Cultural champions sought for Roots Aurora festival

The Roots Aurora Cultural Festival is seeking to honor Aurora leaders who have preserved the history and traditions of their ethnic groups. They will be honored at the 2016 festival to be held Friday, Sept. 2, on Water Street Mall in Aurora.

The festival, now in its fourth year, is a showcase of ethnic cultures within the city, and features music, dance, and cuisine, as well as the salute to those who have preserved traditional ethnic ways and shared them with all citizens of the city, as well as passing them along to younger generations.

Anyone may nominate a champion. The nomination should include specifics about the contributions of the leader, such as education in traditional ways and languages, service in ethnic social organizations, contributions to ethnic cultural institutions, research, writing, exhibits and other communications about the ethnic group, support for religious expressions of ethnicity, creation of ethnic-based art or the operation of an ethnic business.

Further details should be requested from AuroraHistoricalSocietyEvents@gmail.com with the subject line "Cultural Champions."

Honorees will be chosen by a combined committee of the Roots Aurora Festival and the Aurora Historical Society.

Previous honorees and their ethnic groups have been: Dan Dolan (Irish), Anthony J. Prisco and Guy Prisco (Italian), Eva and Michael Kontos and Penny Panayiota Deligiannis (Greek), Anthony Stanford, William Bigham and Onwa Olieh (African American), Krishna Bansal (South Asian-Indian) Mirna Lopez-Freitag and Emilio Barrios (Puerto Rican), Maria Lozano and Jesus Sanchez (Mexican), Rene Cruz (Panama), Arturo Velasquez and Alejandro Benavides (Tejano) and James Michels, David Frieders and the American Luxembourger Independent Club (Luxembourger).

More information about the festival is available at rootsaurora.org and www.facebook.com/Roots.Aurora/.