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Berklee College tunes into Latino culture

E-mail | Print | Comments () Posted by Roy Greene November 19, 2010 11:06 AM

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By Carolyn Vallejo, Globe Correspondent

The Berklee College of Music sits in a neighborhood with one of the smallest Latino populations in Boston, but this month its Latin Music and Culture celebration has turned Back Bay into one of the top spots in the city to experience Latino culture.

Berklee College photo

A recent performance of the Latin Music and Culture Celebration

The celebration, currently in its 12th year, aims to promote Latino culture with performances by musicians from 30 Latin American countries. While the concerts are being staged around the Berklee campus and Back Bay, the events attract audiences from throughout Boston. (For details on remaining events, click here.)

“We don’t want to say we’re just Back Bay,” said Jane Stachowiak, Berklee’s director of Student Wellness and Health Promotion and coordinator of the events. “We want the celebration to be very accessible and very open, and also tantalizing – to the whole city.”

According to the 2000 census, just 4 percent of Back Bay’s population is made up of Latinos. By comparison, some other Boston neighborhoods have a more prominent Latino presence, such as East Boston, with more than 13 times the number of Latinos as Back Bay.

Dewin Hernandez, a student coordinator for the celebration, says that Berklee is a great institution to expose the Latino culture to Boston despite Back Bay’s low Latino population, as Berklee has a high number of international Latino students.

“It’s a nice thing to see that the Berklee community is exposing this sort of music and culture to the community,” said Hernandez, who also says he notices some separation in Boston between cultures in different neighborhoods.

“I wouldn’t call it segregated, but you can really see where different cultures are populated in Boston,” he said. “It’s cool that Berklee is bridging that gap with music.”

Hernandez has been a student at Berklee since the fall of 2008 and is dual-majoring in music education and music business.

Sara Rivera, an administrative assistant for the Latino Student Cultural Center at Northeastern University, also says that the celebration – and a Latino presence – is important for the entire city.

“I wouldn’t say that the celebration is important because of the low number of Latinos [in Back Bay],” Rivera said. “I would say it’s important, period. There is so much history engrained in Latin music.”

Rivera says she remembers a larger Latino community in the area in decades past, especially in the South End.

But Stachowiak says the celebration’s versatility should make these events appealing to everyone, not just people who identify with the Latino culture, and not just to people of Back Bay.

“We really want to have a wide representation of Latino music,” says she. “There’s a lot of different things out there that people have not been exposed to. Latin music is not just Salsa.

“In places like Boston and Cambridge, people have many different interests,” she said. “We do see a mix [of cultures] in our audiences. That’s the beauty of it. You can’t find this anywhere else.”

This article is being published under an arrangement between The Boston Globe and the Boston University News Service.