The International Santa Lucia Festival is currently taking place in Monterrey, Mexico. Considered one of the biggest and most influential cultural events in Latin America, the Festival is innovative, grounded in its past but forward-thinking by taking culture and arts to the home of a global audience.
Producing a 27-day long festival with 340 artists is an impressive task. But doing it during the pandemic and ensuring the safety of all participants is enormously challenging and would not be possible without the leadership of the festival’s director and president, Lorenia Canavati von Borstel. Her vision and commitment to the arts allowed this prestigious event to survive and thrive in spite of Covid-19 and all the hardship that have come with it.
As the Festival comes to a close we speak to Canavati von Borstel to learn what sets this event apart from the rest, overcoming challenges, and her personal advice on achieving success.

HOMBRE: How is the Festival going so far?
Lorenia Canavati von Borstel: We began October 11 and it’s been going great. We started with a road show called “Santa Lucia Changes Us,” because we believe that culture and art changes who you are after you see it. We had 65 drones, pyrotechnics, fireworks and lasers. It’s an amazing event that we have been replicating every Sunday in different parts of the State. It was a big hit since the beginning, and after that a lot of people have been interested.

H: Why do you think the event has been so successful?
LCVB: One thing is that there’s not much happening around the world right now, and the other thing is that we are going to a lot of places. Even though you are not in Monterrey you can see it. We are going to your home. We are doing this type of hybrid festival and it’s working out great. It’s a seven week festival. Every Monday we announce what we are doing on the weekend, and every week has the name of a positive emotion. Hope, Unity, Gratefulness, Pride, Love, Inspiration, and the last week is Happiness. We are trying to be the light and the hope that is so much needed in the world.

H: When did the Festival begin?
LCVB: This is our thirteenth year, it was created in 2008. Last year it was 52 days, and we had more than one and a half million attendees. This year we are also taking the Festival to people’s homes on mobile platforms, but we don’t say where we are going because we don’t want crowds congregating ahead of time.

H: What have been some the biggest challenges?
LCVB: It has been a very challenging year. In February of this year we had everything ready that was going to happen. And in March when I started to see that it was going to be bad we started to change things. We planned to have fifty percent international participation and fifty percent national and local, so we moved everything international to 2021.
We also wanted to support our economy because they have been without work for months, and besides that we can show the world what Mexico is. So one hundred percent of the physical performances are national and local. We have some international participation but that is only online. We also have gastronomy, speakers, musical performances, different shows, we illuminate buildings in what we call ‘Lights of Hope.’ We also go to different municipalities and show how it is to live there. There are no real audiences. For Closing Night we are planning little modules where you can have six to eight people and we are expecting to have 2,500 people.

H: What does the Festival consist of?
LCVB: It’s 27 days in total, 7 weeks, 340 artists, 85 different events, and 32 locations.

H: Why was the event created?
LCVB: Santa Lucia is the place where the city was founded, “el ojo de agua de Santa Lucía.” I’m the president of the board of the Festival and the objective is to show people the cultures of other parts of the world, and also to support our talent. If you go to a concert you don’t have to pay anything. The purpose is to elevate, educate, and help increase the culture.
For ninety eight percent of the concerts we don’t charge anything. We have ninety institutions that support the Festival; from the government, society, universities. Also we have a lot of sponsors that make it possible to do this festival every year.
We support a lot of our talent. We have a competition called “Nuevo Talento Nuevo León” this year where we had 700 participants and we are having those at the end of November so everyone can see who the winner is. This is to support our talent, but we are having people flying in from Los Angeles and other places.

H: How has the Festival grown through the years?
LCVB: It’s been growing a lot. This is my third year as president and before that it was a very good friend of mine, Liliana Melo De Sada for ten years. We are not part of the government, it’s an independent board. In the last twelve years we’ve had eight million attendees, and just last year we had a million and a half. You can see we’ve been growing a lot. This year the visits to our platforms have been incredible. On our first day we had eight hundred thousand people looking at it. And with the government’s sites we had five hundred thousand, I’m sure we had more than one million virtual visitors just in the beginning. It’s been amazing, I didn’t expect it.

H: Where can people see it?
LCVB: It’s Festival Santa Lucia, so we have Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and we have the page festivalsantalucia.gob.mx . But I recommend people see it on  Facebook or YouTube. We’ll also have an app that people can download on their phone.

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https://www.facebook.com/festivalsantalucia
https://www.instagram.com/festivalsantalucia/

H: What should people expect from the Festival?
LCVB: You can expect to learn a lot from our culture, expect to learn a lot from the speakers. We’ll be having talks about the ecology, happiness and wellness, and several conferences. Besides that you can go outside the box to see things that you don’t normally see. The last three Thursdays we’ll have “Botaniando en Mexico” with two chefs from Monterey so you can learn to make Mexican food.
We have so much that everyone can find something in the Festival that they would like to see.

H: I know it’s difficult to plan ahead right now, but what are some of the things you would like to accomplish with the Festival in 2021?
LCVB: I’m a person that feels things, and I feel everything will be fine next year. I feel we’ll have all the international talent we were planning on for this year. Also the dancing fountains similar to the ones at Bellagio (in Las Vegas). Other plans we can’t talk about yet, but it’s going to be amazing. I think we’ll be able to have concerts again, people just have to be careful and learn to live with it if we don’t have the vaccine.

Lorenia Canavati von Borstel, Santa Lucia Festival Director ad President

H: How did you become involved with the Festival?
LCVB: I’ve been doing a lot of things in my life. I’m a person of challenges. First of all I have a company, I have restaurants. They have been in my family for fifty years, and I’ve been working there for twenty five. I’m the director of those restaurants. In 2015 I ran for mayor here in San Pedro where we live and it’s the richest municipality in Mexico and I believe Latin America. We were eleven candidates and I came in second place against a three times Mayor. That gave a lot of recognition for where I live and what I do. After that Liliana (Melo de Sada) told me that I could make a lot of things happen with the Festival and I said yes. What I want to do with everything in my life is to help people, and here I can help them through culture. I’m very happy.

H: What would you say is the key to success?
LCVB: Passion. Do what you have a passion to do. I think we come to the world for two things: to give love, and to give our time to others. And if you’re passionate about what you do and give your time to others with what you do, for me that’s the key to life.
Never surrender, everything is possible when you know where you want to get to. I’m a fan of “Outliers: The Story of Success,” a book by Malcom Gladwell. He says everyone can do great things if you dedicate 10,000 hours to it. If you practice 10,000 there is no way you will not be good at what you do. So if everyday you practice on giving your time to people you’re bound to be great.

H: What would you say is the significance of the Festival?
LCVB: It’s a lot of things, but what I tell everyone is that it’s not a festival of one group of people, it’s really a festival of all of us. When you see videos of kids or videos of the platforms traveling through a town, and you see that they’re looking at a pianist or they’re looking at an amazing dance and they think, ‘I can do that.’ It’s aspirational. To give people the opportunity to see what they probably would not have seen, to me that is to elevate everyone’s life and dreams in education and in culture. You can not be the same. It’s like when you read a book, you can not be the same before and after you read it, you have to change. And it’s the same with this Festival, you have to change.

For more information on Festival Santa Lucia visit:

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https://www.facebook.com/festivalsantalucia
https://www.instagram.com/festivalsantalucia/