With the community’s guidance and support, we are able to hold space at La Peña for a rich and broad spectrum of programs that honor and enact our mission of promoting social justice and intercultural understanding through the arts. These events range from concerts to panel discussions, community gatherings to masterclasses, film screenings to art exhibitions, fundraisers, and more, which are divided into four impact areas, each of them represented by two programming pillars:
1. Cultural Continuity & Preservation
Sustaining cultural traditions, stewarding community memory, and supporting intergenerational knowledge transfer through programming and archival work.
Preservation & Promotion of Roots Arts: La Peña is a cultural homeplace where every week, children and adults study the musical and performance traditions that have nourished struggles of resistance, sustained cultures in the face of oppression, and contributed to the well-being of communities here in the Bay Area as well as in Latin America and beyond. We offer roots arts classes and special workshops led by both local and traveling culture bearers that have studied and practiced these cultural traditions, including Bomba y Plena, Son Jarocho, Capoeira, Afro-Cuban Rumba, Afro-Peruvian Dance, and more.
Community Archives & Cultural Heritage: La Peña’s Archive is an ever-growing compendium of physical and audiovisual material that has accumulated over our history. It represents La Peña’s living memory and an homage to the communities that within and beyond our physical space have given strength to movements of liberation. Through digitizing and cataloguing workshops, temporary exhibitions, and community gatherings, we aim to build a cultural archive that is relevant and accessible to the community, both online and onsite.
2. Community Access & Belonging
Ensuring affordable, inclusive access to culturally relevant space and programming that fosters connection, belonging, and collective care.
Safety & Celebration: La Peña prioritizes the creation of safe and welcoming spaces in which our communities can gather, celebrate their whole selves, and uplift each other with tenderness and respect. These priorities are enacted through choices made in every aspect of our programming –including decisions that range from physical accommodations and sliding-scale tickets to being intentional around which individuals and groups we partner with–, plus training our event staff on various forms of emergency preparedness, and honoring the Community Expectations that we have printed inside our facility and introduce verbally at each of our events.
Memory & Historical Grounding: La Peña is rooted in the international solidarity movements that responded to the 1973 U.S.-backed coup in Chile that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende and inaugurated seventeen years of dictatorship. Today, upholding that legacy of cultural and political rebellion, we sustain annual programs that keep our history alive in order to ground our present in the lives of our ancestors and pass our dreams and knowledge onto the new generations. Our annual September 11th Memorial, Día de Muertos Celebration, and ThangsTaken: Rethinking Thanksgiving are good examples of this type of events.
3. Civic Engagement & Political Education
Using art and culture to support dialogue, learning, and movement-building around social and political issues.
Political Education: We push culture forward by providing shared learning opportunities, with various pedagogical models exploring complex and timely topics that shape the way we interpret the present and imagine the future. Our monthly film series called When We Win and our partnership with the Friends of La Peña Immigrant Rights Committee are primary examples of this pillar.
Advancement of Grassroots Social Justice Movements: Cultural work provides liberation movements with a pathway through which we imagine and materialize radical change. La Peña engages these processes both in partnership with and independent of institutional forces, in order to cultivate creative growth in Bay Area political movement spaces. We nurture social justice movements through political education sessions, panel discussions, fundraisers, strategy meetings, and free workshops for the community.
4. Artist & Cultural Worker Support
Providing paid opportunities, mentorship, training, and platforms that help artists and cultural workers develop and sustain their practice.
Support for Local & Emerging Artists: With more than five decades of experience, La Peña is proud to continue providing platforms for local and emerging artists through a lens of equity and inclusivity. This includes our performing arts open mic series and arts and craft fairs, which all occur multiple times throughout each year. We particularly celebrate and prioritize local and emerging artists who are connected to liberation movements and those from historically oppressed backgrounds.
Professional Development: La Peña provides materials and paid training opportunities for both salaried and event staff in order to equip them with the tools to thrive in their roles and be culturally grounded while making sure that we are professionally attentive to building a safe space within each of our events that is true to our values. Likewise, La Peña’s on-the-job AV trainings help students and young professionals gain live recording skills that contribute to undermining systemic racism in the cultural and media spheres by supporting the production, dissemination, and consumption of nuanced, humanizing BIPOC stories.