Latin America region has a festive calendar densely populated by celebrations whose lineages run from pre-Hispanic agricultural rites through colonial Catholic devotions to contemporary urban mega-events (Lopes Da Cunha and Rabassa, 2021), and whose social functions span sociability, devotion, political contestation, economic redistribution and the public performance of identity. And yet, despite the demographic and cultural weight of these celebrations, Latin American festivals remain underrepresented in the international academic journals, a field whose theoretical canon has been built largely from Anglophone and European cases (Wilson et al., 2017). This special issue takes that asymmetry as both diagnosis and provocation. It argues, through eleven empirical contributions, that Latin American festivals are not merely additional cases waiting to be slotted into existing frameworks, but sites where the central categories of the field – motivation, learning, experience, value, hallmark, stakeholder, community – acquire renewed analytical force when read from within the region's own social, religious and political grammars.
The contributions assembled in this issue, taken together, articulate an emerging Latin American programme for festival research. One whose distinctive contribution lies in a sustained insistence that the social value of festivals cannot be separated from the communities that produce them. This proposition is hardly novel in the abstract; what is new is the concentration of empirical work that operationalises it across very different festival types – Andean carnivals, Brazilian mega-events, Mexican community celebrations, religious devotions, gastronomic showcases and music festivals – and the methodological breadth with which that operationalisation is achieved. The remainder of this editorial situates the contributions within longer-running regional and international debates, traces the conceptual threads that connect them and outlines the research agenda they collectively prefigure.
From visitor motivation to cultural participation
Few research streams have proved as durable in festival studies as the one concerned with attendee motivation, satisfaction and loyalty (Crompton and McKay, 1997; Getz, 2010; Yolal et al., 2016). Four articles in this issue extend the motivational programme while quietly revising it from within.
Cordova-Buiza et al.'s (2026) analysis of the Cajamarca Carnival in Peru tests an attendee-experience model in a celebration whose national symbolic weight is considerable – Cajamarca is officially recognised as Peru's Carnival Capital. Their findings identify hedonic and cultural motivations as the principal drivers of attendance, with the event drawing visitors of all ages and diverse sociodemographic profiles. This particularity confirms the value of the festival as an inclusive cultural manifestation with the capacity to integrate visitors of varied backgrounds within a shared experience.
Gonzalez-Rosas et al.'s (2026) contribution offers a clear illustration of how festivals can function as magnets for domestic tourism. Focussing on the Festival Internacional del Globo, held in Guanajuato, they identify visitors from the state of Jalisco as the primary attendee group, underscoring the festival's role in stimulating regional mobility and consolidating intra-national tourism flows.
Richards and Marques's (2026) large-scale empirical study of Carnival in Brazil, drawing on more than 1,500 respondents, returns to one of the iconic sites of festival research with a careful disaggregation of participation, motivation and outcomes. Richards and Marques, in their analysis, show that involvement in event organisation and participation in traditional dances such as bocco and samba bear a significant relationship with positive experiential states, the sensation of flow and a heightened sense of well-being. Similarly, Sousa et al. (2026), extend this perspective by showing that gamification can also foster flow experiences and, consequently, higher levels of satisfaction within event contexts. Gamification has been documented as a tool to promote learning through edutainment actions in Mexican festivals (Sánchez-Aguirre, 2023); in its contribution to the issue, Sousa et al. (2026), show us that gamification succeeds in such settings because it reframes ordinary activities as engaging experiences that appeal to participants' imagination.
Read in sequence, these four articles trace a coherent arc within the motivational tradition: from the symbolic and inclusive dimensions of a nationally designated carnival, through the domestic tourism flows generated by a spectacle-driven festival, to the segmentation and experiential dynamics of festivals and events. Taken together, they suggest that motivation is not a stable individual attribute to be measured at the point of entry, but rather a socially situated and spatially inflected process – shaped by cultural identity, regional belonging and the material conditions of each festival site. In doing so, they quietly but persistently push the field towards a more contextually grounded understanding of why people celebrate, with whom and to what effect.
If motivation research describes how festivals are received, a parallel and increasingly influential body of scholarship interrogates how festivals produce value, and for whom. The hallmark-event tradition (Ritchie, 1984; Getz et al., 2012) has long been preoccupied with the strategic use of recurring celebrations to anchor destination identity, frequently oriented toward economic and image-related outcomes (Boo and Buser, 2005; Hernández-Mogollón et al., 2018) and sometimes toward social value (Van Winkle and Woosnam, 2014).
With regard to the outcomes related to destination image, discrepancies between the projected institutional image and the one perceived by the community are commonly observed (Alvarado-Sizzo et al., 2018). Building on this concern, in this special issue, Guillen et al.'s (2026) comparative analysis of TikTok content from the official “Perú, Mucho Gusto” gastronomic festival and from user-generated material interrogates the gap between institutional destination narratives and user-generated content of digital representations about the festival. Guillen's article demonstrates that AI-assisted methods, when applied with theoretical clarity, can extend rather than displace interpretive engagement with festival imagery.
