Our campus is filled with students and faculty from various cultural and ethnic backgrounds. However, we don’t often get opportunities to truly recognize and celebrate our unique heritages as a community.
This festival gives us all a chance to come together and appreciate our unique heritages and experience other ones than our own, while also getting to show our individualistic cultures.
Sophomore Lexi Marqueses said, “My favorite part of the heritage festival is seeing all the different cultures that are represented during this event. I love seeing how the Heritage Festival brings our community together by sharing what makes each other the unique individuals we are.”
The event showcases so many diverse languages and traditions that students get to be exposed to and experience through beautiful music and delicious cuisines.
This year, the festival will be held on a Saturday. It came as a surprise to some students, for it’s almost always been held on a Friday.
The Saturday date is for the benefit of vendors, and it will be easier for them to set up on a weekend day.
The festival will begin with vendors who will sell various types of food, snacks, and desserts to those attending. It will give people a chance to try new cuisines that maybe they have never even heard of before, or perhaps have always wanted to try.
Mr. Leyton, Los Osos’s choir teacher, said, “The cool thing about this festival is we are partnering with FBLA, so there is going to be food and vendors out front of the festival before we do the concert portion. So definitely come out to check that out. It’s a great way to hang out with some friends on a Saturday, and for the concert itself, you can just expect to hear a lot of diverse music and get to see a lot of our students’ heritage being shown.”
What better way to spend a Saturday? Food, music, and a chance to try something new!
“Expect many talented musicians, performers, and food from all backgrounds. It’s a perfect opportunity to try or learn something new with friends or loved ones!” Marqueses added, “I’m super excited to see the tinikling performance that TFC does each year! They nail it each time. I’m also hoping that the bubble waffle truck is back this year; they had some great dessert options!”
During the concert portion of the night, there will be several performances from choir, clubs, and soloists. These performers really put their hearts and souls into their performances to display the heritages they are representing.
The songs that will be performed are all so stylistically and linguistically diverse, which will be very entertaining for the audience, and open them up to different parts of the world.
Leyton said, “I like that we get to hear a lot of the backgrounds of each student, not where we’re typically in choir settings where we’re meant to be set in this uniform setting of just choral music, whereas this festival gets to show off individuals a lot more.”
This concert gives individuals a perfect chance to showcase songs that represent them and their family, singing childhood songs or songs that are simply important to them.
The choir will be giving their renditions of songs from different heritages as well. They have been working so hard on songs that are outside of their language barrier, and really making them come to life, and embracing them.
Marqueses said, “I’m most excited for our mass Choir piece called Jambo. It’s a very lively and upbeat piece that will captivate the audience!”
The sole purpose of this festival is for people attending to get exposed to different cultures and heritages, and leave with a new understanding of them, and to hopefully feel represented.
Leyton said, “I hope the audience takes away how diverse our campus is and a better understanding and appreciation of other cultures than their own.”