Heritage Area – New Jersey Folk Festival

The Heritage Area is presents artists and community groups up close and personal. Come have a chat with an artist or get to know about a cultural group in New Jersey. Join us for short presentations that spotlight each of our artists throughout the day.

CoLAB Arts Tent

From Each Little Seed

Cultivating Community is a bilingual exhibit in Spanish and English about the creation of a comic book that tells the story of the New Brunswick Oaxacan community’s use of the gardens. The exhibit features excerpts from the comic, written and illustrated by Susi Pineda and Courtney Menard, as well as oral history quotes from the gardeners themselves. They discuss their lives in Oaxaca, Mexico, the importance of having a love for land, and how they are able to continue their cultural traditions in the community gardens. The exhibit is co-presented by NJFF and coLAB Arts and additionally co-sponsored by the Rutgers University School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Middlesex County, and the Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences Department of American Studies.

Alessandra Williams and Mason Gross Dance Students

Alessandra Williams and accompanist Emmanuel Solano will lead a workshop with dance students from the Mason Gross School of the Arts on land acknowledgement through dance. Drawing on her work as a dancer primarily with Ananya Dance Theatre, Alessandra will lead dancers and audience members in a movement activity that asks how we can thoughtfully engage with the process of exploring the relationships of people with the histories of the land, acknowledge those who are its traditional stewards, and encounter artistic traditions with creative urgency and humility.

Teatro Esperanza

Art

Students created a devised piece of theater with original music for the 2023 New Jersey Folk Festival. A vignette memory play based on oral histories. Students read oral histories and wrote poetic text as well as dialogue inspired by that oral history. They worked to bring the poetic text to life through music. Source material from the comic book Home, The Seeds in My Hands by Susana Plotts-Pineda and illustrated by Courtney Menard, provided a window into the immigrant experiences and agricultural traditions of Oaxacan immigrants in New Brunswick.

Advocacy

What does it mean to plant a seed? This project builds on the ongoing oral history research and advocacy work with the Esperanza Neighborhood Project with New Brunswick Tomorrow and the Unity Square Community Center and neighborhood. The comic book, with chapter structure following the four seasons, features oral histories with community gardeners from Landers Garden and Feaster Park Garden, and the organizers who created and steward it. Students worked with the idea of the garden as a place for respite and mental health, and as a vehicle to pass on history and heritage through the generations of immigrant families.

Community

In the middle of New Brunswick, the 57-block Esperanza neighborhood serves as the city’s main gateway and port of entry for majority Latine immigrants seeking a better life in the United States. Unity Square is a community organizing and social concerns initiative that works to empower community members and catalyze change in a 36 block residential neighborhood of New Brunswick, NJ. Teatro Esperanza is a resident Spanish language theater project with the mission to engage with the contemporary storytelling of the Spanish language community in New Brunswick.

Middlesex County Tent

Share Your Foodways!

What are “Foodways”?

Foodways are the context and meaning around food: why and when we eat what we eat.

What is “Share Your Foodways” and why is Middlesex County involved?

In this series, local cooks share recipes and food traditions that are important to them. For each cooking tutorial and recipe set we produce, we give 100 free ingredient kits to families through the REPLENISH food pantry network.
At the Arts Institute of Middlesex County, our Division of Folklife and Cultural Heritage celebrates the many ways that Central New Jersey residents express their identities, including music, dance, rituals, crafts, language, and food!

How can I participate?

We’re glad you asked! You can share your own recipes and food stories by filling out our Recipe Card, and online on social media with the hashtag #ShareYourFoodways and tag @ArtsInstituteMC.
To watch cooking tutorials, print out SYF recipe cards, read about our guest cooks, and learn how you can support REPLENISH, click here!

Share Your Foodways Collaboration with the Library of Congress

In 2022, Share Your Foodways was invited to collaborate with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress on three new Share Your Foodways films. You can watch all of them on the Library of Congress YouTube channel, and read an introductory behind-the-scenes blog post blog and about the first, second, and third films in the series.

Chef Bios

Carolina Moratti

Share Your Foodways Host and Chef Carolina Moratti is a passionate community leader and advocate for food security. Having grown up in family restaurants in Arequipa, Peru and now living in New Brunswick, NJ, she carries a deep understanding of the power of food to create and maintain community. From 2020-2022, she hosted a weekly bilingual “Cooking Outside the Box” Facebook Live program showcasing creative ways to cook with food pantry boxes and featuring a roster of diverse local foodways experts. She is cofounder of Sisterwork, a bilingual community organization dedicated to breaking cycles of intergenerational poverty through educational access, workshops, and resources that promote economic mobility. She was a longtime volunteer at Elijah’s Promise Food Pantry, a multi-year volunteer for the Fish Food Bank, and spearheaded the “Birthday in a Box” project, which provides a custom birthday cake and presents for children affected by the ongoing Covid-19 economic crisis.

