Flower crowns, picnic blankets and banana slug balloon hats strewn about the Oakes Upper Lawn — is this Coachella 2016?
No, it’s WestFest 2026, the annual music festival hosted by westside colleges and student organizations at UC Santa Cruz.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event, first hosted in 2016, has been paused. Students gathered on Feb. 27 to recreate the 2016 vibes from the very first WestFest 10 years ago, with a Coachella-esque theme.
“We were really interested in bringing this event back to really promote the community on the west side [of campus],” said Daniel Castaneda, an event coordinator and Oakes College Senate Executive co-chair. “So we thought, let’s create an event that brings together all the west side colleges through music, through community, through activities!”
Meeting weekly since the beginning of the fall 2025 quarter, the organizations involved worked together to recruit and hire performers, food vendors and collaborate with other campus organizations to table at the music festival. The organizations behind the event included Oakes Student Senate, KZSC, Rachel Carson College Council, Porter Senate, Kresge Parliament, College Nine Senate, John R. Lewis Governing Cooperative, and the Student Union Assembly (SUA).
Members of the band Juliet Lives perform their songs as attendees gather together and dance to the music. Feb. 27, 2026.
The festivities began around 4:30 p.m. when the freshmen student-based band Juliet Lives hit the stage. Jacob Campa (bassist), Joshua Camarillo (guitarist) and Eytan Flapan-Feig (drummer) formed their band just this year and got their start by playing Blink-182 covers in their dorms. WestFest was their fifth-ever show.
“It definitely means a lot,” Camarillo said. “Just being able to have this, to show up and there’s people here, working sound, you’ve got DJ sets in between, everything’s planned, that’s pretty cool.”
As Juliet Lives performed, many of the 150 attendees laid on the grass or perused the tables set up by campus organizations. Groups such as UCSC Basic Needs, Rachel Carson College Council and Party Like a Slug offered activities such as face painting, beehive making and tie-dying t-shirts.
The festival lineup included DJ Lady Deed, Empire Grade, DJ G, YellowCat, DJ Playstate, Ancestree, DJ Kitty and Birdseye.
Alex Lund, KZSC’s social media coordinator, explained how organizers use a quality-over-quantity method when selecting performers.
“There are so many student bands, and we definitely want to uplift underrepresented voices,” she said. “We judged them after listening to their music — we didn’t want to judge just by how many followers people have.”
Volunteer workers serve taquitos to attendees, who lined up in the Oakes Learning Center during the event. Feb. 27, 2026.
Ancestree, who also performed at WestFest, is a reggae band from the greater Santa Cruz community. By inviting local performers and making the festival free to the community, Alyssa Castaneda, a coordinator and emcee of the event, spoke to how celebrations like WestFest bridge the gap between students and locals.
“We’re very disconnected from the rest of the community and the rest of the school,” Castaneda said. “So I really hope that whenever we put on big events like WestFest … I hope that more people want to show up,” she continued.
The field filled with childlike joy as attendees danced with flower crowns atop their heads, while others hula-hooped, played sack hop or Connect Four. There was also a variety of food options such as Pacific Cookie Company, flautas and agua frescas that attendees could indulge in free of charge.
Various organizations set up booths near the lawn, offering different activities to those who attended the event. Feb. 27, 2026.
Katelin Riley, an organizer of the event, referenced the university’s recent discussions of steering away from its distinctive college system, and explained how Oakes is a part of her identity at UCSC.
“I definitely would say that we have our different parts of campus, all of us … while we are separated, we come together in community for things like this,” Riley said. “It shows the university that we’re united, you can’t divide us,” she concluded.
Whether attendees were joining in on the fun for the food or to represent the west side of campus, all left having listened to rockin’ live music.
“When you have something like [WestFest] where they’re bringing other colleges together, it [minimizes] that separation,” said Aaliyah Copeland, an Oakes affiliate and freshman studying marine biology who attended WestFest. “We may be separated, but we’re all here. We’re all students. We’re all trying to have fun.”
