Photography: Alexis Gómez @alexisgomez

Styling: Fernanda Sánchez @fersaanch

Creative direction: Alexis Gómez and Fernanda Sánchez

Editor: Georgina Villa @georgina__villa

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about cultural heritage? As a team mainly formed by Mexican members, the idea of developing a cover portraying the beauty of our people and our traditions had been in our minds since the beginnings of We The Cool Magazine (because four months since our launch sounds like a lifetime, doesn’t it?).

Everyone has a cultural background, which for us, is more than a set of values, social practices and traditions inherited from generation to generation. We think of cultural background as all forms of expressions transmitted through art, music, fashion, gastronomy, literature, photographs, dances, beliefs, memories and conversations that give us a sense of belonging and identity.

This month, we are featuring initiatives of people who are adapting their cultural backgrounds to new practices and that are celebrating them in different and unique ways. We talked to the founders of Sí Collective, a project that helps Latin American artisans and designers preserve their ancestral traditions, while finding their own voices in the new, and now trickier than ever, digital world. We immersed ourselves into The African Artist Foundation, which not only promotes the highest level of art in Africa, but also gathers and unites emerging and renowned artists and now serves as the first point of contact for the African Diaspora. We talked to El Búho, a British musician who integrates folk sounds into his mixes, and we are featuring five international model agencies that are empowering diversity by casting models from different cultural backgrounds and ethnicities, establishing new and more realistic perspectives for the fashion industry.

Last but not least, for our cover editorial, we wandered around the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico where, unexpectedly, we met our cover girl Abril Cabrera, a millennial poet and storyteller. Her personal style and unique personality invited us to open a dialogue around her social context through a weekend photoshoot in which we got to meet her family, friends and have a 360º immersion into her cultural roots.

Through her Instagram account, Cabrera integrates her traditions and gives life to her legacy in a beautiful visual way, while connecting with young generations. She is the perfect example of how old can meet new through dynamic and modern means. At the beginning of every week, she will be publishing a letter to our readers.