Thank You for Coming to El Mercadito Mágico!

Last Saturday, KYCC held our first ever El Mercadito Mágico Traditional Healing Arts Festival. KYCC’s Prevention Education, Recovery Services, and Koreatown Storytelling Program staff and volunteers gathered with members of our Los Angeles community to learn diverse traditional healing practices. We welcomed local healing artists, who demonstrated different ways to take care of our bodies including acupuncture, plant-based medicine, and sound bath meditation.

From free acupuncture and massage sessions where event attendees could receive services to heal and rest their bodies, to demonstrations of various cultural healing practices – including essential oil remedies using plants like rosemary, lavender, sage, chamomile, as well as Korean bee venom acupuncture, traditionally used to treat a range of ailments – the afternoon was spent exchanging ideas of how to care for ourselves physically, mentally, and spiritually.

Our hope for El Mercadito Mágico was to address the mental health and wellness needs in Koreatown, Westlake, and Pico-Union by offering healing methods that are available and accessible in our communities. This festival also allowed us to provide a space for our community to gather in an intergenerational, multiethnic, and multilingual way. We hope to continue fostering these connections throughout our 2024-2025 cohort exploring Traditional Healing Arts in Koreatown.

We are so grateful to each of our workshop presenters, Deisy Guttierez, Dr. Hong Tack Chung and Dongguk University Los Angeles, Kylee Jones and Indigenous Circle of Wellness, Edith Rincon, Dr. David Delgado Shorter and the UCLA Archive for Healing, Joel Garcia and MiguelAxel Burrola from Meztli Projects, Stella Han, Blanca Rios, and Sion Kim, who offered our L.A. community such a wide variety of culturally rooted healing practices.

This festival would not have been possible without the generous support from California Humanities, Sierra Health Foundation, ArtsHERE, Snap Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

We are actively recruiting oral history narrators, including acupuncturists, herbalists, shamans, and traditional healers from our diverse ethnic communities. Please contact Katherine Kim at kkim@kyccla.org if interested in participating.