Students from multiple clubs at San Jose City College came together to host the Heritage Festival on Nov. 19. The Heritage Festival was organized by six different clubs, including Salaam Namaste, Filipino Student Association and the Burmese Student Association.

The event featured food from India, Mexico and the Philippines, such as caramelized banana leaf wraps and student art sales. Also involved were performances ranging from

cultural dances to songs played with a guitar.

Members of the Latinx Unity Zone, better known as LUZ, performed a Folklórico dance, which involved skirts and using plastic swords as props. Ruby Garcia-Aguilar, an 18-year-old in her second year at SJCC and current president of LUZ, gave additional details on the dance.

“It portrays the agriculture traditions of the Mexican people in Jalisco,” she said. “Many of them harvest the sugarcane, and so they use a tool called ‘los machetes’, which is kind of like a knife.”

The song that was danced to is called “Los Machetes”, with a machete being a long blade used for agricultural purposes.

Garcia-Aguilar, who’d known a bit about Folklórico, raised the idea of a dance performance for the festival. At first, there were only a couple of people who’d shown interest in performing, but she managed to get more people on board quickly.

“We spread the word, and a lot of people were interested in that,” she said. “So it’s just something within the club of LUZ that came out, and it was nice seeing a lot of people interested in Folklórico.” With only a month left until the event, they rehearsed twice a week in order to master the dance.

The group spearheading the festival was the K-pop club. Lucia Sanchez-Lopez is an English major at SJCC, and is also the club’s social media manager.

“Strange,” she said about her experience promoting the event. “A little difficult. I didn’t make the poster, but I did post it online and I did talk about it a lot in my classes … we mentioned it a lot at the ASG meetings.”

With so many clubs involved in organizing the festival, one might wonder how they managed to set it up. Garcia-Aguilar made mention of what inspired them to put the event on, and how that process went.

“We wanted to take that initiative, us the students, to bring something to our own community,” she said.

Garcia-Aguilar also disclosed that a cultural festival held in the spring semester had been organized mostly by ASG and staff, whereas the recent Heritage Festival was organized by clubs who wanted to show that they could work together.

Sarayu Rayapural, the president of the K-pop club, expanded on this.

“We were relying a lot on trying to get experiences from different people who’ve already done events, so we can get an idea of how we can go about doing this one,” she explained. “We often went to a few of the ASG people and asked them questions about what we can do about certain things.”

Communication between the clubs involved was extremely important, too. “We did this thing where we would send a huge text to the different group chats of people that were involved … so that everyone is on the same page,” Rayapural said.

Rayapural also mentioned how many of the people involved were first year students. Perhaps, with the knowledge and experience gained from organizing this festival, collaborations between multiple clubs with these students at the helm will prove to be successful.