Arts & Culture

Last March, film director Melissa Elizondo was about to board a plane from Mexico bound for the Watsonville Film Festival (WFF) when she got a call from Executive Director Consuelo Alba. The festival had been canceled due to the pandemic, and international travel was...

SANTA CRUZ—For years, KUSP was Santa Cruz’s non-university-affliated public radio station, offering local news and extensive music and talk programming, and acting as a regional affiliate for National Public Radio.  The station went dark in 2016, but it wasn’t long before a group of citizens...

Pajaro Valley Pride’s annual celebration returned in a different capacity this year—with a brand new location and more activities. The Watsonville YWCA invited the non-profit to use its facility on East Beach Street, prompting the organization to move the event from downtown.

When the pandemic first hit, many retail stores across the globe were forced to shut down their brick-and-mortar locations and transitioned to online shopping, using virtual platforms to display and sell items. For Sindy Hernandez, designer and owner of Queen’s Shoes & More in Watsonville,...

WATSONVILLE—Mexican Independence Day is Sept. 16, and the Watsonville Film Festival (WFF) is teaming up with two Bay Area organizations to bring a celebratory event to the community. Celebrando La Cultura, to be held Sept. 15-18, will include film, music and dance. It begins with...

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY—El Sistema Santa Cruz/Pajaro Valley has been awarded $50,000 by the Lewis Prize for Music, which will help further the nonprofit’s work in bringing music education to local students. El Sistema was named one of 10 finalists for the Lewis Prize for Music’s...

Wargin Wines’ Assistant Winemaker Brenton Jones says he is ready to shake up the wine industry. “When I look at the industry as a whole… it’s pretty set in its ways,” Jones says. “It gets stuck in a box—especially when you look at what breweries...

WATSONVILLE—Throughout the pandemic, Watsonville-based organization Arte del Corazón has been staging open-air art shows to showcase local artists.  The idea for the shows came from Monica Galvan, who has teamed up with other artists and performers to plan events at Romo Park on Main Street,...

WATSONVILLE—Pajaro Valley Arts’ gallery at 37 Sudden St. has once again open its doors after six months of being shuttered due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The State of California is now allowing most counties to reopen museums, aquariums and galleries at a limited capacity, after...

CAPITOLA—Forty artists from across the county fanned out around Capitola last week with canvas, easels, chalk and tubes of color in tow, in hopes of distilling a handful of the coastal city’s choice land and seascapes on canvas and paper.  The efforts were part of...