5th Annual Bay Area Maya Festival (SF)

Giovanni Emmanuel Uribe

The fifth annual Bay Area Maya Festival will be held on Saturday October 3, 2026, from 9AM to 1:30PM at City College of San Francisco’s Mission Campus, 1125 Valencia Street, between 22^nd and 23^rd Streets.

The Bay Area Maya Festival celebrates the living presence of the Maya community in the San Francisco Bay Area. The only event in the region to bring together Maya people across languages, regions, and traditions: Yucatec, Mam, Kʼicheʼ, Kaqchikel, and more.

The festival is a free, annual gathering for cultural celebration, community healing, and transnational exchange. Through music, dance, poetry, art, food, and workshops, we connect Maya families with their heritage and with one another, while inviting the broader community to learn from and stand alongside their Maya neighbors.

The theme for this year’s festival will be aj tz’ib, and is centered on Maya writers and writing in the largest sense of the words possible. Aj tz’ib intersects with many sub-themes: poetry, fiction, history, art, painting, weaving, pattern-making, the recording of and representation of knowledge, the preservation of the past, the imagining of the future. As Paul Worley and Rita Palacios will be discussing in their book presentation at the festival, the concept of ts’íib, or tz’ib, is connected to: tsikbal, which has to do with narrative, dialogue, interaction, and agency; k’anel, which has to do with love, connection, and approval; cha’anil, which deals with enjoyment and interaction; and cholel, which connects with place and one’s relationship with time and space.

The Bay Area is home to approximately 30,000 Maya people, and for many years, our living culture, contemporary concerns, and voices remained largely invisible in public life. In 2019, a small group of community organizers and educators came together with a shared vision: to create a free, welcoming space where the Maya community could gather, celebrate, and be seen. That vision became the Bay Area Maya Festival, co-founded by Pedro Tuyub of the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), English Professor Steven Mayers of CCSF, and Rita Moran of Maya Women in Art. The festival has been held every year at the Mission Campus of City College of San Francisco, in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District. As Pedro Tuyub says, “It is more than a festival. It is a living affirmation that Maya culture is present, evolving, and thriving in the Bay Area—and that future generations have a place to carry it forward.”

Since our inauguration in 2019, the festival has grown every year since. What began as an all-volunteer effort has become a community institution, with support from partner organizations including Independent Arts and Media (IAM), Asociación Mayab, Acción Latina, Instituto Familiar de la Raza, the Latino Task Force, Radio B’alam, Voces Maya, and the Movimiento Cultural de la Unión Indígena.

For more information on this year’s festival, please see: https://bayareamayafest.org/

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.