Would it be a population of about 30,000? By that definition, two of the three local leaders on the panel—former West Sacramento mayor Christopher Cabaldon and Coachella councilmember Megan Beaman Jacinto—live in communities of approximately 50,000, and would not qualify.

Gonzales city manager René Mendez, whose Central Coast town has a population of just 9,000, said that more important than a number is the necessity of fostering “connections and intimacy” among the people who live there. Though he’d be hard-pressed to consider a community of 30,000 a small town, he said, a town or city with a population the size of West Sacramento and Coachella can still feel intimate—and thus, by that definition, be a “small town.”

Jacinto and Cabaldon agreed that the “small town” designation is relative, noting that it depends where you are. Hewing closer to Mendez’s definition, Cabaldon said that you know you’re in a small town if a fellow resident comes to a city council meeting and you know them not from the organization that they’re representing but because of a different relationship—through something like school or church or the neighborhood.

Marcum, the moderator, quoted Aristotle, who considered a place the right size if “the citizens should know each other and know what kind of people they are.” Turning to Mendez, she asked, “Does Gonzales meet that criteria?”

Unequivocally, “yes,” Mendez replied. The city even refers to its way of doing things as “the Gonzales way,” which he clarified, “doesn’t mean you always agree, just that you’re together, and you’re able to work through some issues.” That comes with downsides, too. For instance, Mendez was working to unveil a new multifamily housing project. A week before its unveiling, the community came out against it—with friends, relatives, and teachers all reaching out directly with unanticipated concerns. “It was a very uncomfortable conversation, but we worked through it,” he said, one that was discussed with emotion everywhere from the liquor store to the barber shop to the post office.

Cabaldon noted that West Sacramento—which nearly doubled in size over his two decades in office—wants “to be a small-town vibe with big-city amenities.” The challenge he found was that “the interconnectedness that we feel isn’t always completely real.” It can be easy to go to certain places and meetings and think you’ll see everyone, but then you miss communities within the community. “I wasn’t really running into recent immigrants from Laos, folks from the Ukrainian community,” he recalled.

This is the similar to one of the challenges facing Coachella, which is currently about 97 percent Latino. The city has doubled in population over the past 15 years and continues to grow, which makes for challenging city planning, said Jacinto. “There is a way of thinking in Coachella—that I share to some extent—which is, as we develop Coachella into the future, we want to ensure that it’s preserving spaces and culture and history for the people that live there now,” she said. “At the same time, about 70 percent of our city is undeveloped, so to speak, agricultural land that’s really ripe for development.” This land could mean opportunities—or challenges that push residents out. Neighbors hold different possible futures for the city in many directions, from the wealthier, larger cities of Indian Wells, Rancho Mirage, and Palm Springs to the working-class neighborhoods of incorporated communities in the more rural eastern Coachella Valley. “We have to be really careful in balancing [our] thoughts and dreams,” said Jacinto.

Turning to Cabaldon, Marcum asked, “Did [West Sacramento] want to be Sacramento, or did it always say, we want to keep an identity as a separate thing that we are?”

Both, said Cabaldon—residents wanted amenities and improvements, but they also didn’t want change. “Very few small towns want to grow just to grow,” he said. Regarding neighboring Sacramento, he noted that anyone who wanted to move there could, but as a politician, he got to have the best of both worlds. “I can draft behind the big cities when it matters and focus on maintaining and building out a small-town place,” he said. If you want to do something, even about a problem as big as climate change, you can open your office door and yell to your colleagues and make a plan. Which isn’t to say small towns are perfect. He joked that you could also have a situation where, say, there are four city councilmembers total—and one hates another because he stole his high school prom date. (When asked if this was a true story, Cabaldon laughed and said he was not referring to the current city council.)

“You don’t have to go through a lot of hoops to get something done,” Mendez joined in, speaking to a plus of small-town governance. “The key is to have partnerships.” In Gonzales, the youth council galvanized the community to figure out how to help young people facing mental health issues during the pandemic. Acting on the recommendations of these local teenagers, he said, the city council and school board came together to create a wraparound mental health approach and fund a social worker to support young people in crisis.

On the other end of the spectrum, small communities are often under-resourced and underrepresented in government. “Can you talk about how small is maybe too small and what the challenges there are?” asked Marcum.

