Luisa Valentín Pelagio (Medford) is an independent Folklorico Ballet dance teacher and performer. Valentín Pelagio obtained her Diplomado in folklórico dance in Mexico City at the Amalia Hernandez School. Besides her dance work, she also crochets, embroiders, and constructs Día de los Muertos altars.
Bio
Luisa Valentín Pelagio (Medford) is an independent Folklorico Ballet dance teacher and performer. As a young woman, Valentín Pelagio obtained her Diplomado in folklórico dance at the Mexico Amalia Hernandez School in Mexico City. Since 2004, she has attended Festival de los Danzantes and Danzantes Unidos workshops in California as well as workshops every spring to learn new dances and get new costume ideas. Each summer she takes part in a workshop at the Asociación Nacional de Danzantes (ANGF) or the Mexico Amalia Hernandez School.
Valentín Pelagio grew up in the state of Guerrero, where her family actively participated in a variety of cultural traditions. She learned to crochet and embroider from the elementary school she attended, and as a child, she used to dance with family and relatives at cumpleaños (birthday parties), quinceañeras (fifteenth birthday celebrations), and baptisms. Every year she learned a different dance, enhancing her repertoire. Valentín Pelagio also added religious dances because she participated for several years in Virgen de Guadalupe celebrations. She and her mother would make papel picado (cut-out paper) banners to decorate the street for the annual Virgen de Guadalupe procession on December 12.
Luisa Valentín Pelagio came to Medford, Oregon along with her daughter in 1991. She married again and had two sons. In 1997, she first saw Victoria Snow Mountain and some folklórico dancers perform for a community event. Fate threw them together again when Valentín Pelagio and her children were visiting Guerrero, Mexico and ran into Snow Mountain there. They drove back together to Medford and became friends. Valentín Pelagio’s children started to attend Snow Mountain’s folklórico dance classes while Valentín Pelagio and three other women started an adult folklórico group. Eventually, Snow Mountain invited her to teach dance for a high school club that Snow Mountain ran. In 2014, the club became a nonprofit, Ballet Folklórico Ritmo Alegre, with Snow Mountain as executive director and Valentín Pelagio as artistic director. When Snow Mountain retired, the board asked Valentín Pelagio to become managing director right around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Until January 2023, she was the artistic director only. Always one to look on the bright side, Valentín Pelagio notes that the pandemic made it possible for her to undertake online management and administration. And when the Mexico City’s Amalia School switched to online in 2020, she took the opportunity to continue learning and then teach folklórico dances via Zoom. As of January 2023, Valentin Pelagio is an independent dance teacher and performer teaching at the Medford Library and at the Medford Dance Arts Center.
Since 2000, Valentín Pelagio has had the opportunity to perform and conduct workshops in the southern Oregon and northern California schools such as Ashland, Talent-Phoenix, Medford, Central Point, Eagle Point, and Grants Pass school districts. As a dancer for Ballet Folklórico Ritmo Alegre Valentin Pelagio has performed for cultural and civic events for a variety of occasions such as Martin Luther King Day, Chinese New Year, Cesar Chavez Day, Cinco de Mayo, 4th of July, Festival de la Hispanidad, Día de los Muertos, Las Posadas, and Virgen de Guadalupe.
Besides her dance work, Luisa Valentín Pelagio is versed in many aspects of her cultural heritage. She crochets, embroiders, and makes the costumes for various folklórico dances. She can speak about the various traditional practices surrounding Día de los Muertos, an important tradition in her family, and knows how to build the home altars that honor the dead. These elaborate commemorations include photos of those who have passed, special breads and cookies, and fruit. Valentín Pelagio constructs a home altar and one for the dance studio to convey the importance of their cultural heritage to her dance students.
For Luisa Valentín Pelagio, folklórico dance is her center: “When I'm dancing, I get transformed and transported. . . . [to] my country, my family. . . . And when I'm dancing, I feel like I'm there.”
