“SWFest” to Showcase Local Sound for Fifth Year at Senate Theater

The neighborhood’s free community music, food, and arts festival returns for its fifth year this Saturday, August 23rd, marking half a decade since Gabriel Herrera-Duran and a small collective launched the event to restore what the pandemic had taken from the neighborhood—a sense of connection centered around live music. SWFest (“Southwest Fest”) will sprawl around The Senate Theater, taking over every available performance space, including parking lots and the 750-person capacity theater, with free admission and 100 community vendors and resources alongside 48 performers across three stages. From noon to 10pm, as Herrera-Duran puts it, “You’re fully immersed in the experience of Southwest Detroit.” 

The lineup spans from breakouts to emerging talent, headlined by artists who’ve captured national attention, like Curtis Roach, whose pandemic-era “Bored in the House” TikTok hit scored a Tyga remix and nearly 9 million YouTube views. The all-ages audience will hear the neighborhood’s musical range, including: Stoop Lee’s neo-soul hip-hop; Iranian-American singer-songwriter Neena Roe, who sings in English, Spanish, and Farsi; Herrera-Duran’s own R&B and Latin fusion serenades; and the dark-pop fusion of Racquel Soledad, who performs alongside fellow dancers of Team Sol.

Artists like DJ Renz see the festival’s diversity in genre as the true cultural representation that makes up the community. “It’s about bringing back the culture—from Latin music to reggaeton, Afro Nation, hip-hop, ghettotech. Anything you can think of, we’ve got it.”

Demaciiio, a visual artist and musician who’s performed every year since the festival’s founding in 2021, saw that growth in how people respond to the festival’s name alone. “It has its own gravitational pull now, where even if I just tell people ‘SWFest,’ they know,” he said. “It’s grown in a way that makes people want to be there, which is the point—bringing people to Southwest, engaging the community, and showing the artists we have.” 

The Senate Theater, which anchors the festival, considers the event to be central to its community mission. “It’s probably the biggest, most visible example of how we’re functioning and developing into a community-based hub for the performing and film arts in Southwest Detroit,” said Lindsay Robillard, Treasurer of the Detroit Theater Organ Society (DTOS) which operates The Senate. 

Back in 2021, when the pandemic had left Southwest’s music scene struggling to survive, there was a growing sentiment among artists to reconvene as a community and share their music with live audiences. “We were coming off of 2020 which was a hard year because of the pandemic, and arts and culture throughout the city took a hit,” Herrera-Duran explained. “So we all kind of felt like there was a void. We needed to just uplift the culture throughout the neighborhood, elevate the artists throughout our community, and reclaim ownership over the cultural economy that exists in Southwest Detroit.”

What would follow was the birth of a festival that celebrates and reflects the neighborhood’s true identity, from the culinary to the cultural. The festival organizers’ approach to their programming emerged from their lived experience growing up in Southwest Detroit, showcasing what the neighborhood actually is rather than what outsiders might expect it to be. “Southwest Detroit is quite literally a melting pot of all sorts of backgrounds,” Herrera-Duran said, and that “we needed something that elevated all of the cultures that exist here, from the Black parts of Southwest to the White parts—everything.”

That commitment to authentic representation, including Detroit’s less visible communities, creates meaningful opportunities for artists like Iranian-American headliner Neena Roe, who grew up on the East side. “For my identity to be platformed means a lot, because there aren’t many of us in that space,” she said. 

What results is a vibe Herrera-Duran calls “a reunion of community,” where professional production value meets the intimacy of a family cookout. That atmosphere resonates with performers, and illustrates how artists from Southwest see their neighborhood. “No matter where you’re from – East side, West side – if you’re in Southwest, you’re family,” DJ Renz said.  

For Demaciiio, who travels internationally to perform for audiences as far as Mexico City, performing at SWFest carries special weight, too. “It’s good to be able to go crazy all year and then come home and do a show in your own backyard, with all your friends and family there,” he said. 

It’s an inviting, communal vibe, says Robillard. “It’s wholesome, it’s fun, and it really showcases the diversity of Detroit and Southwest Detroit.” In previous years, the audience has ranged from babies to seniors, so Herrera-Duran aims to curate the festival’s different lots for the various quadrants of his target audience.

Since its launch in 2021, the festival has evolved into a key platform for neighborhood talent to showcase their artistry. This year’s audition process at Garaje Cultural on June 14 drew 75 hopefuls competing for 15 lineup spots. DJ Renz, who’s performing his second year, said of the audition process, “it felt like home. There was no competition. Everybody was free, in good spirits and laughing.” This year, Herrera-Duran invited him back without re-auditioning, having seen him perform around the city. 

For Roe, whose first time performing at SWFest was in 2022, participating in the event is deeply meaningful. “That call meant a lot. It felt validating to be seen as a Detroit artist by an organization doing such important work in the city that raised me.”

That inclusive and welcoming environment – and Herrera-Duran’s eye for talent – has positively influenced upcoming artists, for whom the event has acted as a launching pad, something that validates Herrera-Duran’s approach as well as his taste. “I have a few examples of teenagers that I know auditioned in the last few years, and I’ve seen their careers grow,” the organizer said. “They go from three years ago having their first performance be SWFest to now I see them performing all across the city, building a name for themselves.”

But growth and momentum hasn’t come easy for Herrera-Duran and his fellow organizers. Herrera-Duran said that due to new permitting required that feels arbitrary and burdensome, producing the event has become increasingly difficult. The double standards between grassroots events and city-sponsored programming add a particular sting to a not-for-profit operation that runs entirely on volunteer labor.

When it comes to organizing events in a historical building with its own regulatory challenges, Robillard hums a similar tune. “There’s no coach or case manager at the city to help you through it,” she said. “You just get told a piece of paperwork is wrong without anyone explaining why.”

It takes a village of volunteers and an army of sponsors to keep the festival free and legally compliant. Funds to produce the event and pay performers and vendors are a necessity, but beyond that, profit isn’t a motive for the festival’s organizers. Artists like Roe appreciate that community-first approach: “We live in a culture where everything is commodified, but a come-up doesn’t have to be financial—it can be cultural, it can be impact, it can be community.”

Despite these challenges, SWFest hopes to inspire similar festivals elsewhere. Herrera-Duran wants the event to become a proof of concept for neighborhood-controlled cultural programming throughout the city. “I really wanted SWFest to be a model that could be recreated in different neighborhoods throughout the city,” he said. “I feel like there should be an East Side version, a West Side version, where that community of artists is reclaiming ownership of their arts and cultural ecosystem.”

But if it’s going to grow, Herrera-Duran believes, the expansion must happen organically, from within each community rather than through external influence. “Southwest [Fest] has no business going to another neighborhood and recreating it—that’s for the people of that neighborhood,” he emphasized. “The residents of that community should have full ownership over a space.”

For Demaciiio, the call to action is clear: “If you’re an organization in another community, all you’ve got to do is take action and hold space for creatives and like-minded individuals, and it’s going to grow.”

Herrera-Duran, whose music career has grown alongside the festival, says he’s focused on building pathways for emerging artists to reach heights beyond what he’s accomplished. “That’s really what it boils down to for me,” he reflected. “My art, my music, has always been about creating a platform for myself to elevate the community and to elevate the voices and experiences that I know so many people have had that have overlapped with my own.”

Five years in, SWFest has become what it set out to be: Southwest Detroit celebrating itself, for itself.