>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> All right. Thank you all for being here today. I'm Catalina Gomez. I'm from the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and on behalf of the division and also on behalf of the Hispanic Culture Society, I want to welcome you today to this really, really exciting program. I am really, really delighted to have Curator and Chair of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage from the Smithsonian Institution, Olivia Cadaval, whom I had the pleasure to work with in 2011 in one of the folklife festivals. It's really, really a pleasure. Before I go ahead and introduce Olivia, I wanted to just announce some little things about things that are going on here in the library. This event is part of Hispanic Heritage Month, which we launched on September 15. It's really, really an exciting time for us, and we have a lot of events going on. So I urge you to please take the calendar of events that we have outside in our little table. We have presented a good number of these programs already, but we have pretty much half of our events still to come. We're hoping that we're not going to be shut down by the government, but October 1 we have a great lecture on Latin jazz by one of our music specialists here in the library. There's also a Puerto Rican cuatro performance in the same venue on October 6 and then some other lectures. We have a lecture on Bernardo de Galvez and another lecture on the anniversary of the city of St. Augustine, which that will be our closing event on October 14. So I hope you guys keep coming to all of our programs and celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month. Also, the communications office of the library is -- created a survey, and we're trying to have a lot of our patrons fill out the survey. It's a survey that can help us find out more about how you guys find out about this program, and this is all meant to serve you all better with our events and with our publicity so please, please, please just take 50 seconds of your time to fill out the survey for us. And one last announcement, a very exciting project that just launched [inaudible]. We just launched a portion of the Archive of Hispanic Literature on tape. It's an archive of poetry and prose writers. These are recordings of poets and writers that began in the 1940's in the Hispanic division and it's a really, really vast archieve of 700 recordings. We have the voices of Borges Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, [inaudible] among many, many amazing voices and we just launched a portion of the archive online. The actual URL of the project is really long, but you can Google it -- Archive of Hispanic Literature on tape -- or you can access the Hispanic Division website, www.loc.gov/rr/Hispanic and also the link to the project is in our home page. So I'm going to go ahead and introduce our wonderful speaker. So Olivia Cadaval, as I said, is a Curator and Chair of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and Folklife from Georgetown -- George Washington University and since joining the Center in 1988, she has curated numerous festivals -- folklife festivals including the presentations El Rio in 2000, which was -- she was just telling me about Rio Grande. Mexico in 2010. Colombia, The Nature of Culture in 2011 and Peru Pachamama in 2015. She has also produced curriculum enrichment materials, exhibitions and websites such as the bilingual site, Assembling the Festival Program Colombia. She has worked extensively on documentation, public programs and education projects in Latino community of Washington, D.C. She published the book, Creating a Latino Identity in the Nation's Capitol, the Latino Festival, which came out in 1998 and has contributed to such publications as Urban Odyssey, Creative Ethnicity, Washington at Home, New York Folklore and the Journal of Folklore Research, and the Public Historian. It's a pleasure for me to introduce you, Olivia Cadaval. Thank you. >> Olivia Cadaval: It's a treat to be here, and it really gives me an opportunity to air out some of the thoughts that I -- some of the ideas that I've been working with recently in our curating programs. I hope it's not too repetitive for some of you that know the festival well, but bear with me, and I really want to thank Catalina. Catalina was -- she really got me into this one. She was an extraordinary presenter back in the Colombia program, which is just a really exciting experience. She is a Colombian, so I as well might talk a little bit about that. So I will address the role of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and advocating -- I'm sorry, I do have to mention that I changed the title of the presentation. It could have been [inaudible], but I stuck with this one. In particular, I will address the role of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and advocating for a cultural heritage policy grounded in cultural democracy and intercultural dialogue as well as our collaboration with [inaudible] a 2003 convention for the protection of intangible cultural heritage. I will focus on the Center's signature program, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, on our experience with the 2011 Colombia, the Nature of Culture Program and draw some comparisons with the recent Peru Pachamama program. Museums have become