In addition to working within Coachella, Jacinto advocates for unincorporated communities in the eastern rural Coachella Valley. These places, which exist primarily because farmworkers couldn’t find affordable housing elsewhere, lack basic resources like clean drinking water and septic systems. They’ve been forced to innovate, developing some of the state’s first point-of-use community water filtration systems and new regulations for mobile home utilities.

Small size necessitates and often facilitates innovation, the panelists agreed. Gonzales recently made universal broadband free to all its residents, and West Sacramento instituted universal preschool 18 years ago and has made free college tuition possible for every high school senior.

“In a smaller town you can imagine actually solving a problem,” said Cabaldon. “In a bigger city, it’s, ‘Let’s adopt a 25-year plan to do X.’” Small-town leaders know they can’t leave anyone behind, he joked, because you might run into that person at a soccer game next weekend.

Marcum then turned the discussion over to audience questions, submitted via a live YouTube chat.

One person wanted to know: How can you create a cultural center for a town?

Mendez said it’s about watching where your community gathers and what places they revolve around. “It’s observing your community, listening, and then you try to activate around that,” he said. In Gonzales, for example, they passed a sales tax to fund a new community center near the school—because it was identified as a place where people were already going.

Another viewer asked: What was the most innovative thing the panelists had seen come out of a small town?

Jacinto said that Coachella was “the first city in the nation to ban private prisons” and also the only place that instituted “hazard hero pay for farmworkers” in the pandemic—an extra $4 an hour for four months.

Viewers also wanted to know how to keep and attract young people to small towns. Creating extension campuses of larger higher educational institutions, said Mendez and Cabaldon, has been helpful.

Listening to the panelists discuss the reasons why people want to come or return to small towns, Marcum noted near the end of the discussion that it felt like the panelists were covering the things that make life good. Summing it up, she said: “You need basic necessities, you need opportunity that makes your children come home, you need fun, you need a place to live, and you need a place where everybody meets.”

The post Small Towns Can Create Big Change appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You heard it here first: The next bubble to burst in California, perhaps even before Silicon Valley and real estate, just might be the festival bubble.

The festival economy is growing so fast that it runs the risk of overheating. Even after expanding from one weekend to two in 2012, and increasing capacity this past year from 99,000 to 125,000, the Coachella Arts and Music Festival still managed to sell out in just three hours. Its cousin, Stagecoach, is the world’s biggest country music festival, welcoming up to 75,000 people each year over one weekend in Indio. Coachella and Stagecoach are even spawning spin-offs, like last fall’s Desert Trip (AKA “Oldchella”) and the massive new Arroyo Seco Weekend, headlined by Tom Petty, debuting later this month at the Rose Bowl.

And those are just the big-ticket festivals. This summer, Californians could spend every waking moment attending festivals—hundreds of regional events and thousands of community ones celebrating our arts, our foods, our cultural heritage, or some combination of all three—and still not get to all of them.

Festivals aren’t new here. Our state has shaped and been shaped by major festivals, from the Monterey International Pop Festival during the Summer of Love, to the 1996 Organic Festival in San Bernardino National Forest, which helped launch the rave scene. But today, festivals proliferate for very practical reasons: they match the promotional needs of so many California institutions and communities.

Festivals provide the ready-made audiences that our creative industries require to support artists and performers. Cash-strapped local governments see festivals as relatively cheap economic development tools for creating traffic around sales-tax-producing retail corridors. Major industries have found that festivals work better than conventions in attracting paying crowds. (Coachella has essentially become an entertainment industry bash for cutting deals and gaining status for the bottle service crowd).

Regional museums and cultural institutions use festivals to differentiate themselves, and attract tourists. No region has taken more advantage of a festival strategy than the Coachella Valley, which hosts dozens of major gatherings, from the big music weekends, to the Palm Springs International Film Festival, to the architecture-design-fashion events known collectively as Modernism Week, to the Indio International Tamale Festival.

There’s also a cultural fit between festivals and this era. Short attention spans require a constant mix of offerings. And given how hard it is to build any structure in California, the impermanence of festivals is attractive. Californians are turning away from established, brick-and-mortar institutions in favor of pop-up food and social events. Festivals are happenings designed to be photographed, hashtagged, geotagged, and shared in order to produce the maximum amount of FOMO among one’s friends and followers, who won’t get their own chance to attend.

