(gentle upbeat music) - Oaxaca en Utah, unites people with ties to Oaxaca Mexico to share their unique culture, food, dance, and more.

Founder Norma Carver is here to talk about the upcoming La Guelaguetaza, with Ofelia Bazan.

Welcome ladies, it's so great to have you.

This is all so colorful and beautiful, but okay, why don't you start first Norma, by telling us why you founded this organization.

- Okay, thank you so much for having us here.

And the reason why Oaxaca en Utah was created is because I wanted to have my family here in Utah.

I come from Oaxaca and I'm very proud to be from there.

And when I moved here, I was missing the food, I was missing the dialects, the textiles, the food and of course my family, so that's the main reason why Oaxaca en Utah was created.

- Okay, and then there's La Guelaguetaza that you're hosting.

And what happens at that, Ofelia?

- Oh my gosh, it's a festival.

It's a wonderful thing.

There's a lot of dances, a lot of different dances from every region that, you know, they prepare each year to participate and show the world.

A lot of tourists come, and look at it in Oaxaca.

But here we wanna replicate that.

We want to show our culture, our food.

We're gonna have food from Oaxaca, from other diversities as well, because we don't only wanna do Oaxaca we wanna do different cultures as well.

We'll be dancing.

We'll have this band that's called Sonora Dinamita.

It's really popular.

So our group, and we've asked volunteers as well to come in and dance our cultural dances in this La Guelaguetza.

It'll be really fun.

We wanna show what Oaxaca is at the Guelaguetaza.

- Wonderful, and I want you to tell us Norma, you brought your friend, ma Copalita.

Yes.

- Tell us about the monos.

- Yes, so this is La Copalita, this is one of the new monos the calendar that we have in the festival.

We are going be having 10, 10 big monos de calenda and these are very popular in Oaxaca.

- All right.

- Each celebration, it's for that.

- Perfect.

Well, I'm so glad you came and brought all this and thank you so much.

- [Together] Thank you.

- Thank you so much.

- And if you'd like to know more about that upcoming event Oaxaca en Utah's La Guelaguetza.

It's July 22nd from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM at Heritage Park in Kaysville.

Go to oaxacaenutah.org.

(gentle upbeat music) I'm Mary Dickson.

Thanks for watching "Contact."

(gentle upbeat music continues) - Local events, arts, culture.

It's what brings us together.

Hi, I'm Mary Dickson.

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