Nasrin Rafiq – Afghani Foodways

Nasrin Rafiq is a relative newcomer to New Jersey and leader in local efforts that serve to welcome recently resettled Afghan refugees. Rafiq grew up in Kabul, Afghanistan, surrounded by the aromatic foods, vibrant textiles, and exquisitely crafted jewelry of Central Asia. A woman of many talents, she works tirelessly to promote women’s empowerment and financial independence and is also famous among family and friends for her shir berenj and qabuli pulao dishes. She was featured in the first film of our 2022 collaboration with the Library of Congress, Folklife, Foodways, and Women’s Empowerment in Afghanistan with Nasrin Rafiq.

Despite the rise of the Taliban, Rafiq worked for more than 15 years to develop women’s empowerment projects, leveraging folklife to create financial independence for Afghan women. Often working with single mothers, Rafiq worked with groups of women all over Afghanistan to mobilize their knowledge of traditional art forms to make textiles, jewelry, and other personal adornment for sale on the international market. She also worked with women farmers to transform former poppy fields into fields for growing the saffron crocus, which supported hundreds of families and created a viable alternative to the opioid industry, an effort that continues today. She has led programs for the United Nations, USAID, and the World Bank, and created jobs for more than 1,000 women.Since moving to the U.S. in 2017, she has continued to connect Afghan expats and refugees around the country, and provides an important connection between her heartland and new home. Read more about her story on the Library of Congress Folklife Today blog site.

Estela and Lourdes Rojas: Oaxacan Foodways

Lourdes and Estela Rojas have been carrying on their family food traditions at their restaurants in New Brunswick since arriving from Oaxaca decades ago. Estela and her husband Felix own Costa Chica Restaurant, one of the earliest Oaxacan restaurant businesses established in New Brunswick. Since helping her family at the restaurant at an early age and going on to earn her own degree in food services, Lourdes has opened her own restaurant just a few blocks from her parents, El Gallo Felix.

In 2021, Share Your Foodways partnered with the New Jersey Folk Festival to produce a special podcast episode on Estela and Lourdes; you can find their family recipes and watch cooking tutorials online on the Share Your Foodways webpage!

Michelle Washington Wilson

Michelle Washington Wilson is a writer, performer, and storyteller from rural Newtonville, New Jersey, and is the featured chef of the most recent Share Your Foodways collaboration with the New Jersey Folk Festival. You can hear her family stories, watch her make a simple “After School Special” Mac & Cheese, a rich Seafood Mac & Cheese, and a “Jersey Fresh” Fruit Cocktail on the NJ Folk Festival YouTube page—or watch the full video!

Chef Michelle Wilson earned an Associates in Applied Science in Culinary Arts from the Academy of Culinary Arts in Mays Landing NJ, and has connected her culinary skills with theatrics and delivered a humorous punchline to The Gospel Brunch at the House of Blues where she entertained as the Church Lady announcer.

Michelle has been writing and telling stories for more than 30 years. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Speech and Theater Education-from Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. She has shared stories with audiences throughout North America and the Caribbean, and is an active member of NJ Storytelling Network and The National Association of Black Storytellers (NABS).

Ms. Wilson has to her credit a two-act play “Dusty Days Gone, the story of the people who harvest the crops.” It is the story of migrant workers on farms during the 1950’s. Michelle, a Certified Life Skills Instructor, has presented at several conferences on Women’s Studies, Family Literacy and Adult Education including the prestigious East Tennessee University Conference on Early Childhood Education in Johnson City, Tennessee. She is featured in two books including Legendary Locals of The Pine Barrens of New Jersey, by the late Karen Riley and Small Towns Black Lives by Professor Wendel White.

Professionally, Ms. Wilson contributes to the quality of Federally funded Afterschool Programs as a Monitor and Evaluator of 21st Century Community Learning Center Programs throughout the South Jersey region. Ms. Wilson served as an Atlantic County Library Commissioner for 18 years and taught as an Adjunct Professor in the Social Sciences Department at Atlantic Cape Community College. Michelle continues to keep the tradition of storytelling alive, “Because everybody has something that they do well.”