All of which makes festivals both red-hot—and vulnerable. Visiting such events around the state, I keep hearing organizers ask: How much longer before the bubble pops? Will the crowds still have the cash for $5 bottles of water if the state’s other bubbles, from housing to technology, burst? Will they tire of waiting in long lines? In an era of skyrocketing land values, will open spaces hosting these festivals eventually find it more lucrative to house something permanent?

A shakeout may be underway, at least among bigger musical festivals. With so many successful festivals seeking to book the same performers, fees go up, and so do ticket prices. How much can the market bear? Major festivals in the United Kingdom (widely considered the global leader in musical gatherings) and in places from Oregon (Sasquatch!) to Tennessee (Bonnaroo) have seen attendance decline and experienced difficulty in securing headliners. Perhaps the biggest harbinger of a festival problem was the colossal disaster of this year’s Fyre Festival in the Bahamas, which sold tickets costing $1,500 to $12,000 and delivered a grand total of zero performances to a hugely disgruntled audience.

Corporate consolidation is another factor to watch. Many of the bigger music and arts festivals are owned by just a couple of companies, making them vulnerable to economic winds. One of those companies is Goldenvoice, which is responsible for Coachella, Stagecoach, and Pasadena’s new Arroyo Seco Weekend. Goldenvoice producer Paul Tollett mused to The New Yorker recently about threats to Coachella from terrorism to botulism to “fake news.”

“There are big ships that go down over small things. You’re riding high, but one wrong thing and you’re voted off the island. It’s scary,” Tollett said.

Don’t forget the Listerine: Jerry Hernandez wears a garlic-shaped hat as he listens to a live band at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, Calif. on July 24, 2004. Photo by Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press.

When the shakeout comes to California, which festivals will endure? The fastest-growing events are mid-sized or boutique gatherings that allow people to immerse themselves in a very particular world for a time.

Among these are the High Sierra Music Festival, a family-friendly gathering (entertainment includes a morning kickball game) in tiny Quincy in Plumas County, and Desert Hearts, an electronic music gathering at the Los Coyotes Indian Reservation east of Temecula. The West Coast “transformational” festival scene—a movement that produces hippie parties with lots of costuming—is strong in California; its crown jewel festival, Lightning in a Bottle, is in tiny Bradley in Monterey County.

The state’s best festivals may be small, but they also have a strong sense of place. No matter how many Googlers move into San Francisco from faraway places, it’s hard to imagine San Francisco street events like the How Weird Street Faire ever shutting down.

“In a more globalized ethos,” says Eamon Armstrong, California-based creative director of Everfest, which produces the Fest300 list of the world’s best festivals, “there’s a desire to create your own smaller communities and assert your own identity.”

California’s most enduring festivals have been careful to develop a deep web of ties to their local communities, so they are aiding their hometowns every day, not just one weekend a year. For example, the Monterey Jazz Festival, now in its 60th year, has a robust education program that includes a student festival and summer camp.

But when it comes to engagement, it’s hard to top the Gilroy Garlic Festival, famous for its garlic shakes and garlic cook-off. The event’s proceeds help support over 140 local nonprofits, creating an incredibly diverse array of supporters. It provides a venue for local musicians and performers. It relies on more than 4,000 community volunteers. High school students often complete their community service requirements by working at the festival, and young women compete to win a college scholarship in the Miss Gilroy Garlic Festival Queen Pageant.

Sure, you could have seen Lady Gaga at Coachella this year. But she’s also playing L.A., San Francisco, and Sacramento in August alone. The only place you can find that much garlic is in Gilroy. And the taste lingers.

The post What California Festivals Need–More Garlic, Less Gaga appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Desert Sun arts and entertainment reporter Bruce Fessier—whose beat is strictly covering these festivals—began the discussion by asking if the Valley simply has too many festivals, and if they’re being forced to compete with one another.

Lisa Vossler Smith, executive director of Modernism Week—a festival devoted to mid-century architecture and design—said that as both a festival planner and a Coachella Valley native, the answer is no. “I’m thrilled to see the growth and diversity in our festival schedule,” she said. “There is something for everyone in our Valley.”

Palm Springs Art Museum deputy education director Irene N. Rodríguez agreed; rather than competing, she said, these festivals provide their audiences with different perspectives on local communities and a taste of cultures other than their own.

Different festivals admittedly target different audiences, said Fessier—contrasting an “industry” festival like Sundance to a “community” festival like the Palm Springs International Film Festival, which more recently became a destination festival. Which type matters most to “ordinary people”?

