The Multicultural Festival Is Back — and It Takes the Pop-Up Museum With It

Mahjong tents, a chess party that moves down the block one turn at a time, and a hundred-year-old bus barn full of Ridgefield history that has exactly four hours left on the clock. September 5 is doing a lot of work.

Back in July I told you there was some kind of history “pop-up” coming to the Greely Building and that I did not have details. I have details now, because it opened, I went, and it is genuinely one of the better things this town has done all year. Here is the part that matters this week: September 5 is the last day you can walk through it, and it closes at 2 p.m. — in the middle of the Multicultural Festival, which is happening two blocks away at the same time.

So you get one Saturday to do both. Let’s talk about both.

First, the Festival

The Ridgefield Multicultural Festival is back for its eighth year, Saturday, September 5, and it is, without exaggeration, one of the best free days you’ll spend in this town all year.

If you haven’t been, here’s the pitch. It’s a full day downtown built around one idea — everybody’s culture gets a stage. Traditional dress, food from vendors who are actually doing cultural work (not just slapping a flag sticker on a food truck), and a lineup of music and dance performances at Overlook Park that rotate fast enough that you’ll see four or five different countries represented before your kettle corn gets cold.

The whole thing started with Ridgefield resident Megan Dudley noticing that two of her colleagues, who lived right here in town, never showed up to the city’s first-Saturday events downtown. When she asked why, they told her it didn’t feel like it was for them. Dudley, who is Yonsei — fourth-generation Japanese-American, with grandparents who were interned in Arkansas during WWII — had her own reasons to think hard about what gets passed down and what gets left behind when a community pushes people to assimilate. She pitched the city a PowerPoint. They said yes. The Ridgefield Multicultural Initiative threw its first festival in 2018, and it’s grown every year since.

Expect a big games tent — mahjong has become a genuine year-round program for RMI at this point, not just a festival novelty, and the library’s been running a chess party where you make one move and pass to the next board down the row. There will be food vendors prioritized for doing real cultural work (Dudley’s words, more or less — think Portland Indigenous Marketplace-style vendors over generic festival-food trucks), plus back-to-back performances at Overlook Park all afternoon.

This Year’s Theme: History and Healing

Every year RMI picks a theme, and it shapes everything from the vendor lineup to the games tent. This year’s theme is History and Healing, and it’s a noticeably bigger swing than past years like Fun and Games or the drum-focused festival that brought Portland Samba up for a full weekend of workshops in Abrams Park. RMI has been working with humanities scholar Michelle Swinehart, a Portland State instructor who’s worked with StoryCorps, on collecting stories from longtime Ridgefield families alongside newer residents — an attempt to close the gap between what Dudley calls Old Ridgefield and New Ridgefield.

Ridgefield can grow fast and still remember who was here first.

The Museum Closes the Same Day

That theme is not just a slogan on a banner this year. It has a building.

Meeting History: Exploring Ridgefield’s Told & Untold Stories has been running inside the Greely Building at 304 Pioneer St since August 21 — the century-old former bus barn the Port has been slowly trying to figure out what to do with. It opened with a 1920s jazz dance and a live orchestra, which I went to, and which was one of the more surreal Friday nights I’ve had here. Sixteen days, free, weekends only. September 5 is day sixteen.

The tour starts in 1909 and works forward — the industries, the schools, the churches, the organizations that have quietly fed hungry neighbors for decades. The section that has gotten regional attention is Dudley’s: the Japanese farming families who lived and worked around Ridgefield before being forcibly removed during World War II. She built it out of census records, tracing who the first people of color in this area actually were, and the answer turned out to be families whose kids were American citizens in local high schools when the removal orders came.

That is the exhibit that makes History and Healing mean something specific instead of general. And on Saturday it is open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and then it is gone.

Want In?

RMI runs almost entirely on volunteers, and vendor registration for 2026 is open now with limited spots. If you’re a performer, they want you on stage. If you run a business with a cultural angle, they want you at a table.

Quick Questions

No. Both the festival and the museum are free and walk-in. Bring cash for the food vendors.

Easily. They are about two blocks apart. The museum closes at 2 and the festival runs to 3, so do the museum first.

Not as far as anyone has announced. It was built as a sixteen-day run tied to the country’s 250th anniversary. The Greely Building has other things lined up — the Big Art Show moves in September 19 and 20 — but Meeting History ends Saturday.

Downtown gets tight on festival Saturdays. Park a few blocks out and walk in. You are going to be walking between two venues anyway.

One More Thing

Adriana Baer over at I’m Into This Place has an episode with Megan Dudley dropping the week before the festival — she’s the one who tipped me off to the Greely Building details in the first place, and she’s been covering RMI since before I knew what a first Saturday was. If you want the longer version of the founding story, the internment history behind it, and where Dudley wants this to go in five years, her coverage from last year is worth the listen, and keep an eye on imintothisplace.com for the new one.