Border Stories Festival 2025
The Border Stories Festival celebrates its third edition in Laredo, Texas, on October 18, 2025. This event highlights the cultural heritage and resilience of Mexican-American communities.
Photo by Mitchell Luo in Unsplash.
This October 18, 2025, the third Border Stories Festival will be held in Laredo, Texas. The celebratory event was born as an act of community care at the height of the immigration persecution seen in the news daily. It is acutely felt in places like Laredo, a city bordering Mexico in South Texas.
To understand why this festival is special, you have to understand Laredo's history. The border city is known for its rich cultural blend of Texan and Mexican influences, its history as an independent settlement and one of the oldest border crossings, and its economy as the largest inland port in the United States. It is also known for its vibrant festivals and tasty cuisine.
But the Border Stories Festival wasn't born in Laredo; it also migrated there, like much of its population. The festival was initially organized by Drs. Norma Cantú and Olga Nájera Ramírez, both originally from Laredo, in 2022 in San Antonio, at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, as part of the Trinity University Folklore Symposium.
Both organizers, understanding Laredo's richness and identity tied to the Mexican-American border, brought the festival home.
The Border Stories Festival as resistance
At the first Folklore Symposium, they presented a full concert. The positive response from the community prompted them to collaborate a year later with Sandra Rocha Taylor of the Pan American Courts Artistic Complex. This collaboration provides the Laredo community with the opportunity to celebrate their border heritage through music, song, and dance.
One of the highlights is the performance of dances that tell stories of struggle, joy, overcoming, and activism from the perspective of the Mexican-American experience by members of the Gabriela Mendoza-García Ballet Folklórico. According to Dr. Gabriela Mendoza-García, founder and director of the Ballet Folklórico, "This event is part of Hispanic Heritage Month, but it is also a way to continue passing on the dances of our ancestors."
Furthermore, the organizers and the collaborator promoted a very clear message: “In Historias Fronterizas, the dances performed by the Ballet Folklórico members trace the history of the Mexican-American people. We sometimes mistakenly think that folklórico only tells stories of the Mexican people, when in reality, many parts of the United States were part of Mexico for many years.” —Dr. Gabriela Mendoza García
This is a unique experience in which artists bring to life the stories of Mexico and the United States that are often excluded from history books or forgotten over time. At the same time, the stories of resistance of both countries in the present are traced.
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