Indio Mayor Lupe Ramos Watson said that the most successful festivals come from locals—and then draw in tourists who want to be a part of the celebration. She pointed to the Riverside County Fair and National Date Festival, now in its 69th year, as an example. It began as a celebration of the end of the harvest for the community, and today brings together 300,000 attendees annually.

Not all festivals are so lucky. Music writer and photographer Steve Appleford, who has covered many of them, including Coachella since its inception, said that there were so many festivals starting in the early 1990s that not all could survive. The Warped Tour lives on, as does Lollapalooza (originally a touring festival that’s now anchored in Chicago), but Ozzfest and Lilith Fair were not so lucky. Ozzfest was actually a victim of its own success: It did so well that bands started asking for too much money.

Appleford said that what distinguishes Coachella is that it started as a labor of love—and that Goldenvoice, the concert promoter that organizes the festival, is very astute about what’s happening in music. They are “exceptionally good” at picking both big bands and acts that are going to be big later on, and they have always been “forward-looking” rather than choosing top 10 or top 40 artists.

Art has become an increasingly large part of Coachella. What, asked Fessier, does this aspect of the festival—and what do arts festivals in general—do for local audiences and artists?

Rodríguez said that they create “awareness” among broader audiences, allowing people to get familiar and comfortable with contemporary art—which can be “very difficult to understand.” Festivals also bring emerging artists’ work to the attention of collectors and gallery owners.

Festivals can also bring local artists to bigger audiences. Watson said that when Lisa Vossler Smith’s husband, artist Phillip K. Smith III, was exhibited at Coachella, it was a “proud moment” for the community.

The cultural value of the festival can’t be measured, but the business value can. Ramos Watson said that a study commissioned by Indio found that Coachella has a $90 million impact on the city each year, with over $20 million in sales activity. As a result, the city has made a greater effort to help the festival grow. In return, Goldenvoice also gives back to the community, helping young people with music and arts opportunities in particular. “At the end of the day, we were satisfied with what we learned,” Ramos Watson said of the study, “and we’re confident about the future of festivals in Indio.”

Fessier asked Ramos Watson if she was concerned about “alternative crowds” and problems with safety. She said that the city was unfamiliar with the attendees in Coachella’s early years, but has learned that the crowds are “nice kids,” many of whom are still in school and save up for the whole year to attend. Like any other tourists, they want to have a nice time. “It’s just an extra 100,000 people in our city over the weekend,” she said, eliciting audience laughter.

Appleford credited Goldenvoice with knowing its audience for the safe atmosphere—a sharp contrast to the disaster of Woodstock 1999, which took place a few months before the inaugural Coachella and made national news with fires and physical assaults. “I’ve never seen a fight at Coachella,” said Appleford.

So what’s the secret to a successful festival? “I spend an awful lot of time curating,” said Vossler Smith of the work behind Modernism Week. She said that “quality” is the number-one thing she has learned from Coachella—the importance of setting a really high standard and creating a brand “people can count on year after year.” A great festival, she added—whether it’s Coachella or the Indio International Tamale Festival—offers audiences something new.

The Tamale Festival, said Ramos Watson, grew out of one city council member’s desire to get into the Guinness Book of World Records by building the largest tamale. The organic nature of its origins got the community invested in the first place—and now hundreds of thousands of people attend the festival over one December weekend.

“The festival has become the new convention,” said Vossler Smith. Industry conferences were educational and networking opportunities; now, festivals—be they architectural, literary, musical—are bringing together the “best thinkers and most voracious collectors in these fields together.” Successful festivals also cross boundaries, merging different experiences—fashion and culinary, architecture and design, in the case of Modernism Week. “You need more than one activity going on to call it a festival,” she said. There ought to be a level of diversity and engagement; if it’s a one-note event, it’s not a festival.

The post Why Do Coachella Valley Festivals Rock So Hard? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If Coachella isn’t your bag, there is a festival somewhere in the country for every interest—classical music at the Spoleto USA Festival in Charleston, South Carolina; paintings that come to life at the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach, California; all the Bard you can consume at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, just to name a few. In advance of the Zócalo/James Irvine Foundation event “Do Arts and Music Festivals Matter?”, we asked a panel of experts: What does the popularity of music and arts festivals say about the ways Americans are experiencing art now?

The post What’s So Great About Coachella? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.