What's new at Tucson Meet Yourself this weekend? A lot.

The festival’s footprint has been reimagined around themed villages, a pair of pavilions and a handful of micro pavilions, and open spaces where visitors can linger and feel like they are entering a neighborhood not unlike their own.

The redesign was the brainchild of Bryan Rafael Falcón, who took over as the festival’s director this year when longtime director Maribel Alvarez became senior advisor, and was made possible by the festival’s collaboration with the Smithsonian Institute.

The goal, said Falcón, was “to help people slow down and go deeper.”

“A folk life festival … is about the people, the language, the nomenclature, the way people interact with the ritual that surrounds all of these things that give us our identity and which bring us together,” he said.

“We've been itching for a while to dig down into what makes Tucson Meet Yourself a unique experience and really a unique signature, namesake event for Tucson,” said Alvarez. “How do we continue to be unique, educational, deep exploratory of cultures beyond music and dance and food, but then dig deep in all of those things?”

The Smithsonian Institute provided part of the answer when it included Tucson Meet Yourself as one of 40 folklife festivals for this year’s “Of the People: The Smithsonian Festival of Festivals” nationwide tour.

The Smithsonian collaboration came with $250,000 to help Tucson Meet Yourself amplify its “spaces for civic engagement,” including designing activities “that reflect the voices, stories and aspirations of their communities,” according to the institute.

When James “Big Jim” Griffith and his wife Loma conceived of Tucson Meet Yourself as a folklife public square — a place where Tucson’s culture and its people came together — there was no one else thinking along those lines.

That was 1974.

In 2026, there are dozens of Tucson festivals that fit that bill in some way or another, including Pueblos del Maíz, which held its fifth annual event last month; Tucson Greek Festival returning downtown Nov. 6-7; and All Souls Procession on Nov. 8.

“It was the festival of multicultural exchange; now there’s a hundred of those,” Alvarez said of Tucson Meet Yourself.

Food remains the common denominator and the festival’s enduring tagline: "Come for the food, stay for the culture.” But this year the food will come with a bigger side of culture.

Each of the villages and pavilions will house different communities. “Native Nations Way,” for example, will showcase the living traditions of the region’s Native American communities including the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui. Artists from Tucson’s Jewish community and Tucson’s long-lost sister city of Amaty, Kazakhstan, will demonstrate their skills and traditions in the “Global Artists Triangle.”

The “Home Cooks Corridor” is back, celebrating family recipes and the stories shared across the dinner table from generation to generation, while the “Culture Kitchen,” a live demonstration stage, got a major makeover that gives visitors a sense of nostalgia.

As part of the Smithsonian campaign, Tucson Meet Yourself commissioned the Polzin Family to reinvent the “Culture Kitchen” from a historically plain white festival tent into something that tells a story. Their answer: A 1950s-esque diner with a prefabricated aluminum facade covering the white tent.

“I just saw in my head this chrome diner,” said Sarah Polzin, a Tucson artist who turned her work into a family business that now involves her two kids, ex-husband and partner. The family mostly works with theaters, designing stage sets and creating costumes.

“I just really mentally made a connection with the importance of food in culture, and then how nostalgia plays such a part in that,” Polzin said. “And I think there's probably nothing more nostalgic than the 1950s … so it just seemed like the perfect segue, drawing nostalgia to culture to food.”

In addition to the cultural arts and crafts, music and dance that have been cornerstones of the festival, Tucson Meet Yourself will spotlight occupational folklife this year.

“We chose four occupations that are on the edge of practical and artistic, but that are also a little bit hidden and they had a vital role in Tucson’s history and economy,” Alvarez said.

On the festival grounds you’ll find a boxing ring with trainers demonstrating moves; an area where glass blowers from Sonoran Glass School will demonstrate the art of blown and fused glass; several Western ware makers from boots to hats to jeans; and landscapers whose role is to restore and beautify the world we live in.

The festival’s 10 micro pavilions represent Tucson’s different communities, including Asian Creations curated by the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center, the Jewish Pavilion, Flamenco Sonora, Disability Cultures and Kazakhstan Artists.

That’s where you will find 15 Kazakhstani artists and musicians who are expected to travel to Tucson for this weekend’s festival to perform and showcase their art. In the Casa Pavilion, visitors will also be able to help create felt from wool as part of a Kazakhstani art project, Falcón said.

The Kazakhstan connection comes from the Tucson and Almaty sister cities program launched in 1987. And even though Tucson’s collaborations with the city waned around 2010 largely for budgetary reasons, Tucson still has an impact on the country. In 2023, the University of Arizona opened a microcampus at Kozybayev University offering dual degree programs in biotechnology and information science. Alvarez said the program had its first graduating class in July.

The Tucson-Almaty cultural connection will be a focal point when the Smithsonian Folklife Festival returns for its 60th anniversary next summer.