Culture keeper, youth steward, exercise store, arts center – many names relate to the business of Casa Circulo Cultural on Middlefield Road south of Costco in Redwood City.
One of them is particularly interesting: negotiate.
Aided by partial sponsorship from the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, the nonprofit organization offers low-cost classes in art, music, video production, salsa and folk dancing, sewing, boxing, taekwondo, cooking, gardening , Spanish, English and a potpourri of creative activities for young people and adults from 5 to 90 years old.
Perhaps the greatest fame is how, in just a decade, Casa Circulo Cultural has elevated Mexico’s Día de los Muertos – Day of the Dead – celebration to a community event in Redwood City. By now, most locals understand that Día de los Muertos is a joyous celebration of the living rooted in Mayan, Aztec, and Olmec tradition dating back a thousand years and more. (The Olmecs, who colonized the tropical lowlands of Mexico, are credited with the first great civilization of Mesoamerica.)
For the founder of the center, Verónica Escámez, the culture of “Día” is a source of respect, the source from which all things flow, a stream of blessings for the ancestors, the living, friends, family and community, regardless of their ethnic composition. who celebrate it. For example, the annual November 1 and 2 Día de los Muertos festivities in the San Mateo County Historical Association’s Courthouse Plaza and adjoining museum featured Chinese and Russian altars honoring and nurturing the dead.
A continuous evolution
Casa Circulo Cultural has evolved tremendously since its beginnings as a theater troupe in 2009. “The adults who came on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays started making ornaments for the group,” recalls Escámez. “Little by little, they started doing dance lessons and – poof! – now here we are.
Escámez says each Día celebration shows what customers have learned over the past year. Art and painting classes incorporate masks and decorations. Dance rehearsals include Folklorico routines typical of Mexican culture performed at Día events. Sewing classes teach the technique of making costumes and accessories. And video production builds skills to document events.
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This story appeared in the July issue of Climate Magazine.
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The deliberate economy of effort helps explain the outsized influence of the Casa Circulo Cultural. San Francisco is now part of his sphere. About 15 years ago, Martha Rodríguez-Salazar, curator of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, helped present the orchestra’s first Día de los Muertos celebration. She continued to expand it and bring in more community partners, which 11 years ago included the dancers and artists of Casa Circulo Cultural.
The Redwood City organization is now at the heart of the Symphony’s Día events. On its website, the ensemble describes its partner as “a vibrant multidisciplinary arts organization dedicated to creating cultural programming that reflects the experiences of Latin American communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.”
On the day of the symphony’s performance, youth and adults from the Casa Circulo Cultural march—in regalia they have made themselves—in the Día procession down Grove Street in San Francisco. Handmade decorations by Casa Circulo Cultural patrons adorn the windows and walls of Davies Symphony Hall, as do oversized masks, skulls and other objects painted in the style of 19th-century Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada . In the past, patrons of the symphony have also been offered a photo op in the Casa Circulo Cultural’s “Catrines y Catrinas” photo booth, a clever deployment of the skills in painting, sculpture, sewing and photography learned at the center. (The Spanish word “catrine” refers to a well-dressed person. “Catrina” describes an elegantly dressed skeleton.)
Connection with a famous sculptor
Among the sculptures presented each year in the concert hall are several works by Mexico City-born artist Fernando Escartiz, who now lives in the area. Last fall, hordes of visitors photographed his ‘We Are Stardust’ Día installation, a monumental sculptural work of art that looked like a meteorite had crashed into the roof of the Courthouse art gazebo Square.
Escartiz’s intention was to capture the moment of impact and destruction. It demonstrated, he told the Almanac newspaper, that “there has to be death for there to be life.”
Widely admired in Mexico, Escartiz is the lead artist of Casa Circulo Cultural. His presence in the center is impossible to miss. High on an interior wall, bas-reliefs of colorful fish are arranged around an easily recognizable replica of the underwater vessel from the film and song immortalized by the Beatles. The message is clear: we all live in a yellow submarine.
