The Boca De Oro festival of Literacy, Visual, and Performing Arts & Culture is a premiere literacy event that combines performance, spoken, visual and written words from local and national authors and poets. For the past five years the festival has brought together Community Engagement partners with the Santa Ana Business Council, Santa Ana Unified School District, Santa Ana College, and the City of Santa Ana to engage thousands of residents, students, and members of the community through readings, panels, workshops, creative experiences, and theatrical performances led by renowned literary figures.
Throughout the past two years, the festival pivoted to accommodate the flexibility necessitated by the global pandemic. During that time many stayed home dreaming of the chance to collaborate and celebrate the arts once again. This shared wish inspired this year's theme of “‘Together We Rise’ honoring the spirit of healing, recovery, rebirth, and reconnection through the arts amidst the pandemic.”
Attending this year as a keynote speaker is local Santa Ana author Marytza Rubio who found her passion for storytelling in a seemingly unconventional manner after she began reading tarot cards as a teenager. She explains that “for me, the cards helped me understand patterns in human behavior and trained me how to see a multitude of potential outcomes depending on a variety of choices. In that way, storytelling has taught me the value of listening and paying attention to what is not said, but revealed in actions instead.” For her, the art of storytelling has been a reliable way to prolong her visits in those temporary worlds which give her the space to be as expansive or precise as she wants to be.
This isn’t the first year Rubio has participated in the Boca de Oro festival. In the past she created a brick & mortar lending library (Makara Center for the Arts) where they opened up the space for different activities including an Alice Coltrane listening party, a Sister Spit literary reading, and an interactive musical performance with plants among other things. This year she was moved to learn that she had been invited to participate as this year's keynote speaker for a variety of reasons, the main reason being that “this year’s theme of restoration and healing resonated with me. It is the first year the festival is back in person after going virtual last year, so I want to do my best to celebrate the people who are honoring their curiosity and spending their weekend exploring literature and art.”
Rubio admits that when she first started writing, she wanted to achieve all the literary accomplishments: fancy awards, three-book deal, Guillermo del Toro wanting to make movies out of her stories. However, she quickly realized that while those opportunities would be great achievements, she didn’t need them to continue writing and making up new stories. To her, the best part about being a writer is having the ability to transform an overheard conversation or accidental touch into a wholly imagined world.
If there’s one piece of advice that Rubio hopes aspiring authors know is the importance of gaining exposure. Not exposure of their work to an audience, but for them to be exposed to as many reference points as possible, beyond the typical resources like books, live music, and movies. She urges creatives to dig deeper into society and nature by “going birdwatching or talking to an elder, to learn new rhythms of song and speech.” At the end of the day she hopes that this festival is not only beneficial for storytellers but all attendees, as it can be a fun and inviting place where artists can share their work, readers can meet the creators behind the art, and similar experiences and interests can bring people together!
This annual inclusive event returns in-person this Saturday on March 5th and is free to attend. There will be over 100 authors as well as 3,000 visual and performing artists who will participate in twenty six locations throughout the Santa Ana Arts District.
For more information on Boca de Oro please visit: bocadeoro.org, Facebook at facebook.com/bocadeorofest, or Instagram @bocadeorofest.