When the use of festivals is moving toward social value – understood as the net positive contribution of an event to the economic, environmental and sociocultural well-being of the host community – Maracajá et al.'s (2026) article in this issue is exemplary in this regard, they developed a framework in which hallmark events become pathways to tourism social value precisely through the coopetitive networks they catalyse. They identified a mechanism in which value created through coopetition is appropriated by some actors and devolved to the wider community through hallmark celebrations. In the same line, Zucco et al.'s (2026) contribution recasts the social-exchange framework, finding that in contexts where institutional fragility is a recurrent concern, the social value of festivals depends not on the events themselves but on the credibility of the institutions through which their benefits are channelled.
Inclusion and diversity is another interesting subject of social value, Camargo et al.'s (2026) article on Rock in Rio takes the hallmark conversation in a direction that has been largely absent from the literature on mega-events, the presence of people with disabilities. By tracing accessibility through a festival's trajectory, Camargo reframes it not only as a site of musical and economic spectacle but as a longitudinal record of how Brazilian society has, often haltingly, expanded the boundaries of who counts as a legitimate participant in its largest celebrations. The article demonstrates that hallmark events can be mobilised as historical archives of social inclusion, an analytical possibility that the dominant economic-impact framing of mega-events has tended to occlude.
Monterrubio et al.'s (2026) contribution on Mexico's community carnivals extends this conversation in a different but complementary direction. The authors position event organisers as ethical and political agents who curate equality, diversity and inclusion in settings where these values are themselves under negotiation. Organisers, in Monterrubio et al.'s (2026) study, are moral actors whose decisions about who is included, whose voice is amplified and whose presence is rendered visible carry political weight. This contribution converges with Camargo's accessibility lens to suggest a coherent regional argument: the social value of Latin American festivals is co-produced, contested and politically mediated at every stage of the event lifecycle.
Another debate that the issue advances concerns the relationship between festivals and the political-religious life of communities. Religious festivals are central to the Latin American calendar (Durán-Sánchez et al., 2018). Esparza Huamanchumo et al.’s (2026) study examines a festival that is constituted by popular Catholicism and the identity of a fishing community, and its relationship with tourism is at best emergent and at worst contested. The article asks how stakeholder dynamics differ when the event's primary purpose is faith and community continuity rather than economic capture.
Social value in festivals is also tied to learning opportunities for attendees (Rosseti and Quin, 2019), and it is equally vital for the cultural sector itself, where performers often operate under precarious labour conditions. This precariousness, particularly evident in Latin America, becomes more visible during periods of crisis, although it persists as a structural concern in less turbulent times as well (Sánchez-Aguirre et al., 2025). Within this context, Lee's (2026) study of the Huilo Huilo Music Festival in Chile approaches festivals as intermediaries for both learning and career development. While the literature on cultural careers has predominantly examined metropolitan creative economies (e.g. Leoti et al., 2023), Lee shifts the focus to a Chilean ecological reserve, where festivalisation intersects with rural development and environmental governance. The article reframes festivals not as terminal experiences but as nodes in longer-running trajectories of skill formation and professional mobility, an argument with particular salience in regions where formal cultural-sector training infrastructures remain unevenly distributed.
Toward a Latin American program for festival research
The contributions assembled here support four propositions that the editorial argument of this issue takes as a research agenda rather than as conclusions. First, social value should be treated not as a residual outcome of festival production but as a co-produced object of governance whose realisation depends on institutional trust, coopetitive networks and the ethical agency of organisers. Second, religious, devotional and community-rooted festivals are legitimate and theoretically productive objects of management research, and their inclusion will require frameworks sensitive to celebrations whose primary purpose is not visitor capture. Third, methodological pluralism – encompassing structural equation modelling, historical-archival analysis and AI-assisted multimodal methods – offers a coherent vision of how to engage with festival-related themes across Latin American contexts. Fourth, while this issue provides a preliminary mapping drawn from four countries – Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Chile – the picture remains partial. Future issues and research programmes will need to incorporate the Caribbean, Central America, the Andean countries beyond Peru and the Southern Cone beyond Chile, while engaging more substantively with Indigenous and Afro-descendant festive traditions, whose epistemic contributions to event studies remain underdeveloped.
This special issue does not aim to resolve these questions, but to open them up for sustained inquiry. If the articles that follow achieve their purpose, it will be by persuading readers that Latin American festivals are not a peripheral case for event and festival management, but part of its current theoretical debates – and that the regional research community is prepared to take part in shaping them. That case is made by the authors themselves, whose contributions stand on their merits.
We are deeply grateful to the authors for their commitment to a rigorous and constructive review process; to the more than forty reviewers from across Latin America, Europe, North America and Oceania whose careful engagement strengthened every paper; and to the editorial team of the International Journal of Event and Festival Management for their support throughout the development of this collection. Any virtues this special issue may possess are owed to that collective effort.
