Sonoma Valley residents keep Latino holiday traditions alive

For Angie Sanchez, the founder and executive director of VIDA Cultural Arts in Sonoma Valley, there’s great joy in sharing her culture, especially at Christmastime.

The oldest of seven children raised by low-income immigrant parents from Mexico, Sanchez wants the rich Latino traditions of generations before her to continue with her own daughter, who is 15, “so it doesn’t get lost.”

In Sonoma Valley, where Sanchez was raised and now lives in the Springs area north of Sonoma, Christmastime is an opportunity to celebrate the special rituals of Mexico with the broader community.

“The traditions in Mexico are so beautiful,” she said.

Sanchez is among the Latinos in the valley who are bringing some of those traditions to the community, for people of all backgrounds and ethnicities to enjoy.

When the annual Lighting of the Sonoma Plaza celebration kicked off the local holiday season just before Thanksgiving, dancers from Grupo Folklórico Quetzalén of Sonoma Valley opened the program with traditional Mexican dances.

The popular event was a multicultural celebration, with the lively ballet folklórico dancers — and their festive costumes and music — engaging the crowd outside Sonoma’s historic City Hall.

Glen Ellen resident Erik Mejia brought another tradition to the public, leading a sold-out class last weekend on the history and preparation of rural and modern tamales. Held at the Sonoma Community Center, the class was so popular that a second session has been added for Jan. 16.

Mejia owns Ta’Bueno Co., an El Verano-based food preparation and delivery business that specializes in authentic, homemade tamales. Dating to ancient Mesoamerica, tamales are steeped in cultural tradition.

By Christmas Eve, Mejia and his team at Ta’Bueno will fill hundreds of orders for tamales, those labor-intensive bundles of corn-based masa, or dough, with myriad fillings that are wrapped in corn husks and served as a requisite part of Latino holiday celebrations.

“It’s one of those bundles of joy,” Mejia said. “You can open them up in your hand and just eat them. There’s lots of flavor in that tiny bundle.”

Mejia’s gourmet tamales include chicken, pork, chicken mole, and serrano pepper and Oaxacan cheese options, plus a vegan roasted corn variety. He delivers within Sonoma Valley, Napa and Santa Rosa.

The tamales, a blend of time-honored family recipes and those of a master tamale maker who works with Ta’Bueno, are authentic to the regions of Michoacán, Jalisco and Colima on the western coast of Mexico. Other regions use banana leaves to wrap tamales.

Mejia moved from the port city of Manzanillo in Colima to the North Bay when he was 6. He recalls tamales being central to family celebrations.

“Tamales were never missing from the table,” he said. “We usually had the tías (aunts) curating that food. Not just at Christmas, but on occasional weekends or if it was a party.”

For Ta’Bueno, “our biggest day by far is Christmas Eve,” said the entrepreneur, who started his business in August 2020. He has gained a wide following of those who enjoy tamales as well as other specialties he prepares seasonally, including traditional Mexican stews and enchiladas.

Traditional foods also are a part of a community holiday celebration in Agua Caliente in The Springs hosted by Antonia Villalva and Adolfo Hernandez, parents of four and grandparents of nine.

Every year on Dec. 12 — Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe and a national holiday in Mexico — the couple invites the public to stop by their 5-foot-tall statue of the Virgin Mary, which is on display year-round in a covered structure outside their home on Highway 12.

The day typically includes live music and refreshments, like a warm ponche fruit punch; but more importantly, the gathering is an opportunity for prayer and reflection. It celebrates the Virgin Mary as the patron saint of Mexico, regarded for bringing blessings and granting miracles to people around the world.

Not even an atmospheric river could dampen the enthusiasm of those who gathered Dec. 12 under pop-up tents, despite rain, wind and cold temperatures.

Typically, well over 100 people stop by the shrine — some kneeling in prayer, others leaving offerings like flowers, candles and rosary beads.

The couple’s daughter, Jennifer Hernandez Villalva, said the event brings her parents great joy.

“It’s one big family around Sonoma, whether you’re blood-related or not. This brings the community together,” Antonia Villalva said in Spanish, translated by her daughter. “It’s been comforting knowing how much people enjoy (the statue).”

For the couple, both from small towns in Mexico — Villalva is from Guerrero and Hernandez is from Michoacán — the observance continues a beloved Christmastime tradition from their homeland.

They purchased the statue while returning from a trip to Mexico to visit relatives. “My mom had a feeling. She couldn’t leave without her,” Hernandez Villalva said. It stood out from “tons of them all lined up on the sides of the border.”

Now, more than a dozen years later, the serene replication of the Virgin Mary is a central figure in the family’s Sonoma Valley holiday tradition.

“Even when there have been hard times,” Hernandez Villalva said, “my mom has always kept her promise to keep the tradition.”

For the faithful from St. Francis Solano Catholic Church in downtown Sonoma, the shrine — illuminated with strings of Christmas lights and visible from Highway 12 — is a marker along the procession route parishioners take from nearby St. Leo the Great Catholic Church in Agua Caliente to St. Francis 4 miles away.

Their procession honoring the Virgin Mary begins on the evening before Feast Day and culminates with an 11 p.m. Mass at St. Francis. More than 100 people made the 95-minute walk, arriving at the church moments ahead of the storm.

On Feast Day, about 30 parishioners with umbrellas in hand gathered at the Sonoma Plaza to walk a few blocks to St. Francis for another celebration and service. The downpour prevented scheduled mariachi musicians from leading the procession, but they performed during the church service.

The observances provide local Latinos with an opportunity to maintain traditions they, or generations of their families, celebrated in Mexico.

“Our Lady of Guadalupe is so emblematic of Mexican culture, a mixture within the Spanish and Native cultures,” said Liz Tinoco, who served on the Guadalupano planning committee and works at St. Francis as wedding coordinator and secretary of religious education.

“As much as it is religious, it’s very cultural. Having celebrations here brings a piece of Mexican culture and tradition here,” said Tinoco, a native of Mexico who has lived in the U.S. since she was 3.

The holiday tradition has long been important to her family; her mother is from Aguascalientes and her father is from Michoacán. “My family has had great devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe,” she said.

Tinoco said the processions, particularly the chilly nighttime walk, go by faster than imagined. “They’re full of spirit. You’re walking with people of great faith.”

In another Latino holiday celebration, El Brinquito Market in The Springs is hosting a Posada Navideña event from 6-9 p.m. Sunday for the local community. The neighborhood market will provide goodie bags and a traditional Mexican dish called pozole in celebration of the Christmas season.

Sanchez, who established VIDA Cultural Arts in July, said Latino traditions are especially important to those from Mexico who may be away from their loved ones at the holidays and whose livelihoods are impacted by seasonal work in the trades or as farmworkers.

“Wintertime is not a very happy time in the (Latino) community,” she said. Celebrating traditions from Mexico “brings joy and brings a lot of good memories of their childhood and of their parents and grandparents. It gives them a sense of belonging and pride in their culture and traditions.”

She plans to continue working with the local community to expand cultural arts, especially during the holidays. She teamed up this month with her neighbors, the Hernandez-Villalva family, to help out with their Our Lady of Guadalupe celebration and is hopeful next year’s observance can have an even greater reach.

“It’s bringing everyone together and everybody is welcome,” Sanchez said. “This is really about embracing your neighbors. It has to do with your community.”