central players in safeguarding heritage for the world, continuing a now well established museological discourse and practice in transforming museums from elite temples to democrfatic forms, from collections -- I really should play with this one too - from collections -- it's collections of -- in tangible [inaudible] repositories that include intangible cultural heritage. The stories, history, expertise, expressive traditions and related social and cultural values associated with the makers and users of these objects, and yet while museums are increasingly doing the work involved in heritage protection, we're all familiar with documentation, archiving, conservation, digitization, providence, repatriation, authentication. Some are advancing a more proactive approach to collaboration with other national and international culture institutions advocating principles of respect for cultural diversity, cultural democracy and intercultural dialogue. As the world's largest museum complex and heritage preservation organization, the Smithsonian Institution has both the opportunity and the responsibility to step fully into this arena and become a global contributor to cultural heritage leadership. In 2003, UNESCO's convention on intangible cultural heritage has also played a central role in this expanding and contested public policy field in the 21st century. The transitional conference that contributed to formulation of this convention took place in Washington, D.C. in 1999 under the co-sponsorship of the Smithsonian. The conference assessed UNESCO's 1989 recommendation in the safeguarding of traditional culture and folklore and produced a baseline report and plan for the convention. The Center strongly advocated for substantitive participation of tradition practitioners at this conference including some of the participants that I worked with back in 1991. It contributed to the drafting of the convention by drawing from it's practices based on cultural equity and cultural pluralism, emphasizing the importance of agency, of traditional practitioners in the formation and implementation of a policy. As a follow up to the conference, UNESCO invited Center staff to lead a definitional exercise that concluded in a significant shift in convention terminology from traditional culture and folklore to intangible cultural heritage, which recognized the knowledge that underscores expressive and material forms and associated tradition bears. Colombia, a signatory to the convention, has been at the forefront in developing a strong and inclusive national cultural policy including general categories of heritage, particularly grassroots or community-based heritage. Coincidentally, as Colombia began to develop it's intangible cultural heritage policy, it signed an agreement with the Center to collaborate in the production of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in the national mall. So let me give you -- and this will be very repetitive for many of you -- just a very quick sketch of -- about the festival. The Smithsonian Center for Folklife Culture -- sometimes we agree that the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage is that -- it's a museum with walls. This can also be debated by our staff as well. It started in 1967 as a project, the Festival of American Folklife inspired by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's. The first festival advocated a popular approach to presenting and celebrating diversity of American culture, deploying such principles and policies as speaking in your own voice or taking instruments out of their cases and connecting them with their makers and users, making them sing. This form -- this poem is part of a broader effort to democratize museum practices and diversify the stories represented with it in these formal institutions. The idea of cultural democracy is the driving festival principle that is reinterpreted by curators in different ways over time. The concept of authenticity, a term rarely used by festival curators today, was very important to the festival as it established it's legitimacy in it's early years. This is around the 1960's, 1980's. In both the museum world and academia, the festival has also adapted and reinterpreted the concept of cultural conservation, which at first was associated with the preservation of tradition, but in later years has been more explicitly associated with local community agency for traditional practices that impact cultural, economic and environmental sustainability. The first festival in 1967 offered an overview of traditional culture in the United States by featuring craft artists and music and dance groups from throughout the country. The following festivals began to highlight individual states and their traditions. The 1970's was the watershed period for the festival and for public sector folklore in general anticipating the current global cultural heritage policy activity. The American Folklife Center, many of you here, was created in the Library of Congress in 1976 by the United States Congress to preserve and present the heritage of American folklife. By 1978, a folk arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts was established under the directorship of [inaudible]. State folklorists were hired by several state arts councils and many collaborated in the summertime, folklife festival celebration