From the editor.

• Author: Kierman, James Patrick

Festivals, by their nature, are colorful celebrations, meant to be enjoyed by all who take part; today, however, they are also efforts to revive and protect cultures and the communities that created them. The festivals that you'll read about in these pages of Americas have reached beyond their communities to include tourists and witnesses and, in one case, confronted those who wished to suppress this ritual expression. Festival planners undoubtedly face the cost-benefit balance of cultural-expression-as-performance for tourists, but none has reached the point of commercialization of Rio de Janeiro's carnival, where in an effort to remove it from the streets, organizers have created a spectacle concentrated in the sambodromo (samba stadium) for tourists and television cameras.

Unlike Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires is not synonymous with carnival. However, as Kevin Footer explains, its celebration has had a long historic identity in the neighborhoods of the Argentine capital, where after suppression during military rule, the murga portena is now enjoying a wide revival. Meanwhile, on the Caribbean island of Tobago, reports Suzanne Murphy-Larronde, the summertime Heritage Festival, begun only some fifteen years ago, has surpassed carnival in popularity, drawing crowds of locals and tourists to its many neighborhoods and hamlets for parades, performances, and tasty...