The Cuming Museum is hosting since October of last year and until May 28th an exhibition about the Carnaval de Pueblo, the most popular Latin American event in Europe.

The roots of the Carnival sink in the calendar back to the 1960s, long before its first edition, when the first exiled Latinos reached London.

In the small but well-spaced site of the exhibition you can found that tight wholeness that are forty years of exile and pain, but, above all, forty years of adaptation and blossoming.

It is worth approaching Walworth to read each of the explanatory notes. From the reading you will get an overview of the development of a community which even though small and dispersed, has come to constitute a growing group of political pressure and economic activity. 

You miss, perhaps, a greater presence of costumes and masks or costumes of different editions, but one understands that space is limited and the truth is that its use has been maximised by the organisers.

Photographs taken in different editions of the Carnival and exhibit now showcase the mass optimism with which Latinos usually infect the English, when the English allow it. The looped video completely confirms this impression. 

Both revelry contrasts with the melancholy that produces the exhibition of copies of the first Latin press edited in London, as well as family parties photos (which began to group émigrés of the Americas) and coverage of some memories and testimonies of those early days.

One imagines the first few years covered in clouds, trespassed by the cold, deserted, although they may have had as much or more colour than present days - but it is big the solitude of whom arrives. 

Over the years, one will learn to smile in English and with no contract, decline pronouns and job offers, harden on the outside... although inside one is still the same young émigré that would drink its own tears.

By force of tenacity and joy, of memory and Carnival, the emigrant disguises himself as his country in London, its past, and the tears end up tasting much sweeter. 

This exhibition is the proof that culture is the only luggage of a human being.  

The exhibition is the result of a synchronized team effort by Alexandra Cuesta, Sofia Buchuk in charge of oral history and several photographers, coordinated by Ingrid Guyon, documenting the exhibition graphically.

Venue and Times