of the nation's bicentennial. This national bicentennial festival spurred growing -- spurred the growing complexity of the festival. Programs began to be organized around themes, such as African diaspora, old ways in the new world and regional America. Tradition practitioners from other countries began to be invited to participate . New presentation genre such as occupational or labor lore were developed. In the 1980's, the festival flourished by presenting state programs which engaged cultural organizations and ethnographers in local regions. These programs gave rise to new challenges and representation and collaboration and have had an impact a national cultural heritage politics. Several of these programs were restaged back in their home state expanding the reach and application of the festival model to regions around the country. A series of programs over the course of three years were organized under the theme of cultural conservation, addressing topics such as language and graphs in a post industrial age as well issues of cultural dislocation, revitalization and revival. In 1982, the first program focusing on a single country initiated the development of a new set of strategies for collaboration with foreign countries. Summer Folklore Institute for Community Scholars was held in '89 and '90 in tandem with the festival and provided a model for more collaborative engagement with practitioners and the different phases of festival development. In the 1990's, the Center became increasingly involved in UNESCO culture policy discussions especially as mentioned, the drafting of the 2003 UNESCO convention and intangible cultural heritage. Programs presented a wide range of case studies on the relationship between local culture, the built environment, sustainable development and cultural tourism as well as advocate for the inclusion of traditional artists and their culture and local and global economic planning projects. I curated a program that year in collaboration with the Inter-American Foundation on culture and development, and I worked with -- I was counting -- maybe seven countries who was all from Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Equador, Haiti and Guatemala. And I actually didn't work with the countries themselves. I worked with a group responsible, the Interamerican Foundation, who believes that culture is a basis for good development, but they are about development in the end. It was a challenge. Changed a lot of our thinking. In 2002, the festival featured a major program, the Silk Road, connecting cultures creating trust whose very title underscores a quality of the participant visitor interaction and also explicitly emphasizes dialogue among the participants themselves and later programs, the concept of cultural conversation began to predominate over and redefine the older cultural conservation agenda. In this new millennium, the festival has also encountered fresh challenges with programs developed in collaboration with U.S. government agencies such as the Forest Service, NASA, the Peace Corp and USDA. Difficult partners, some. Now, I would like to address more specifically how the Colombia, the nature of culture festival program relates to the centers and more importantly to Colombia's intangible cultural heritage policy and practices. I will compare this with the experiences and producing the Peru Pachamama program this year. The Colombia program highlighted the country's rich biocultural diversity. We've explored how Colombia cultural expressions are inextricably connected to their distinctive environments. From the [inaudible] mountains in the Amazon rain forest -- from the [inaudible] mountains to the Amazon rain forest, the rural southeastern plains to the urban centers of [inaudible], the Peru program -- I mean, the Peru program explored difference in connectivity with a focus on cultural communities creatively -- how cultural communities creatively integrate -- no, we don't want that one. Okay. Very complicated, this whole thing that we did with Peru. Every Latin American country must talk about difference. So we have to really explore how differently different this difference was in Peru. So, we went in this -- looking at diversity and connectivity, and our focus was on how cultural communities creatively integrate history, culture and landscape to address today's challenges. History is just [inaudible] there. This is a slide with significant [inaudible] from the Colombia program by incorporating explicitly historical factor. Let me give you a little bit of a back story in the Colombia program. The Colombia program is part of a history of collaboration between the Center and Colombia. In 2003, the Smithsonian [inaudible] recordings [inaudible] by recording traditional Colombian music in some of the same regions that were featured in the festival. In 2007 and '08, the Center started conversations with the Colombian embassy and the Minister of Culture. With Peru, we did not have this lead time before the event and while our conversations were initially with both ministries of culture and commerce and tourism, the Ministry of Commerce and Tourism which was also known as [inaudible] was the only agency to follow through. From the beginning, Colombia envisioned how the Folklife Festival could align with Colombian projects prompted by UNESCO's convention and