A family business
It may have made a difference that it was his mother who asked Escartiz to volunteer. As doña of her family – and Casa Circulo Cultural – Verónica Escámez can be persuasive. His invitations are particularly convincing for those close to him, so much so that at the centre, “close” and “volunteer” are practically synonymous. And if Casa Circulo Cultural seems to be running in creative overdrive, it’s because the family and other staff members are hyper-creative.
Anna Lee Mraz Bartra is Escámez’s stepdaughter. She has a doctorate in sociology and was a 2020-21 fellow in the Research Justice at the Intersections program at Mills College, which was due to complete its planned merger with Northeastern University on July 1. She is also CEO of Peninsula 360 Press, a news outlet for the Latino community and teaches media lessons there for children and adults. Mraz Bartra also recently honored Escámez with a granddaughter.
Peninsula 360 Press started in 2020. It was founded by one of Escámez’s sons, journalist Manuel Ortiz Escámez, who is also a board member of Casa Circulo Cultural – unpaid, as are all organization administrators. Administrative advisor and board member Florence Ortiz is Escámez’s granddaughter, and program aide Sofia Ortiz is Escámez’s cousin.
Another son, taekwondo instructor Gerardo Ortiz, teaches adults and also children from the age of five. Its teams have reached competitive levels and its martial arts students have collected numerous gold medals.
Others – unrelated to Escámez – at Casa Circulo Cultural include Arturo Samayoa, who teaches salsa dancing; Roxana Escamilla, Sonia Martinez and Hanny Crespo, art; Asael Merlin, piano; Andrés Garcia, guitar; Roberto Cruz, singing; Gretel Gagnon, cooking and gardening; Magaly Lopez, sewing; Asminda Zavala, embroidery; Daniel Saldivar, boxing; and Wendy Segovia, program coordinator.
But the family started it all. And, like many family business stories, this one started with a dead end.
restart
By the end of 2008, Escámez had lost his job with an immigration lawyer in San Francisco. In just an instant, she had nowhere to go and nothing to do. In Mexico City, she was a long-time teacher and principal of a government-sponsored school. (She came to the United States in 1989.) Now in Redwood City, she wanted to have fun. In May 2009, she started a theater troupe in her garage for “people in my community who normally have nothing to do but work”.
Often it was noisy – and that was a problem. “The noise,” she laughs, “was something my neighbors didn’t want to hear. So they started to send the police. We were rehearsing to the point where we knew the police would come, (and then) we started singing “Happy Birthday”.
In December 2009, she approached Redwood City Community Services Director Bruce Utecht about using the former Veterans Memorial Senior Center on Madison Avenue as theater space. She got it in exchange for her help with the bingo games there. Two years later, Casa Circulo Cultural moved to a warehouse on East Bayshore Road in Redwood City. Then, in June of last year, the organization used small grants and community help to acquire its new home in North Fair Oaks.
Of the center’s evolution, Escámez says, “Adults started bringing kids to rehearsals because they had no place to take them. I thought, ‘Well, let’s see what we can do.’ So we did something with the kids too. On Saturday, we started giving lessons. We had adults, we had children, and one thing led to another.
“Fortunately, we had a lot of volunteers,” she continues. “One wanted to teach art, the other wanted to teach dance, and one of my sons was doing sculpture, well, we just got together. Since then, we have continued to grow.
Teaching Department
“Our main goal is, through the arts, to engage children in the community and inspire them to become leaders,” says Escámez. “The Hispanic community is a bit more shy than other cultures. So, for example, if we are organizing an event, our animators are usually the children. »
The centre’s linguistic approach also reflects its mission to bring families and cultures together.
“All of our children speak English,” notes Escámez. “When they are around 11, they start to lose contact with their parents who don’t speak English.” Thus, the children of the center receive instruction in Spanish and the adults in English. “We try to connect the two cultures,” Escámez explains, “and make the little ones proud of where they come from.”
The approach is not bicultural. It’s not cross-cultural. This is the Casa Circulo Cultural-Cultural. As much as the center cultivates Day of the Dead awareness, it respects other traditions. In addition to honoring Día de los Muertos, children also celebrate Halloween.
“They need to know all of their cultures,” Escámez says. “They must also know all their traditions, so that they know the difference.”
