North Texans know that Latin American influences have be­come a part of daily life in the region. Just as Mexican, Cuban and South American restaurants pop up across the Dallas-Fort Worth area, reggaeton music — a popular form that merges Caribbean and African sounds and rhythm — and Latin hip-hop proliferate on the FM radio band.

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Karla Mercado, a Texas Woman’s University dance graduate student, will perform in the TWU Latino Dance & Music Festival next week. The TWU International Dance Company will perform at 7 p.m. July 19.

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For officials in the Texas Woman’s University School of Arts, it made sense to devote some time this summer to Latino music and dance. The university galleries got in on the festival with a joint exhibit featuring the work of two Latina artists.

The university is gearing up for the premiere of an original composition by a pre-eminent Mexican composer and guitarist even as it plans to spotlight the TWU International Dance Company, a group that has performed and studied a growing amount of Latino dance forms.

The music of Veracruz

The anchor of the festival is the premiere of Fantasia Tropical, by guitarist and composer Ernesto Garcia de Leon, from the Music School of the National Fine Arts Institute of Mexico City.

The piece will be unveiled Saturday, July 19. TWU commissioned the piece last September, said classical guitarist and University of North Texas graduate student Pedro Haley, who is helping to coordinate the festival’s music.

Haley said he’s been performing de Leon’s music for years, as has TWU faculty member Carlo Pezzimenti, a celebrated classical guitarist who will also appear in the festival.

De Leon, who’s from Veracruz, has written popular and folk music in Mexico since the 1970s. Haley said that music and dance are major forces in Latin American culture, and that both even dictate dress when Mexicans venture out for a night out on the town.

“I know I thought it would be great to have him write something that was combining the two forms,” Haley said.

Fantasia Tropical, Op. 66 is a major work of music, Haley said. It’s written for a quartet of classical guitars — Dennis Harris, Brian Rowe, Haley and Pezzimenti — with clarinet (Ricky Reeves), flute (Oscar Arturo Osorio) and percussion (John Osburn).

Haley said the piece is one of the biggest guitar compositions he’s en­countered. It’s about 30 minutes of music, with six movements lending a symphonic feel to the project.

“He took some dance styles from the Caribbean and the coastal regions of Mexico where he’s from … and added his own nostalgic remembrances of this popular music,” Haley said.

The average North Texan might think of flamenco or salsa when thinking of Latin music.

“It’s definitely not stemming from salsa or flamenco,” he said. “The coastal region of the Gulf of Mexico — like Veracruz — and the music there is more related to the Caribbean.”

Haley cited three dance styles in the premiere: dancon, a popular Cuban and Latin American dance before World War II; the son, a dance form based on the old Spanish tradition during the Renaissance, which is lively; and the rumba, a catch-all term for dances that blend folk influences with popular forms.

The composition is a ballet. The original plan was to premiere the piece with a dance, but Haley said that plan was postponed.

“Ernesto is a unique composer,” Haley said. “To me, he’s one of the true generating forces in Latin American for the guitar. He’s written more than 60 pieces. It’s probably a unique ensemble. I can’t think of a piece that has been written for four guitars, flute, clarinet and percussion. I think it’s one of the biggest pieces written for the guitar. It creates an incredible ambience. It’s a truly unique sound world.”

The dance

TWU dance professor Gladys Keeton has directed the school’s international folk dance company for years. In the past few years, the company has evolved into an international company with a special interest in Latin forms.

The company covers a lot of dance forms, but Keeton said Latin dance has become a central part of the company’s mission.

“I think because of the group of the dancers I’ve had — most of them are from the Valley and a lot of the dancers are Hispanic — we’ve done a lot of Spanish dance,” she said. “But that’s not why I do it.”

Keeton said the company also just gets a lot of requests to bring their Latin dances to schools and events. The group has performed at Fiesta on the Square in Denton for years now, and said the same is true for Denton’s Cinco de Mayo celebration.

