Students danced and celebrated at Taylor Courtyard on Sept. 3 marking the first Cultural Fusion Fest by the Cultural Connections organization in partnership with the Middle Eastern Student Association (MESA). The fest was a complementary event of IU Indianapolis’ (IUI) Weeks of Welcome.
Cultural Connections is a new organization dedicated to creating connections between students of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds while also promoting campus life and the community within Indianapolis.
Attending students were dressed in their cultural wear as they participated in numerous activities, including a large parade where they walked across campus showing pride in their backgrounds while waving their cultural flags and playing music.
Booth for the Cultural Connections organization in front of the tent
Avi Taylor, a senior at IUI, attended the event and shared her experience about what the event meant to her and others who attended.
“You don’t have a strong tie to the homeland of your culture,” Taylor said. “I’m a black American and I don’t have a strong tie to any specific country in Africa, but I still really wanted to come to this event and show out.”
Non-IUI students who visited such as Daylen Patterson, echoed this sentiment, emphasizing the importance of highlighting and including those of various backgrounds.
“I think that it’s really important to realize that everyone has their own unique looks and appearances,” Patternson said. “It’s more of the communities being able to be a part of something like this.”
Various student organizations were also in attendance for tabling at the event, including the Pakistani Student Association (PSA), Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) and Ethnic’s Mental Wellness Association (EMWA).
The Pakistani Student Associaton in attendance for the Cultural Fusion Fest
As Tuesday’s event was part of the new organization’s mission, the organization’s cofounder, Keaun Michael Brown, spoke about the creation of Cultural Connections from his own experience as an Afro-Latino trying to embrace the culture and connect with the community in Indianapolis.
“Any time I tried to involve myself with the Latino community in Indy, it was like, awful,” Brown said. “Because I was black and also Latino, I just got absolutely horrible treatment.”
This extended further into his experiences at IUI, which moved him to initially want to create a Caribbean student organization, but he soon realized that his struggle was shared among other students across the Latin diaspora.
“I was like ‘Oh wait, this is like, big, this is a real thing and I gotta do something about this,’” Brown said. “And most of them weren’t even Caribbean, so I couldn’t do a Caribbean organization because that wouldn’t solve the problem.”
Following this, Brown concluded that although he was treated unfairly, this was likely because communities were confused on how to approach or interact with him and others who looked differently, prompting inspiration to create a broader space for people across different backgrounds and cultures to present themselves to one another.
“I thought what we really needed was a space where everyone could be authentically themselves,” Brown said.
The Ethnic Mental Health Association in attendance alongside other organizations
Brown’s determination would eventually launch to become Cultural Connections at IUI, where Brown would come up with the idea of the Cultural Fusion Fest held during the school year based on a conversation with a friend.
“He said, ‘Yo it’d be so good if we could have a big one at the start of the year’, and I was like, ‘Yeah that would be dope’,” Brown said. “He said, ‘Yeah we could have a parade of floats’ and I was like... ‘why not?’”
Further inspiration for the event and organization came from an event earlier in March called the Cultural Connections Banquet, where numerous students gathered at the Campus Center to learn and celebrate different cultures explained by Brown.
“What the banquet really showed me is that people on this campus want to engage with other people, and they’re ok with being vulnerable,” Brown said. “The people on this campus want a place where they matter and they want a place where they can be themselves, then I started thinking, what else can we do?”
The planning process for the Cultural Fusion Fest later began, but it could not have happened without Maya El Chal, the President of the Middle Eastern Student Association (MESA).
El Chal explained her role in the process and how she and Brown would trade ideas with one another while working in different positions, with Brown being the spokesperson for the event and El Chal being the coordinator and overseeing logistics.
“I was reaching out to administrations and faculty, responding to emails, meeting up, and helping plan out the meetings for it,” El Chal said. “So I kind of helped with the nitty gritty details because I'm very detail oriented.”
Throughout the process, El Chal and Brown helped each other with roles they were comfortable with. They explained they had an estimated two months to prepare in advance following approval by the school to participate in Weeks of Welcome.
“I think it was just kind of stressful but really cool to see it be like, our vision is not what happened, but what happened was so beautiful that it doesn't really matter,” Brown said. “At the end of the day, we got notes to change things to improve on as we always do.”
Although their original vision was not fully realized due to the limited amount of time for preparation, they both enjoyed seeing students who met and interacted with one another.
Students standing in line for the Taco Express food truck
El Chal emphasized the need to help others feel seen while explaining her experience of struggling to fit in on campus.
“I've seen a lot of things from different cultures and how a lot of people do struggle to find a place to fit in, especially international students,” El Chal said. “I was having this life crisis because I was like, ‘What am I doing here?’ and it took me basically two and a half to three years to feel comfortable with who I am as a person.”
With this, El Chal explained her goal of making students of diverse backgrounds feel involved and included from the start of their college experience.
“I want to make a change to the lives of students, and I want them to start from their freshman year and not have to go through what I went through,” El Chal said.
Brown also shared his thoughts, explaining how making the university and city more inclusive can have a positive impact for students of all backgrounds.
“If students really know they got a place here in this city, high school kids, middle school kids, and they got a place here at this campus [...] that could change the entire game,” Brown said. “All I wanna do is live in a place where people feel like they matter.”
Empowerment and support for students is a goal the two students hope to achieve for the future, and they encourage people of diverse backgrounds to be involved whenever possible.
“Students know what they want, they know what they need and, more importantly, the only thing we need is support to make that happen, and we just need to be invested in it,” Brown said. “Somebody out there is hoping to see somebody like themselves out there.”
With more to come for Cultural Connections, Brown and El Chal hope this will encourage others in the community to start their own creative endeavors and support one another.
“I would say that the cost of mastery is always gonna be beginner's embarrassment,” Brown said. “Do it scared because the longer you wait, that time is going to pass anyway.”
Daniel Guevara is a senior studying Journalism at the School of Liberal Arts. He is a campus writer for the Campus Citizen.
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