Multicultural Night in 2017. Photo from B & G Archive.
Every year in the spring, the Multicultural Club aims to bring together all the cultures at Malden High through Multicultural Night. The Annual Multicultural Night is a event where cultural foods and traditions are shared among the Malden Community at the Malden High School.
The Annual Multicultural Night has taken place at the Malden High School for the past seven years and is open to the entire community to participate in. Consisting of various festivities and cuisines from around the world, the attendees are engaged in Malden’s ethnic and cultural diversity. Students and local business alike participate by preparing dishes that represent their cultural heritage for the community to enjoy.
Aside from all the food and cultural festivities, the event will also host the Best Dish competition. The winners of the competition will be awarded a cash prize for being the best dishes of the night.
The event was created in order to highlight the diversity in Malden and to “get students involved in cultural celebrations,” explained English Teacher Yahaira Marquez, who is also the Multicultural Club Advisor. Marquez had wanted students to “celebrate their own culture, but also learn about other student’s cultures and to teach their culture to others.”
In the beginning, the event had been a Multicultural Week, with each day highlighting a specific topic. “[They] had one day where it was just Cultural Artifacts” Marquez stated. Booths had been set up in the Cafeteria to display the mementos that students had submitted. The mementos consisted of things that “[they] had bought on vacation, and [they] went on vacation there to visit family.”
Over the years, the Event had been shortened to a single night in order to make the event “bigger, with all the different booths and aspects into one evening.”
The event will take place on May 17th 2019, from 5:30-7:30 pm in Cafe B. Tickets are $7 in advance and $10 at the door and can be purchased during lunch from a Multicultural Club member or after school from Ms. Marquez in room J282.