Fan­dango jaro­cho is a four-hundred-year-old tra­di­tion from Ver­acruz, Mex­ico born from the encounter between Euro­pean, Indige­nous, African, and Arab cul­tures. After being can­on­ized by the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment, El Nuevo Movimiento Jaranero reclaimed the musi­cal cel­e­bra­tion of fan­dango in the 1970’s as a space for com­mu­nity trans­for­ma­tion and empow­er­ment. Over the last twenty years, Chi­cano and Mex­i­can com­mu­ni­ties in the U.S. have engaged with com­mu­ni­ties in Ver­acruz to use fan­dango as a tech­nol­ogy for com­mu­nity build­ing and social jus­tice that tran­scends national borders.

The Seat­tle Fan­dango Project joins this move­ment by using the fan­dango to build and trans­form com­mu­nity. As a tech­nol­ogy (in the ana­log), fan­dango con­tains pro­to­cols within dance, music, verse, and par­tic­i­pa­tion that pro­vide new chan­nels of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, con­nec­tion, and under­stand­ing. Peo­ple find them­selves through musi­cal inter­ac­tion with oth­ers, and both indi­vid­u­ally and com­mu­nally real­ize new pos­si­bil­i­ties and ways of being. This is con­viven­cia, to con­vene and coex­ist. Once peo­ple leave fan­dango, this new sense of self car­ries over to other parts of their lives.