Music, dancing and ethnic foods will fill the Kansas City Kansas Community College Field House as part of the 13th annual Wyandotte County Ethnic Festival: A Human Family Reunion.
The Wyandotte County Ethnic Festival is from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday, April 14, in the KCKCC Field House, 7250 State Ave. Admission and parking are free. Ethnic food will be available for purchase.
The goal of the festival is to celebrate Wyandotte County’s greatest asset – its diversity.
More than 60 organizations, countries and ethnic groups from Wyandotte County will be represented at the festival through booths as well as onstage entertainment. Clarence Small, of the Kansas City, Kan. NAACP, will once again serve as master of ceremonies. The Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Department’s Honor Guard will present the colors and Shawn and Gloria Derritt will perform “The Star Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful.”
Another annual tradition is the awarding of the Legends of Diversity Award. This year’s honorees are Dr. Ewa Unoke, associate professor of political science/peace studies, editor of KCKCC’s E-Journal and director of the Henry M. Louis Center for Global Transitional Justice at KCKCC and Ed Chasteen, professor sociology at William Jewell College. Chasteen started the Human Family Reunion in Missouri.
Past honorees of the Legends of Diversity Award include Irene Caudillo, Alvin Sykes, Janith English, Kamiasha Tyner, Karen Hernandez, Melanie Scott, Loren Taylor, Pat Adams, Ed Grisnik, Chester Owens, Helen Walsh Folsom, Barbara Clark-Evans, Eyyup Esen and Carol Levers.
New this year will be a display from Timothy Kent, an expert on 17th Century Native and French in the Midwest as well as the experiences of French traders when they arrived in this area. He will have a display tent outside the festival entrance where he will provide ongoing duo presentations in a fully equipped travelling campsite of a French trader and his Native family during the 1600s and early 1700s.
They will show and discuss a wide array of items of daily life including a fully detailed replica of a birch bark canoe.
Everyone attending the festival will receive a souvenir program with a blank “passport” page that can be stamped at the various booths. All filled passports turned in at the Martin Luther King booth will be eligible for a prize drawing. Countries that will be represented this year include Kenya, India, Mexico, Turkey, Guatemala, Nigeria, Ireland, Croatia, Japan, Italy, Israel, Brazil, China, Germany and Lithuania, among others.
Among the entertainment groups are:
• Deepa Realite – Live Reggae Band
• Los Bailadores Mexican Folkloric Dancers
• St. Andrew Scottish Highland Dancers
• Hmong Singers
• China Dancers
• Lem Sheppard – Folk Music and the Harlem Renaissance
• Sabor a Peru
• Roger Suggs Hip Hop
• Hide in the Shallow – Allen Arias Costa Rican Sound
• Panamanian Dancers
• S.V. Blautaler German Dancers
• Danny Hinds and Ayotunde – Barbados Drumming and Dance
• Hravatski Obicaj Croatian Orchestra
• West of Marrakesh Dancers
• Tez and Tam Gospel Music
• Garima Yaduz – solo dance from India
The Creative Children’s Corner, coordinated by the KCKCC Intercultural Center, will be located just inside the fieldhouse. Students majoring in the education program under Dr. Hira Nair will manage the Children’s Corner. Gene Hernandez will be providing balloon sculptures. The Kansas City, Kansas, Fire Department will have one of its fire trucks outside and the Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Department will offer “Ident-Kid.”
The food court area will include ethnic foods from countries such as India, Peru, Malaysia, West African cuisine, Soul Food, Kenya and Mexico. In addition Supreme Eatery, Bowers Memorial and C.M.E. Church and Healthy Foods by Naturally Designed will be have food booths. There will be free filtered water and mint tea.
The Wyandotte County Ethnic Festival Inc. is made possible by the support of KCKCC President Dr. Jacqueline Vietti and the KCKCC administration; the KCKCC Campus Police and the KCKCC Buildings and Grounds staff. The festival has a new Gold Sponsor this year – KKFI 90.1 FM public radio and the Unified Government of Wyandotte County Department of Human Services. Other sponsors and community partners include the KCKCC Intercultural Center, 2mas2kc Hispanic newspaper, Imagine! Magic Productions, Gene and Karen Hernandez, Judy and Curtis Smith, El Centro, All-Star Awards and Ad Specialties, Burke Travel, Cricket Wireless and KCKCC Trustee Ray Daniels.
The festival is organized by WyCo Ethnic Festival Inc., Karen Hernandez, Barbara Clark-Evans, Clarence Small, Dr. Hira Nair, Dr. Curtis V. Smith, Marquis Harris and Shai Perry.
“On this 50th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, it is especially fitting that we as a community gather together to celebrate the rich ethnic and cultural diversity in our community in and around Wyandotte County,” said Karen Hernandez, who helped restart this festival in 2006. “It is an opportunity to experience the agape love he felt for all of us as he marched alongside people of all colors and hues who shared his dream of equal rights for everyone in America. In today’s world, it is imperative that we all take a moment, if not another day, to recognize our common humanity and to celebrate Dr. King’s life and legacy to us. His Dream of creating a Beloved Community can be ours as well if we continue on the path of inclusion. As my brother Ewa Unoke often says,’ UBUNTU!’ which means ‘I am because you are. You are because I am.’ We are one Human Family, and the WYCO Ethnic Festival celebrates that idea.”
For more information on the ethnic festival, visit www.freewebs.com/wycoethnicfestival/.