• About UANews
• Sign up for News
• Resources for Media
• Calendar
• Contact Us

UA shows commitment to O'odham culture by hosting the event and providing workshops for youth on Waila music.

By Rebecca Ruiz-McGill,
May 29, 2008

The Waila Festival Committee and the Arizona Historical Society invite the public to join members of the Tohono O’odham Nation in celebrating their annual dance and music festival, the Waila Festival.

The festival will be held at The University of Arizona’s Bear Down Field which is adjacent to the UA Football stadium to accommodate thousands who attend the event each year. It takes its name from the Spanish word for dance, "baile."

Last year 6,000 people attended the festival, now in its 20th year. Tohono O’odham bands offer participants the opportunity to dance to waila (polka), chote (schottische), mazurka and cumbia tunes. Over the previous 19 years, the festival has presented 93 bands to a combined audience of just over 100,000 celebrants.

According to the Arizona Historical Society, the Waila is the social dance music of the Tohono O’odham, or "Desert People," and evolved from the music of earlier acoustic fiddle bands that adapted European and Mexican tunes heard in northern Sonora. The Tohono O'odham Nation, located west of Tucson and just under 3 million acres (about the size of Connecticut), is the second largest Indian reservation in the U.S. The O'odham share a 60-mile common boundary with Mexico.

Angelo Joaquin Jr. and Karen Seger are the founding directors of the Tucson Waila Festival. Joaquin is a program coordinator for the Arizona State Museum and grew up with the Waila tradition.

The traditional setting for waila music is an all-night feast, or "piast," held to celebrate saints’ days, weddings, birthdays and graduations. “My father, Angelo Joaquin Sr., was in a Waila band called the Joaquin Brothers. I never played an instrument but became very involved with promotions for their music. Over time I felt that the traditional part of the festival was being lost – people didn’t listen reflectively to the music anymore so I began to study the history of the Waila to bring greater understanding of its importance to the community,” said Joaquin, a member of the Tohono O’odham tribe.

His studies led him to local, regional and national folk festivals to learn how to best present a cultural event, and 19 years ago set the wheels in motion for Tucson’s first Waila Festival.

Joaquin keeps the tradition alive by encouraging the artistic development of Waila music and musicians through the festival's Waila workshops for children and youth ages 10 through 20. The workshops have been attended by more than 75 students throughout Southern Arizona and are supported and held at the UA School of Music.

The event opens the Tohono O’odham culture for appreciation and enjoyment, and through the workshops and the festival, which are held at the UA campus, it opens the opportunity for the Tohono O’odham as a people to familiarize themselves and gain a sense of comfort within the Southern Arizona community. Joaquin sees this as a major mission of the Waila Festival, for only a mere 70 years ago he says children were told by their elders to run into the tohono and hide if a motor vehicle was heard approaching the village.

“Motor vehicles represented Me:ligan (Americans or white people), who owned cars and forcibly took children away from the tribe to missionary schools in Tucson to be assimilated into the dominant culture. The festival serves as a source to strengthen Tohono O’odham cultural identity and to heal the occurrences of the past,” said Joaquin.

The free event is sponsored by the Arizona Historical Society, the UA School of Music, Desert Diamond Casinos, Pepsi-Cola Bottling Co., Native Seeds/SEARCH and Tohono O'odham Senior Services.