“They get requests from all over to do Cinco de Mayo [performances], and that has gotten huge,” Keeton said.

When they perform for schoolchildren, both the children and the teachers seem to respond especially to folklorico and other Latin folk dances.

Keeton said the demand isn’t coming just from administrators and teachers looking to engage children in Latin dance.

“I guess I’m looking at our community at the diversity of our community and the diversity of the area,” she said. “There aren’t a lot of groups in our area that are doing this work. There are probably a lot in the D-FW area, but they are for children. The TWU company is made up of adult dancers, and we perform for adults, too. The company has been selected to do our Aztec dance piece for the [Dallas] Dance Council Curtain Call Concert in September, the same weekend as Fiesta. I estimate we’ve performed for ore than 8,000 people this year.”

For the festival, Keeton said the company will perform La Pasion de la Vida (“The Passion of Life”) by choreographer Sarita Salinas. The piece is set to music by Ojos de Brujos and Luis Linares, and is based on flamenco.

Salinas, a TWU alumna, teaches dance at George Carver Magnet High School in Aldine. Dancers Jessica Baker and Karla Mercado are senior dance students at TWU, and Rubi Trevino is a TWU dance graduate. Mercado is in Mexico studying Spanish dance with several Latin masters.

The art

The festival turned into a School of Arts effort when the art department invited Sara Cardona and Maria Teresa  Garcia-Pedroche to exhibit in a joint show called “Flora.”

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The Texas Woman’s University Latino Dance & Music Festival makes its way into the fine arts galleries on campus as well. Artists Maria Teresa Garcia-Pedroche (whose work is shown in left photo) and Sara Cardona (right) have a joint show titled “Flora” in the West Gallery at TWU.

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Cardona is a Dallas artist and art teacher at Richland College who uses geological survey maps to make ornate ink drawings of flowers, bird-like forms and flourishes that recall European embellishment. She uses collage and sewing machine stitching to add depth and interest to the work.

Cardona said her latest work is a study in speeding up what used to be a leisurely practice. The teacher now has a 10-month son, and finds the ink and sewing machine let her get into the creative zone faster, with more immediate results.

The work looks like screen prints of classical ornamentation basted onto maps. Cardona tackles the collage part of her process with a steady hand. The viewer might never know she cut out pieces of work and added them to a map of Colorado’s topography if the artist didn’t gently shape the paper into waves.

Garcia-Pedroche offers five quartets — sets of four photographs — of a bird of paradise plant against an azure sky.

She had brought a cutting of the plant to her mother — who was living with a terminal illness. A single stalk had two blooms, an unusual feature for that type of flower.

She photographed the plant day after day. It achieves an architectural quality, with the photographs zooming in on both the fresh, fleshy part of the plant as well as the withering leaves. The plant’s demise results in vivid colors — soft pink-orange, brittle yellow and soothing green. A cloud is here and there in the background.

Garcia-Pedroche took photographs for a month and shared them with her mother. The flower died the same day her mother did.

“A year passed before I developed the photographs,” she says in her artist statement. “What is essential does not die but clarifies. The greatest tribute to my mother is not grief but gratitude.”

The photographs, she said, are dedicated “to my mamacita.”

The art exhibit runs through July 19. A closing reception will be from 5:30 to 6:45 p.m. July 19.

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com .

What: TWU’s festival of music, dance and art

When: An evening of classical guitar will be at 7:30 p.m. July 17. Special guest Ernesto Garcia de Leon performs with local artists at 7:30 p.m. July 18. The festival culminates with a dance performance and the premiere of de Leon’s Fantasia Tropical at 7 p.m. July 19.

Where: July 17-18 events are at the new Redbud Theater Complex at TWU’s Hubbard Hall. The July 19 performance is at Margo Jones Performance Hall, on the first floor of the TWU Music Building at Oakland Street and Pioneer Circle.

Details: July 17-18 performances are free. Tickets for the July 19 performance are $5.