On What Trying Looks Like

It’s been a bit of a jumble inside my mind in recent days. Just as we were engaged in a pointed community conversation (thank you, Richard Aguirre) about having an exclusively white group of honorees representing the entirety of Elkhart County for Indiana’s Bicentennial, something hopeful was quietly blossoming in Goshen.

After many months of planning, a group of six Goshen residents (diverse in terms of ethnicity, gender and age) unveiled… THE MAPLE CITY MULTICULTURAL FESTIVAL!!

Feel free to applaud here.

LaCasa sponsored the group of residents at an annual leadership conference which included a small grant for a project. The Maple City Multicultural Festival was that project.

If you weren’t at the festival on Saturday, you’ll just have to take my word for it that it was a toe-tapping, drum-pounding, circle-dancing, smile-producing kind of day. And don’t even get me started on the food (my favorite was spicy pork and corn tortillas). You could also applaud here, if you like food.

THIS is the Goshen of my heart, the same Goshen that responded some 20 years ago to the racist KKK by creating the first grassroots-conceived-and-planned Diversity Day. Before that, there was the Goshen College Ethnic Fair (which was wonderful and generous, but somehow different because it lived on the campus of a small, private college).

Diversity Day lasted for many years as a stand-alone event (thank you, Sreekala Rajagopalan and many others), until it was recently reinvented as “Taste of Goshen/Diversity Day” and folded into our wildly successful First Friday’s. Clearly there were (and are) good reasons to solidify such a partnership; but there’s also some loss of identity, loss of history. There is something about a public park on a sunny day full of people with a single focus (celebrating our DIFFERENCES) that puts a spring in my step.

A small group of everyday Goshen residents saw a need to bring people together again in that very particular way (out in a public park, on a sunny day with the sole intention of celebrating one another) and they made it happen.  THANK YOU, Jose Elizalde, Deb Jones, Elias Garcia, Jose Chiquito, Sylvia Rocio Diaz, Mark Daniels — and many, many more.

We are not there yet, to that place of power-sharing and mutual understanding. I know that. But surely we’re inching in the right direction. Oh, please say YES: In the same week, we had an awesome, inclusive event in Goshen AND the Elkhart County Bicentennial Committee offered apologies and remedies for what in years past would have been accepted as a standard result.

We can lament the actions and attitudes of those who would separate, or we can celebrate the warmth and companionship of those who would have us join together across a million possible divides.

Today, I choose to celebrate the unifiers.