Living Arts of Tulsa’s annual Día de los Muertos festival has been held since 1995. But when festival officials reached out to funders this year, some said no, arguing the event didn’t align with the Trump administration’s values.
“This festival, where people that have been around it, know what it is, and know what we do, know that this is not your run of the mill [diversity, equity and inclusion] program that corporations are trying to get away from,” said Jessica Dewey, executive director for Living Arts of Tulsa. “There’s nothing political in nature about what we’re doing.”
Dewey wouldn’t share the names of funders or their specific concerns saying she doesn’t want to lose more support. She said in September, some funders began pulling away, citing the Trump administration’s anti-DEI stance.
They had three conversations in one week where sponsors indicated they couldn’t contribute to this year’s event due to the misalignment with the administration’s priorities, Dewey said.
At the end of the month, she and the board president Lucia Carballo Oberle posted an update on Living Arts Instagram:
“It is necessary we address a pushback we are receiving from some of our longstanding partners being they are unsure if this event should even happen as it may conflict with the current Administration’s priorities and they are unsure if this is where their funds should support.”
Dewey said after that, people asked her to name the businesses that were pulling out. But she said she doesn’t want it to become an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ situation since a majority of sponsors who backed out this year cited economic concerns. She said the funders in that boat are still finding ways to help through volunteering.
Living Arts of Tulsa has made smaller in-house cuts — like having staff do tasks they would normally contract out — to compensate for the lost funds.
The organization had already been having conversations about the potential impacts if the country went into a recession. They discussed finding ways to diversify the funding streams for Day of the Dead even before partners started to pushback, Dewey said.
“We were just preparing for the worst,” she said. “We weren’t preparing for a couple of bad eggs because we’ve never really had anyone be like, ‘No, we don’t like Day of the Dead,’ no one has ever said that.”
The event will run from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday at 307 E. Reconciliation Way, and feature food trucks, market vendors, lowriders and performances on two separate stages. There will be 35 individual altars, five classroom altars and two community altars displayed.
The organization is still waiting on roughly $12,000 before Saturday, Dewey said.
The festival generally costs $45,000 to $50,000 a year to host, not including staffing costs.
“While the festival is not in jeopardy of not happening this year, if this is going to be a long-standing thing, we need people to know, if through this administration we’re going to continuously see discrimination coming down on that level — we may have to turn to our community in the coming years,” Dewey said.
This article was produced as part of a partnership between the Tulsa Flyer and La Semana, a Tulsa-based bilingual Spanish-English newspaper serving Latino communities in Oklahoma.
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