Sonoma County festivals celebrate Oaxacan culture

Maribel Garcia doesn’t have many fond memories of last year’s Guelaguetza Sonoma County festival at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts.

“I was pregnant and it was 100 degrees. It was horrible,” the Healdsburg resident said Sunday at the annual celebration of Oaxacan culture.

This year, she planned to have a good time. Garcia, wearing a bright handmade floral blouse, strapped her son, Santiago, now 9 months old, onto her husband, Lamerto Sandoval. She gave him a palm hat to shade the baby’s head and ran off to take pictures of the traditional dancers who are her favorite part of the festival.

Sandoval grew up in the southern Mexican state before immigrating to the United States, and he wants his four sons to know a little bit about where he came from.

“Guelaguetza lets my boys see the culture of Oaxaca,” Sandoval said as he watched a parade of dance troupes perform on stage.

Now in its seventh year, the festival celebrates traditional music, dancing, food, and clothing of the indigenous Oaxacan people. It’s sponsored by the Santa Rosa-based grassroots organization Oaxaca Tierra del Sol.

A similar celebration was held Sunday in downtown Santa Rosa, where a steady stream of people flocked to Courthouse Square throughout the day to revel in the sights and sounds of Oaxacan traditions. They feasted on tacos and tlayuda, a handmade dish featuring beans, meat and greens layered on a crunchy corn tortilla.

It was a bittersweet experience for many, one that provided reminders of home while underscoring their distance away.

Asked if she missed her first home, Angelica Herrera, 40, said with a resigned smile across her face, “Mucho.”

“It’s beautiful that the United States is bringing Mexico here,” she said.

Visitors to the free event, dubbed Oaxaca in Wine Country, squeezed into patches of shade to hear traditional music and watch folkloric dances, some performed by out-of-town groups, such as the Los Angeles-based Maqueos Music.

Sacramento resident Juan Hernandez, 44, who grew up in Santa Rosa, where his family still lives, led the procession at the event opening. He wore a huge traditional Oaxacan puppet, carried on a wooden frame set upon his shoulders with a papier-mache head that stood 10 feet tall.

“I love it,” he said about the festival. “It’s my passion. I’ve been coming seven years in a row.”

This year’s event at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts was noteworthy for the large number of groups from around the state coming together to support Sonoma County after the fires, said Antonio Ramirez, an organizer.

“Many workers lost their jobs after the fire,” Ramirez said.

Ramirez’s wife, a house cleaner, was out of work for a period because some of her clients’ homes burned down, while some vineyard workers he knows lost work, he said.

The damage to the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts almost forced the festival to find a new location, he said. Next to the northeast lawn where the festival took place was a vacant lot where a portion of the center burned in the Tubbs fire.

Despite the logistical challenges created by the damage to the center and renovations underway, “we decided to do it here because we’re helping each other,” Ramirez said.

That spirit of cooperation and support for different members of the community is at the heart of the Guelaguetza, said Angel Salvador Martinez, one of the organizers of the festival in San Jose.

Sipping a tepache, a traditional drink of fermented pineapple rinds flavored with sugar and cinnamon, Martinez explained that the city of Oaxaca and surrounding villages were badly damaged by a massive earthquake in the 1920s. In the aftermath, people realized they needed to put their differences aside and come together to help one another, Martinez said. The festival and its variants in the United States have become a way to celebrate both the unique arts and crafts of the various peoples of Oaxaca as well as that spirit of sharing, he said.

Keenly aware of the suffering from the October wildfires, dance troupes from San Jose, Santa Cruz, Milpitas, St. Helena, Half Moon Bay and elsewhere came out in force this year to show their support for Sonoma County in much the same way the villages came together after the earthquake, Martinez said.

“Our Oaxacan community is getting more strong day-by-day,” he said.

Staff Writer Mary Callahan contributed to this story.