Need country-specific activities for a Hispanic-American heritage event.

September 25, 2009 10:31 PM

Need country-specific activities for a Hispanic-American heritage event.

I'm coordinating a dinner celebration for Hispanic-American heritage month. The current schedule is to have the introduction, a guest speaker and a band.

Each table the guests will be sitting at is going to have a flag representing one of the South/Central American countries. The plan was to have a table activity portion, where the people sitting at the table will be read a brief statement about their table's country, and then do some sort of activity that represents a tradition from that country. For example, the Mexican table will have a pinata, and the people sitting at the table will actually break the pinata for the kids present at the event. For Colombia, we were thinking of offering the adults sitting at the table, cups of Columbian coffee. Unfortunately, that's about as far as we've come.

I've been trying to Google traditions or activities that are specific to other countries, but I'm either unable to find anything specific, or unable to find something that can actually be turned into a short table activity (We can't exactly have people celebrating Cinco de Mayo)

So, can some of you more culturally-aware people help me out?

posted by jimdanger to society & culture (4 comments total)

Ecuador: BBQ a guinea pig, wear panama hats,
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:41 PM on September 25

Nitpick: Mexico is in North America. Say "Latin America". It's easier. (And then ignore the other nitpickers who will say that technically Latin America should include Quebec.)

I think you're going to have a very hard time here because few things really split along country lines. I'm having an extremely hard time coming up with even food items that are eaten in one place in South America that are not extremely common in at least one other country there. Once you get into activities, you're often drawing from cultural lines even more likely to cross national borders because you're either coming from Spanish traditions or from indigenous groups.

For example, you'll find a lot of foods, cultural traditions, etc, that are fairly unique to Andean culture, but they aren't unique to one country, so you might find very similar things in Bolivia, Peru and Chile but you won't see that same thing in Mexico.

How many tables are you having, here? There are ~20 countries in Latin America. Also, budget could be a real concern. Maybe it would be better to come up with one Latin American tradition of some variety for each table, and from a wide variety of geographic regions, and then just mention which countries that activity is practiced in? That would be much simpler.
posted by larkspur at 2:22 AM on September 26 [1 favorite]

Honestly, as someone who has lived in Latin America, I find these kinds of "in Mexico you break the piñata; in Argentina you tango" events kind of actively painful in the way they reduce such complex places to a single stereotype.

Certainly things like dance, food, and music can be somewhat country-specific. Tacos are more of a Mexican thing; dancing samba more Brazilian. But cumbia and reggaeton are popular across many countries, and coffee is grown in places other than Colombia. So you need to be a bit careful in this sort of reductive cultural nationalism that you are actually somewhat correct.
posted by Forktine at 6:45 AM on September 26

Might I suggest ditching the games/traditions and reading poetry or singing songs from each country? English translations are available for many of these. You could recite Neruda from Peru, Borges from Argentina, Octavio Paz from Mexico, etc. Something like this would do more to actually educate people than breaking a piñata, in my opinion.
posted by JJ86 at 7:19 AM on September 26 [2 favorites]