by the El Reportero’s news services
Paracho Guitar Festival, considered one of Mexico’s most important meetings, will gather musicians, researchers and instrument makers from July 31 to Aug. 5.
The meeting will include contests to build and play guitars, as well as concerts, master lectures and book launches.
Paracho is a community with 500 families devoted to making musical instruments, in addition to four factories where they produce it, said Mariana Gómez, the festival’s artistic director.
Every year, the city of Michoacán, Mexico’s guitar capital, holds several contests to for children, young people, intermediate and advanced players, she said.
According to the program, Italian guitarist Marina Tomei will perform on July 31, Mauro Zanatta will give a concert on Aug. 3, Mexicano Oman Kaminsky on the 4th and Spanish Marco Socías on the 5th.
They will also give master lectures during the week, she said.
Mexico to pay tribute to Jorge Negrete
Tijuana Cultural Center, Mexican state of Baja California, is getting ready to pay tribute to Jorge Negrete on Aug. 19, where experts will discuss the life and work of this Mexican singer and actor.
To remember him we will have the presence of his grandson tenor, Rafael Jorge Negrete, as announced by the aforementioned center.
His grandfather was considered the emblem of Mexican charro for his long career in radio and cinema.
Ay Jalisco , no te rajes!, Dos tipos de cuidado and El Rapto, in which he starred with María Felix, who was his wife, are integrated to the imaginary collective, generating around Negrete a legend that went beyond the borders of his native country.
He was born in the state of Guanajuato on Nov. 30, 1911 and died in Los Angeles, California, United States, Dec. 5, 1953.
It was one of the iconic actors of the so-called Golden Age of Mexican cinema, flattered by a unique voice, charisma and physical attractiveness.
Poetry festival honors thousands of missing persons in Guatemala
The International Poetry Festival of Quetzaltenango (FIPQ, in Spanish), which begins today in Guatemala, will pay tribute to the more than 45,000 people who disappeared during the internal armed conflict that ravaged this Central American country for over three decades (1960-1996).
The most important event of its kind in the territory will feature, in this twelfth edition, poets from thirty countries, including Cuba, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Japan, Mexico, Palestine, Dominican Republic and Uruguay.
During the festival, dedicated to promoting peace and to revitalizing the issue of missing persons, the artists will exchange creative experiences and their views on these and other issues, according to organizers.
The program designed for the occasion includes about four dozen activities aimed at promoting the humanization of the missing people and the search process required for truth and social justice. The FIPQ, which is organized by the group Metáfora in coordination with the Colectivo Caja Lúdica, will conclude on August 6th and plans to become a space for reflection and dialogue for poets.
A forum for peace and the dignity of the disappeared is scheduled for the start of the festival today, in the capital’s Centro Cultural de España, and at the same time a conference on the poet and activist Aleíde Foopa will be held in the colonial city La Antigua.
The festival, organized for the first time by former literary group Ritual (2003) and considered one of the most important on the continent, appears among the founders of the network Nuestra América and since 2011 is a member of the World Poetry Movement.
