WAKE UP THE COMMUNITY Making JP's Neighborhood Festival Happen
Jamaica Plain’s Wake Up the Earth Festival has filled the Stonybrook MBTA station’s Southwest Corridor every year since 1979. While the festival always takes place on the first Saturday in May, for community art-nonprofit Spontaneous Celebrations, the work starts much earlier.
Meetings for festival planning start in February in the art room of Spontaneous Celebrations’ 45 Danforth Street community building. The meetings start slowly – a handful of volunteers huddled around a space heater discussing funding and themes – but, by March, preparation has become a community-wide, semiweekly affair. “A lot of folks don’t know that Spontaneous [Celebrations] does [WUTE],” says Paula Cantor, a Spontaneous Celebrations board member and WUTE volunteer of nearly 30 years. “They think the city does it, but it’s us.”
During March and April, Spontaneous’s regular Friday night open potlucks turn into an open-house workshop for the festival. Zafiro Patiño, organization cofounder and wearer of many hats, leads the charge for food, fun, and festival.
“It’s like healing–,” she says in a coat closet, away from the chaos of one of these Friday night workshops, “ – All the people... art making, working with their hands… We are wanting in so many ways, and this gives us the opportunity to get together and to be happy.” She added that the momentum leading up to the festival is her favorite part of WUTE.
“Wake up the Earth is a festival made with very little resources that we were able to gift to Jamaica Plain,” explains Zafiro, who is spending this year spearheading a multi-week project to restore the beloved puppets featured in both parades. “[It is] owned by the people.” Last year, over ten thousand people attended WUTE. With approximately 70 volunteers, less than one percent of attendees, putting in time across the festival.
Based in celebrating a successful grassroots movement to stop the development of a highway, the festival is a living tradition of the power of collective organizing and how such actions often radiate outward into the greater community. “It’s like my holiday,” laughed Paula, “I don’t plan anything else on that day.” For more information on the history of WUTE and to get involved, please visit www.wakeuptheearth.org/.
———— SAMANTHA SCHNEIDER
Organizing the WUTE is a monumental task, requiring months of careful cooperation with the city government. The kickoff for the festival is a parade down Centre Street – a major artery through the center of JP – and, more recently, a parade from Egleston Square.
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