The 37th Tejano Conjunto Festival en San Antonio is scheduled for May 16-20, 2018.

Radio Bilingüe heads to San Antonio next week to produce and broadcast extended specials from the 37th Annual Tejano Conjunto Festival in collaboration with the festival’s organizers, the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, and with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Accordion-powered polkas, cumbias, huapangos and soulful corridos will all be in the air at the festival featuring almost 30 of the greatest Tejano Conjunto dance bands in the world, as well as the surprise posthumous induction of Radio Bilingüe’s own on-air legend Miss Alma Garza into the 2018 class of the Conjunto Hall of Fame.

Music lovers may tune into Radio Bilingüe commercial-free public radio stations or radiobilingue.org for broadcasts featuring top festival highlights, full performances by legendary bands, and interviews with the greats of the Tex-Mex genre at the following times:

Saturday, May 19: 12-3 PM PDT
Sunday, May 20: 2-5 PM PDT
Monday, May 21: 12-3 PM PDT

The festival’s highlight is the three-day series of dance concerts at Rosedale Park, with more than 25 hours of performances including renowned Conjunto bands Los Texmaniacs, Hometown Boys, Tony Tigre Saenz y La Rosa de Oro, Veronique and the Puro Party Band, Los Monarcas de Pete y Mario Diaz, Boni Mauricio y Los Maximos, and winners of the National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship Eva Ybarra y su Conjunto, Flaco Jimenez y su Conjunto, and Santiago Jiménez Jr. y su Conjunto, as well as the Conjunto Student Showcase and the International Conjunto Showcase, this year featuring world-class bands all the way from Japan and the Netherlands. Another favorite festival venue is the historic Guadalupe Theater, which will provide the stage for the Seniors Conjunto Dance and the Conjunto Hall of Fame Gala.

Posthumous image of Alma Garza, originally from the cities Donna, TX and Fresno, CA by adoption, where she worked for three decades as the presenter of the program with the highest audience of Tex-Mex music, “Onda Tejana” from Public Radio – Radio Bilingüe.

At this year’s Gala, the Radio Bilingüe family is deeply moved that its own Miss Alma Garza will be honored with a posthumous induction into the Conjunto Hall of Fame. Miss Alma was the beloved host of the “Onda Tejana” Tex-Mex music program on Radio Bilingüe for 30 years before passing away in 2016. A native of the town of Donna in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, she adopted Fresno as her home and for decades delighted audiences throughout the border regions and beyond as a leading ambassador of Tex-Mex. Taped highlights of the Hall of Fame ceremony honoring Miss Alma will be presented during Radio Bilingue’s festival broadcasts. (Please see attached media announcement from the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center about the 2018 Conjunto Hall of Fame honorees including Miss Alma.) http://www.guadalupeculturalarts.org/hall-of-fame-gala/
The Tejano Conjunto Festival specials can be heard on the air in South Texas on Radio Bilingüe’s own KRZU 90.7 FM Batesville-Crystal City and sister station KXJT 88.3 FM Rio Grande City in the Rio Grande Valley; on all 17 additional RB stations and repeaters in California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, and on affiliate public radio stations in other states. The programs will also be webcast and will be available as on-demand audio at radiobilingue.org around the world.

Thanks to a special collaboration, San Antonio’s Texas Public Radio is providing valuable local production support to Radio Bilingüe’s visiting team.

In the Hall of Fame 2018 of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center.

This Radio Bilingüe project is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts – Folk and Traditional Arts. NEA is also supporting Tejano-Conjunto feature stories and full concert programs that will air on Radio Bilingüe’s news platforms and general programming during this summer 2018. Radio Bilingüe features Tejano music live every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Pacific Time, from California to south Texas with its network of full power FM radio stations from Calexico/Mexicali to the Rio Grande Valley. Radio Bilingüe has been a champion promoter of Tejano music from its beginning in 1980 for generations of Tejano farm worker migrant families.