intangible cultural heritage. And saw the potential for restaging the event in Colombia. They restaged three times. And adapted the festival research base models for the project under the Ministries of Cultures Cultural Heritage Division, the [inaudible] Foundation collaborated in the field work research for the program. Tapping their developing database and intangible cultural heritage, it's really wonderful as a curator to find that this is living database and temporary cultures. From there, you can run with it. In contrast, the field work process in Peru benefited indirectly from the Ministry of Culture's work on cultural heritage through the unsanctioned involvement of the Intangible Cultural Heritage representative and our [inaudible] committee. However, interestingly enough, most of the traditions presented in the Peru program were recognized in [inaudible] list of representive culture heritage for humanity. From the beginning of our collaboration with Colombia, it was agreed that the principles of cultural equity based on respect for practitioners, agency, authority and voice should guide the process. The selection -- where are we still -- yeah. The selection was democratized by prioritizing ordinary people and not the usual stars to represent the culture, region or country. [Inaudible], Director of the ICH Division, observed. And he was also working at the festival. "It would have been easier and cheaper to bring people who are well known, but these 100 participants are quite anonymous and not even Colombians know about them. They are low profile people. In Colombia, there were people who were saying -- there are people who -- these are people who are -- were better -- people who are better qualified and more representative. You're taking a little artisan who nobody knows to represent the country." [Inaudible] continues. "It is quite amazing actually. It had a huge impact. Behind those 100 participants are 100 life stories. And these are stories from cultural regions often excluded in our museums and public programs." In the case of [inaudible], vision and mission were very different from [inaudible]. They could not understand our criteria. They actually told me, "This is very subjective." So, it allowed us to move forward. However, the impact on the participants parallels that of Colombia. Our colleague, Holly Wisler [assumed spelling] who worked with [inaudible] in the Amazon observes, "When they experienced large and continuous [inaudible] that was truly interested and respectful, they began to feel empowered and a sense of pride and self-awareness began to take hold." And this sense of entitlement was expressed by many of the other participants in the federal program. So for the research in Colombia, the Colombian Ministry of Culture formed it's own advisory team representatives from several univerisities and cultural institutions. This group overlapped with the curatorial team led by the [inaudible] Foundation. For the Peru program, we used the same curatorial team format but without the benefit of the Ministry of Culture's institutional imput or the leadership of a Peruvian research organization like [inaudible]. Collaboration was only at an individual level. We were very lucky who these individuals were, but we had different time. In both cases, members of the curatorial team all came to the table with different agendas, goals, values and practices but together we created a common ground. We brainstormed an [inaudible] structure and approach to the program. In Peru because of the tight time schedule, we opted for using a case study approach. So let me give you a little feeling about this field work that we got into. In Peru and Colombia, Center staff led field work research workshops sharing methodological and technical skills we have honed by experience for identifying resources, traditional practices, stories and other expressive forms that would be appropriate for the festival exhibition. In Colombia, followup research trips by the curatorial team -- I'm way behind on this, enjoy them. There we go. Here's the curatorial team stuck on the road. Let's see. In Colombia, followup research trips by the curatorial team helped further develop the Smithsonian [inaudible] partnership and helped us select appropriate presentations for the festival context. The Peru field trips followed the Colombian model. Of the 12 groups featured at the festival, we visit 11. And in each case, we discuss with the potential participants how they would like to present themselves and their cultural tradition. To some degree, they participated as co-curators of their programming. In the case of the 12th group, the [inaudible] in the Amazon we did not visit because of the community's physical inaccessibility. However, Holly, our researcher who had history working with them made several trips to hold meetings with them first to explain the project, then to encourage them to participate and later to work with and select and prepare appropriate presentations. And these evolved even further during the festival itself. At one point, they decided they want to do some healing ceremonies which are usually not done at all in public. They're not even done with researchers. So, very interesting things that festival encourages people to do. And they were very successful actually. We had a Navajo elder that formed part -- was