We are in the countdown week before our summer fiesta. I’m not sure why we have never done this before. We live in fiesta territory and we are surrounded by Hispanic culture so it seems like something we should have done before this. I carry an Hispanic surname and am regularly asked if I identify as Hispanic, which I don’t. I spent six of my first seven years living in Latin America, first in Venezuela for four years and then in Costa Rica for two. I spoke Spanish before I spoke English. I went to a Spanish-speaking kindergarten. My mother was a fluent Spanish-speaker and my father spoke his whole life with a thick Hispanic accent. Truth be told, my mother was more Latin American than my father. She had lived there for twelve years working for the Rockefeller Foundation and she worked among the indigenous people that whole time. By contrast, my father was actually Italian from Bolzano, so Northern Italian at that. He was in Venezuela by virtue of being forced to emigrate from Italy during the war. I truly don’t know if that was for his own lifestyle reasons or because his father had been a Mussolini fascist. What I do know is that he was always a European more than a Latino, and at his first opportunity, thanks to my mother and the War Brides Act of 1946, he got the hell out of there and into the United States as soon as he could. The rest of his family…his parents and his brother and his family because true Venezuelans and stayed there for good. It’s perhaps that reality and my two follow-on years in that tropical valley in Costa Rica that makes me feel partially Hispanic.
I can’t swear I really have too many memories of my Venezuelan days ( I get lost in what was a memory versus what I have sun in old photographs), but my two young years in Costa Rica were very formative and heavily spiced with Latin culture. We started going to the local Catholic Church, where all the parishioners were locals…as were the pigs and chickens that wandered in an out of the church intermittently. I remember the grittiness of the local stores like the bakery and what passed for a grocery store. While I had some American and European friends, I also had some local kids that I used to play with, doing things like pulling down young banana trees, killing and dragging snakes behind our bicycles on the gravel roads, and chewing on batons of sugarcane (despite seeing the rotting teeth of the local kids who did so too regularly). I also remember that when we had or were invited to a birthday party, it was a fiesta and there was a piñata.
I have always had a liking of Spanish architecture, with the adobe walls, the terracotta red tile roofs and the hushed and shaded courtyards and arcades used to avoid the worst of the heat. The West has always appealed to me for many reasons, but among them was always a sense that there was a part of me that resonated with the dominant local Hispanic culture. I truly wish I spoke fluent Spanish, but I have learned the language three times, once as my first language in Venezuela, once as an important socializing language in Costa Rica and a third time in the mid-80s when I was tasked with running our Latin American business and retrieving some $4 billion in failing sovereign debt. That last round had me spending four years in and out of almost every country in Latin America on a regular basis. I followed that act with six years running a private banking business where many of the clients were Latin American and I had to travel regularly in and out of the region with regularity. Unfortunately, I don’t seem top have an ear or mind for languages, so today I speak what I call passable “Gardener Spanish”, but not too much more.
You can’t go a mile here in San Diego without encountering a Mexican restaurant. It’s a regular part of our culinary diet and I am neither particularly partial to it nor do I avoid it. San Diego was, after all, a part of Spain or Mexico for eighty years before becoming a part of the United States. About 34.6% of San Diego County’s population is Hispanic or Latino (29.8%, per current California census data). That’s higher than it seems since the only population greater is White at 42.4%. Most of that Hispanic population traces to Mexican origin, the majority of Hispanics and Latinos in San Diego are Mexican American, consistent with the region’s long history as part of Mexico. So it’s only right that we have a fiesta.
I have started the mechanics of decorating the property for the fiesta. I am trying to find a balance between the festive Mexican look and yet not making it a kid’s Piñata party. I have bought three basic types of decorative accoutrement. For the tables, we have red table cloths across which we have the traditional multi-colored Mexican striped runners. I have bought 12-foot strings of colorful stenciled banners (they are plastic, which means that they actually hold up well in the weather and wind). And I have all manner of hanging ornaments which are mostly multi-colored fans, starbursts and crepe poofs, along with miscellaneous colorful discs, Mylar spiral hanging ornaments and various types of colorful flags. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to hang all of this and I settled on a set of 10-foot metal poles which I have placed along the sides of the driveway and pathway, and 1/16” metal cable, which I have cut into lengths to run from pole to pole. I have metal rings to attach the banners to the cable. I also have monofilament fishing line that I plan to make loops to hang all the ornaments randomly along those cable lines. So far, I have put up all the cables and banners and Kim said it already looks well decorated enough…even before I hang the ornaments or put several more cables across the driveway (I want to wait to put that up since an delivery truck is sure to wreck havoc with anything crossing the driveway). All or the ornaments are ready to be put up later in the week and I will spend time tomorrow making the fishline loops to hang them and measure out the drive-crossing cable precisely.
The plan is to have the Mexican food truck (The Lime Truck) and the Margarita Truck at the base of the driveway. We will place the drinks station and the chips, salsa and queso up by the garage near where the Mariachi dancers will perform. The weather is predicted to be low 80s to high 70s and we are expecting lots of merriment and fun times reconnecting with the Hispanic roots in us all.