This June 13 I am going to perform at Hot Corner Fest 2026.

It is an honor for me to bring my artistic work to the African American community of Athens. This community is the one I most identify with, both humanly and culturally.

I do not say this lightly; I say it conscious of the cultural intersection we share, our relationship with the world and with history.

Let’s say it all began at the start of the century, at the Hot Corner Cafe.
When my brother Noé and I visited the Hot Corner Cafe for the first time, we arrived on an island where a micro-America existed, with an identity shaped by slavery, hip hop, segregation, and jazz — heirs to an inexhaustible wealth of rhythm and color.

There, on that island called Hot Corner Cafe, I was able for the first time in Athens to express my cultural identity outside my own community.

Now I understand that there are many micro-Americas in Athens. Although only two stand out, as if people only saw in black and white, ignoring the rainbow that we Athenians are. But you only have to enter the classrooms to see the cultural diversity in Athens.

My neighbors at work, white Athenians with Southern accents, had a carpet-installation business; my brothers and I had an auto restoration shop — we shared the same building.

One day they moved elsewhere, and when I asked one of the workers why they were leaving he told me, “milk and grease don’t mix.” It was his most poetic way of saying he was white and superior and I was a filthy, greasy person. Too late I learned the meaning and consequences of such an assertion: racial supremacy, established since colonial times.

Although every year I submit my application to play at AthFest (the white people’s festival), I am rejected every year and yet every year I insist on playing at that festival because of its reach and representation in Athens and the surrounding areas.

The value of Hot Corner Fest does not lie in how spectacular it is or how much money it raises, nor even in the number of people it draws.

The value of Hot Corner Fest lies in the corner it defends — a corner that historically represents the Morton Theatre.

Beto Cacao at the Hot Corner Cafe is an act of resistance and solidarity with the Afro-Athenian community.