healed in one of these ceremonies. There's Holly. Okay. Several of the field workers for both programs later come to the festival as presenters. Example number one. We found them here in D.C. Provide language interpretation and encourage conservations with the public. Throughout the whole process of research and program development, we strived to create a space where participants have their own voice and authority over their own cultural representation. Beyond the festival, the researcher carried out for the event provides for and offers insights into conservation processes that explicitly show cultural adaptations to environments and how they are transmitted to guarantee the survival and sustainability of the natural and cultural environment. A research database created by our colleagues at [inaudible] to document ICH in Colombia served as a great tool for sharing research as well as for substantiating participant selection and providing context for festival presentations. By packaging it's ICH research processes in this way, the Ministry of Culture can use these resources more effectively and sustain relationships with cultural practitioners and the research methods used in preparation for the festival then inform future ICH research practices. In the case of Peru, it plays out a little differently because it is -- because the program is not accurate in the ICH work carried out by the Ministry of Culture. Our partner, [inaudible], does not understand let alone integrate into their practices our research process, strategies for developing the program or presentation frameworks. However, after the successful reception of the -- however -- After the successful reception of the festival by some Peruvians and non-Peruvian officials and the public in general including Peruvians in the United States, the verdict is still out on it's impact on [inaudible] practices. It is also important to note that Peru's program had and continues to have a very active website producing enumerable behind the scenes and during the festival blogs and now post festival stories and now great Facebook friendships. The festival and cultural policy. What role do these festival programs play in shaping a policy based on principles of respect for cultural diversity, cultural democracy and intercultural dialogue? Colombian journalist, Mario Lamo [assumed spelling] addresses the convergence of diversity, cultural equity and cultural democracy with a very poignant example. "The Smithsonian provided a unique opportunity to bring together in one space representatives of Colombia's cultural and ecological diversity. Where else will you find together an authentic [inaudible] and a Shaman from the Amazon? One with it's history in the satchel and the other with an encyclopedia of knowledge stored in the brain, both humans and incredibly beautiful with much detail. In Peru, co-curator Raphael Baron [assumed spelling] describes this in the case of Peru in terms of the community that participants form at the festival. "We saw it all. We saw it with those encounters [inaudible] geographic cultural extremes, which are difficult to achieve in Peru." For example, here's what [inaudible] bridge building farmers from the Andes and [inaudible] Peruvians from the coast or with the [inaudible] group. Between [inaudible] and [inaudible] or between [inaudible] and [inaudible] native communities and who knows how many other contacts may have been established. [Inaudible] bridge. This is bridge tradition that goes back to the Incan empire that's been continuously rebuilt over the -- every year over the [inaudible] river in [inaudible] . We built it on the national mall and now you can see a piece of it now at the American Indian museum. And this is -- this became a metaphor for the program because of -- here, you see these Afro Peruvians from the coast actually coming and working with farmers and taking these incredibly heavy ropes and raising them up for making the bridge. That's one of the friendships that you still have on Facebook, the Afro Peruvians still communicating with [inaudible] as they're known. In Colombia, the program is not without it's critics questioning the country's expenditure in such a seemingly [inaudible] event. [Inaudible], the program's research coordinator, responded to a local newspaper article noting that this is a worthwhile investment because the program will have a live beyond the ten days at the festivals in the mall, but more importantly, he highlights the significance of this event and expanding a cultural understanding of and for Colombians about the rich yet unrecognized diversity of their own country. This is a quote. "Configuration of this group is a cultural laboratory for recognition of ourselves, an exercise in tolerance and respect, a lesson about what we are. And this parallels Peru very much. It's [inaudible] character is relative. It's exquisite museology and it's participants return to Colombia leaving behind a profound message about their country. The 100 people that participate come specifically from areas now flooded, harrassed, economically depressed, hidden and silenced. Their life experiences of struggle and survival are expressed in traditional processes such as in their daily occupations, their cultural practices and their knowledge, which they hope to convey to their children, friends, migrants, displaced