The Children’s Museum Tucson will debut its new storytelling program, Cuentacuentos, on Saturday, Oct. 8, as part of its Art After Dark program, a monthly collaboration between local art partners and nonprofit organizations.
Hilary Van Alsburg, executive director at the CMT, said the museum received a project grant from Arizona Humanities in August to bring in multicultural storytellers as an ancillary initiative to support the Art After Dark’s arts programming.
Arizona Humanities is a statewide nonprofit organization that supports public programs to “promote understanding of the human experience with cultural, educational and nonprofit programs across Arizona.”
“There’s such a rich, vibrant storytelling community in Tucson,” Van Alsburg said. “Being able to bring in individuals who are skilled at this and highlighting different cultures for the audiences we serve is such a great benefit.”
Cuentacuentos is a partnership between the CMT and the University of Arizona’s College of Humanities and Africana Studies Department. Dr. Praise Zenenga, director of Africana Studies will be the first featured storyteller sharing oral histories from Africa including a West African Folktale about “Anansi the Spider.”
“There will be a lot of participation in terms of call and response and asking questions back and forth, wanting [the kids] to predict the outcomes,” Zenenga said.
The stories will have morals and span a variety of delivery methods, including digital and performance storytelling. The department invites professors, and graduate and undergraduate students to participate in the program.
Zenenga, who is tasked with finding other storytellers throughout the university said that narrators will be sourced from programs such as the School of International Languages, Literatures and Cultures (SILLC), area studies programs such as East Asian, Russian and Slavic German, Judaic, Latin American and Middle Eastern.
“We decided that these area studies within the university can bring us stories about diversity, inclusion and equity from different parts of the world so that these kids will get to know that a difference is something that has to be celebrated and not disdained,” Zenenga said.
With a theme of acceptance, Cuentacuentos reaches out to children in marginalized communities to prepare future leaders to think critically, make decisions, fairness and acceptance, Zenenga said.
The Cuentacuentos program is set to run through spring. CMT’s free Art After Dark program runs year-round, every second Saturday of the month with the goal of increasing accessibility to the arts for historically underserved and marginalized communities.
Cuentacuentos at Art After Dark, supported by AZ Humanities
WHEN: 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. the Second Saturday of each month through the spring
WHERE: Children’s Museum Tucson, 200 S. Sixth Avenue, Tucson
COST: Free
INFO: childrensmuseumtucson.org
This article appears in Oct 6-12, 2022.
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On August 31st, 2022, Children’s Museum Tucson announced on Facebook their Art After Dark with Guest Drag Story Hour AZ (set for October 8, 2022). This post invited us to “join CMT & Drag Queens and Kings in inspiring children to be themselves through books, songs, and artistic expression.” Shortly thereafter, they changed their marketing of this event and dropped any reference to drag queens from their social media, promotional materials and website, but have stubbornly refused to acknowledge the public outcry.
Their new Cuentacuentos program is supported by a grant from Arizona Humanities, which coincidentally just hosted David Boyles, the President of Drag Story Hour AZ, to lecture on the topic of LGBTQ+ Representation in the Media and the “battles… being fought about the exposure of young people to LGBTQ+ representation in schools.”*
According to this article, “The [Cuentacuentos] stories will have morals.” But whose morals? The morals of the people who think you’re a hateful bigot for saying there are two sexes and they are immuatable? The morals of the people who arrange for drag queens to entertain your young children?
“With a theme of acceptance, Cuentacuentos reaches out to children in marginalized communities to prepare future leaders to think critically, make decisions, fairness and acceptance… so that these kids will get to know that a difference is something that has to be celebrated and not disdained.”
Unlike Children’s Museum Tucson, most of us don’t celebrate teaching children that they have been born into the wrong bodies or that in order to be their authentic selves, they need to take hormones, mutilate their bodies, and present themselves as artificially and unnatrually as they possibly can.
Furthermore, why the incessant emphasis on physical identity and endless obsession with the shallowest aspect of the human experience. We should teach our children to celebrate hard work, perseverance, achievement, intelligence, problem solving, and productivity.
For now, CMT has dropped their drag queen event, but the same themes continues with their new Cuentacuentos program, which seems obviously intended to instruct your children on embracing and “celebrating” lifestyles you might believe are damaging and unhealthy. CMT will never get our money or foot traffic again.
*https://azhumanities.org/event/representation-matters-lgbtq-representation-in-the-media-then-and-now-with-david-boyles/
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