Albuquerque Foxy Festival draws crowd with music, art and pet adoptions

About 400 people filled Rail Yards Market on Sunday for the third annual Albuquerque Foxy Festival, a daytime gathering that mixed Latin-Grammy-nominated music, poetry, local art, food and pet adoptions in one of the city’s most recognizable public spaces. For organizer Michelle Mirabal, the turnout suggested the event is doing more than selling tickets. It is helping pull people back into the Rail Yards area as a place to gather, linger and support local businesses.

Mirabal said she created the Foxy Festival as a family-friendly alternative to a bar setting, and this year’s version leaned hard into that mission. Alongside live performances and spoken word, the event featured local artisans, food vendors and an adoption component through Cross My Paws Animal Rescue, giving the festival a civic purpose that extended beyond entertainment. That blend of culture and outreach has become part of what makes the event stand out in Bernalillo County’s crowded summer calendar.

The setting mattered. Rail Yards Market sits in the Barelas neighborhood and has become a regular Sunday destination during the warmer months, operating from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. from May through October. The market says it was originally established in 2014 by volunteers and neighborhood residents, and recent coverage has placed it in its 13th season with more than 200 local vendors. Against that backdrop, Foxy Festival looked less like a one-off concert and more like another sign that the site is becoming an economic and cultural anchor.

That role carries extra weight because the Rail Yards are not just a backdrop. The City of Albuquerque says the complex was built in the late 1800s and early 1900s and once employed nearly one-quarter of the city’s workforce. A festival that draws families, artists, vendors and rescue groups into the same space gives new life to a site that helped shape Albuquerque’s growth in the first place.

Cross My Paws Animal Rescue added another layer of community value. The volunteer-run group focuses on reducing animal homelessness and euthanasia through rescue, vaccination, spay and neuter work, and adoption outreach fit neatly with the festival’s family-first tone. Mirabal said she wants the event to grow even bigger in future years, and Sunday’s crowd suggested there is room for it to do exactly that.