persons and this and other settings for dialogue, to tourists, visitors, academics and journalists." Likewise in the Peru program, participants find a space to address difficult realities, and in the process of achieving recognition of themselves in a dialogue with the visitors leaving behind a profound message. Holly Wisner [assumed spelling] again, reflects on the [inaudible] experience. "Many presentations were a combination of joy and sharing and also the pain of knowing that their culture is diminishing quickly due to decreased numbers and modernization [inaudible]. Yet these difficult emotions served as a catalyst for some deep reflection about who they are as a people and what they want to do about their decreasing traditions and knowledge." Here's a very important one, the bridge. In summary, while the Peru festival process was not integrated into the country's broader cultural heritage safeguarding agenda as in the case of Colombia, it nevertheless offered a rare instance of the multicultural composition of the country. Rafael Viron [assumed spelling] observes. "I think that a presentation such as the festival which demonstrates a cultural diversity of Peru, the adaptability of it's communities to change, it's connectivity as well as strength and survival of it's traditions and environment of social cohesion based on these traditions is something that we do not see or has not been seen in Peru. It sounds simple, but we know that it is not. When the Peru we try to imagine is multicultural Peru who's identity is linked to it's history and traditions, we have to do it on a large scale, and it's all -- all it's complexity, but it's not been possible until now I think and be able to appreciate it in a manageable and understandable dimension. What the Colombian Peru programs have achieved is in large part a result of a practice of negotiation and culture and reciprocal collaboration at many levels. But in particular with the people in the community represented. This approach is not exclusive to the Center for Folklife and Culture Heritage. This practice also energizes new museum making models which engage local community specialists and practitioners in the curatorial processes resulting in deeper intercultural dialogue that contributes to shaping intangible cultural heritage policy from the bottom up." Gracias. [ Applause ] >> Any questions? >> I have a whole lot of questions. >> Olivia Cadaval: Oh, dear. >> I guess, one of my questions is you talked about cultural reasons for the festival. When I think of the Colombia festival, to be honest, I think about [inaudible] free trade agreement. And when I went to the Peru festival this year, I enjoyed it tremendously [inaudible] tourism pressure or presence. >> Olivia Cadaval: Oh, you felt it? >> Very strong. I guess -- I mean, you've talked about the country's cultural perspectives on this. How much have commercial, political and noncultural factors played into the [inaudible] these two festivals or just the festival [inaudible]? >> Olivia Cadaval: It's all there. When the Colombia program was planned, the free trade agreement had not been signed. For curators, it's a very uncomfortable situation. However, we're not purists, and we don't turn away. We're not a political presentation. But, however, what you do have, you provide a platform, and we're not the only platform. There's lots of spaces to also have the debate, platform for people to really speak for themselves and to talk about how some of these policies impact their livelihood. And in fact, Colombia after the festival and after the free trade agreement, there were all those demonstrations in the very area in the highlands for many of our [inaudible] came from who were on strike because of the milk and the dairy -- the dairy industry was being very impacted by. So, we don't take it on. I hope that in some way we do -- like with Colombia, the recognition -- these 100 people were the legitimate people to represent the country and that in fact you did have some of these strikers that do strike later on -- it's messy. It's complicated, and we don't pretend to resolve anything but we do prepare the space where people can feel -- feel their worth and they go ahead and move on. Peru, very interesting. Yes, we fought and fought with [inaudible] what was appropriate to present at the festival. They actually wanted to be selling trips, tourist trips. And we said, "You can't do that." And they argued me to death. I don't know how many times I had to explain to them first of all what case studies were and why we have to pick the case studies we want because they would say, "Well, -- and of course, we always have in the back of our mind that Peru is more than [inaudible] to begin with -- and they would say, "Well, how do you expect any of the visitors to come to the festival to want to go to [inaudible] in the distant?" We couldn't even get there in the Amazon. And we argued what we're doing is really presenting a richer more broader, more diverse Peru that you have here and people can they do their itinerary and in fact, some of the visitors made some deep relationships with some of the participants, and I'm sure they're going to go to places that they would not other visit. But it's not -- it's a very important question because we are implicit and sometimes aiding what we don't want to