In the last 15 years, half a million Mexican immigrants have made New York City their home. And for the last four years, they’ve had an arts festival whose strength of spirit has kept pace with their burgeoning population.

Every fall since 2003, Celebrate Mexico Now has conveyed a national flavor that comes from many neighborhoods, and even many regions and classes, of Mexico. Beginning today and running through September 16, events in architecture, cuisine, dance, film, music, theater, and visual art involving more than 65 artists will offer to New York the latest from Mexican culture.

Behind it all stands Claudia Norman, the Mexico City native and longtime New Yorker whose management company programmed the initial festival in 2003, and then carried it forward after its sponsor, Arts International, closed.

The curator and programs manager of the Manhattan gallery Art in General, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, has been working with the festival for all four years. Ms. Hernández said she appreciates Ms. Norman’s efforts at nationwide coverage. “When Mexico Now was being designed, most of the contemporary arts were focused in Mexico City,” she said. “But we really support emerging artists outside the center as well.”

Three years ago, for instance, Tijuana-based artist Jaime Ortiz Ruiz produced a room of gold foil paper scavenged from maquiladoras — “not iconographic, more abstract, but still Mexican,” Ms. Hernández said. This year, the festival will import the collective Perros Negros, which has created event-based visual art shows in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico and around the world . But the new culture also occurs outside of the global cities, or outside of any cities at all, and the Celebrate Mexico Now festival aims to represent all of these facets of Mexican cultural life. At Los Mirasoles restaurant, guest chef Rubi Silva will provide “A Taste of Michoacan,” a southern state that, like Puebla, is a major source of Mexican New Yorkers. And at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Mayan woman dramatists will offer a short play in English, Spanish, Tzotzil, and Tzeltal about struggles in Highland Chiapas. “We are presenting it in a context: not indigenous, but contemporary. It’s a way to approach new audiences,” Ms. Norman said.

The festival also draws attention to Mexican culture that has already headlined elsewhere. “Ver llover” on the bill of prize-winners from the Morelia Film Festival, also won the Palme d’Or for best short feature at the Cannes festival. “In the past few years there has been a growth in interest for culture beyond the traditional tropes,” the festival’s film programmer, Carlos Gutiérrez, said. “Celebrate Mexico Now has been a key project in showcasing it.”

Ultimately, though, what is defined as Mexican in the work is up to the
audience to decide. “The Mexicanism or Mexicanity of our work is something
we have really never taken into consideration,” a member of Perros Negros,
Fernando Mesta, wrote in an e-mail message. “Our projects have always been
done thinking more in a capricious and personal way.”

This brand of promiscuous cosmopolitanism dates back in Mexican culture to
Malinche, the indigenous translator and mistress to conquistador Hernán
Cortés. “Mexico being the Malinchista country that it is, it is the dream
for every artist to come to New York and be part of this festival,” the
dramaturge and managing director of the downtown theater group 3-Legged Dog,
which is presenting Pluton, a technologized multidisciplinary piece about
the ex-planet by the performance group Antarctica, Victor Weinstock, said.
“Through it, Mexican culture in New York grows both more pervasive, and more
abstract.”

“Now it can be part of culture in general. Not modern in terms of modernism,
just contemporary,” Ms. Hernandez said. “Earlier, if you said, ‘Mexican
culture,’ you would imagine Frida Kahlo and Virgin Marys.”