groups, and 31 handicraft-oriented groups. The last edition was attended by 18,000 visitors and this year, 20,000 people are expected, according to the executive director at Museu da Imigração.
The event was created because the communities themselves wanted to share a bit of their family traditions, says Bonas. The festival will feature not only peoples that have immigrated to Brazil long ago, like Italians and Arabs, but also newly-established communities from Latin America, Africa and Asia.
In addition to Arab cuisine, the festival will feature food by immigrants from Germany, Austria, Armenia, Belgium, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Croatia, Spain, France, Peru, India, Russia and others. The event will also feature handicraft from countries ranging from Lithuania to Mexico and Mozambique.
The festival will also feature typical recipes prepared on the spot, such as Portuguese apple cake, Indian pulav, Italian roletini, and Russian strogonoff. The audience will also be able to learn how to make handicraft from Lithuania, Japan, Poland, Paraguay and others, or participate in workshops on dancing from different countries. For the children, there will be storytelling, as a part of the project “Contos dos Quatro Cantos do Mundo” (Tales from the Four Corners of the World).
At the festival, visitors will have access to the new facilities of Museu da Imigração, which belongs to the São Paulo State Secretariat for Culture, and to the exhibition “Migrar: Experiências, Memórias e Identidades” (Migrate: Experiences, Memories and Identities), an overview of Museu da Imigração’s work. One of the goals is to retrieve the history of over 2.5 million people who stayed at the old Hospedaria dos Imigrantes do Brás since the late 19th century; Hospedaria was a lodge for immigrants in São Paulo’s Brás neighbourhood, and now hoses Museu da Imigração.
Service:
19th Immigrant Fest
Date: July 20th, 26th and 27th, 2014
Time: 10:00 am to 4:00 pm
Place: Visconde de Parnaíba Street, 1316 – Mooca –São Paulo
Tickets: R$ 6.00 (US$ 2.69 at current exchange rates)
Information: (+55 11) 2692-1866 or www.museudaimigracao.org.br
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