aid. But as we feel very strongly about providing the platform. And now we -- participants talked about tourism. But yes, they talked about tourism beyond [inaudible]. So thank you. That's a good question. [ Inaudible ] Well, it's not quite that simple. We had like three years to work with Colombia. We had three quarters of a year to work with Peru, so we really had -- and not because we hadn't tried to get the -- everything going earlier. And Peru, it really did not have the cultural institution. What we had is we had this brainstorming session with our curatorial committee that we formed that was very wisely put together. We had historians. We had people in literature. We had reporters, and when we -- we came down with some ideas, and when we sort of presented -- after we sort of played around with this overall theme of diversity and connectivity, that's when they started coming up with ideas. "Oh, you know, why don't we do the [inaudible]?" [Inaudible] have never been presented, and there's really -- out there, you had this old history over there and of course the bridge. The bridge was important because we also did the programming in conjunction with [inaudible] Inka Road exhibit. And the bridge was a common piece there so we sort of sought out what were possible case studies, rather then the communities coming to us. Then we visited the communities and then we got very involved in working with them and figuring out what do we do? What do you do with fishermen? What do you do with bridge builders? [ Inaudible ] That's interesting. [ Inaudible ] Governments are governments. So there's a basic challenge that you're working with these institutional governments that definitely have their own agendas. And sometimes things are happening in country that have nothing to do with you but will impact you terribly. In Mexico, there was a change of director for [inaudible] who had initially given the blessing on the program and before we knew it, she disowned there was any budget on their side. So before I knew it, we worked with the institute, the [inaudible] Anthropology Institution who for some reason really adopted us and found money some place. So the basic government -- the politics of government is always there. You play it differently in different ways. I think we've learned a little bit over the time. But then -- I mean, like right now we may be doing a program with Chile, and we have to identify who -- what is the institution that has all that cultural stuff that we can tap? It may not be -- it may not be the Ministry of Culture. I don't think I answered, but it's yes and no. Yes? [ Inaudible ] Well, you know, in our dream world, we would like to have an endowment for doing the festival because the best and richest programs are really programs that are based on themes. And I've done lots of those, and I've put them together with Scotch tape, and it's always -- they've always been very rewarding, but they've been little programs. Okay, so then what happens is that during the festival -- D.C. has a lot of embassies, and they come to the festival and a lot of them [inaudible] governments are always having anniversaries. So many think -- [inaudible] usually the cultural attache. You've got to go see the festival. You've got to see what they do. And for the price, we're pretty cheap. So people think this may be a good way -- this may be a good time to celebrate or is a good time to bring some attention to the world on some countries. They come to us, but more what we really like to do is really explore thematically. And then when you do a thematic program like I did culture and development -- but countries don't want to collaborate because hey, why should I give you some money when Chile's is also going to be in there? That's not fair. Mexico and the United -- oh, my goodness. It was just impossible. I thought programs would be real easy because I'd take a little bite from everybody. Never. [ Inaudible ] I think I'd love to travel all through Latin America. I mean, to me basically what I really like are thematic programs. Now if it brings lots of -- I worked in the Caribbean too. I'm less interested in looking for Chelinos and [inaudible] and -- looking at broader cultural manifestations that are beyond nationality but maybe I -- little different then that. Okay. >> Can I revise my question? What themes have you not presented that you'd really like to [inaudible]? >> Olivia Cadaval: Ooh. Well, really taking on seriously this idea of intangible cultural heritage, and what it really means not to the policymakers up here, but how this is really reinterpreted by people themselves in their communities. How does it make sense? And how does it really respond to -- there's a lot of needs out there in the world. I mean, working with Colombia, we worked with areas that were always, always flooded, areas in the [inaudible]. I've never seen such poverty in my life. And so you can really have programs not talking about poverty but really -- when you can really work with communities. They can start educating us on what intangible cultural heritage is really about and what policies should be. >> Thank you all for coming and please don't forget to grab the Calendar for Hispanic Heritage Funds outside. Let's give Olivia a big round of applause. >> Olivia Cadaval: Thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.