This year, two seniors in student government took on a project to add an evening event to the assembly called Multicultural Night. The idea came up because there wasn’t enough space in 2025 for everyone who wanted to participate. That wasn’t a problem this year, and the night was certainly a success. 

Multicultural Night is similar to the assembly. It has most of the same performances and fashion show, but no flag ceremony. It widens its audience to include non-student community members, and it pairs the show with excellent food. I was introduced to injera, which my friend brought to the event; the injera was amazing.

The assembly starts with a fashion show where students show off everything from formal ceremonial clothing to everyday attire. Many pieces stood out, but when all was said and done the fashion show isn't what people remember, and not for a lack of trying. The dance performances were at a level where even the most apathetic students were entranced by the dancing skill shown by their peers. Perhaps most attention-grabbing were the two members of Razas Unidas doing the worm in blow-up dinosaur suits.

The Filipino Student Association (FSA) performed an intense Tinikling dance — with little room for error. Two people, sitting, each held the ends of two sticks, which two other students danced over as they hit the sticks together, faster and faster, to the rhythm of their music. A slight misstep could have easily meant an embarrassing fall. They pulled it off perfectly.

“We practiced for like a month or two before; I only actually showed up to two or three practices, but we would rerun it many many times,” said Madyn Embry, a senior at Garfield with the FSA who was one of two seniors who led the event.

One group of freshmen put on a stunningly precise K-pop dance routine. It involved two songs, and got even better the second time they put it on in the afternoon. It was clearly the product of intense practice, but couldn’t have happened without serious passion.

“When we realized we could have a chance to dance at this multicultural event I was like, ‘that's really cool,’ because we come from multiple cultures and were celebrating a culture.” said Connor Dockery. “It's important to know that anybody can like K-pop, no matter their race or gender.”

It was one of many performances where multiple cultures came together, because Garfield is a place where traditional ethnic and political boundaries often dissolve. In that vein, one group from Ethiopia and Eritrea came together to do a dance.

“It’s really cool that we can show two countries coming together,” said Feruz Tesfa, who led that dance. “We go to school with these people every day but it's important to know their backgrounds and where they come from. There's many high schools that don’t have cultural days and don't have events like this, which makes it very special.”

The makeup of Garfield’s student body changes often with waves of immigration to the country. My first friend at Garfield found his way there because of war in Cameroon. Another friend of mine came because of economic instability in Venezuela, and another because of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

“When I’ve been here, it’s changed demographics. Mostly, when I started, we had a lot of kids from Vietnam, China, Thailand… [and then] Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea mostly,” said Gretchen Sloan, a teacher for multilingual learners, who has been at Garfield for 23 years and organizes the assembly’s flag ceremony. 

There are many other communities at Garfield as well, with many students coming from West Africa, the Pacific Islands. I’m lucky to be part of a small but growing Persian-speaking community at Garfield. 

“We just got a new student today from Micronesia,” Sloan added.

Many students came in waves of immigration where they were subject to rhetoric that vilified them and their cultures. So, when this assembly comes around, it could be expected that they might not want to show their culture so much. But this is not the case.

“I feel like, [because of anti-immigrant rhetoric], kids are more proud to share their country. There’s so much ugliness said about them, or assumed about them,” Sloan said. “[Students say,] ‘Let’s show who we are, let’s be proud of who we are, and we’re not gonna let that ugliness taint us.’”