Skippy Peanut Butter showed up. So did some banks, a few mariachi bands, some local taco vendors and Ronald McDonald.
Conspicuously absent from Sunday’s Cinco de Mayo celebration at Civic Center was open talk of immigration reform, a subject that drew 75,000 people to the same site less than a week before.
Amid of sea of corporatism – a woman on a stage extolling the virtues of Wish- Bone salad dressing in Spanish, Frontier Airlines trying to lure the crowd to register for a raffle for two free airline tickets – hundreds of thousands of people who flocked downtown weren’t treated to heavy politicking.
But, according to organizers of the two-day event, which began Saturday, that wasn’t necessarily on purpose.
“There is no separation going on. We 100 percent support the rally and the pro-immigration issue,” said Veronica Barela, president of NEWSED Community Development Corp., which runs the festival. “A lot of them are our family, a lot of them are our friends, a lot of them are our neighbors. They attend our event. They spend their money here.”
While a few people were wrapped in Mexican flags or had political T-shirts on, more were dressed in regular Sunday festival attire. A few people did say they were happy to attend a predominantly Latino festival to send a political statement, but more were just content to eat the food and listen to the music.
“This is my sixth or seventh time here, and I don’t come for the politics,” said Sergio Franco, who lives in Englewood. “I come here for the atmosphere … for the food and for the single women.”
Jennifer Herrera manned the Dignity Through Dialogue and Education table, an immigrant educational organization. Hung up around her white tent were disparaging cartoons from around the turn of the 20th century about Irish and Chinese immigrants.
Most people kept walking by, and Herrera wasn’t surprised.
“I think those who may be politically inclined may not be here,” she said. “The sentiment is that it’s too corporate, too consumerism. It’s the same complaints that you hear about Christmas, that this culture is much richer than sombreros and beer.”
Nathan Marcy thinks so. He and his wife, Rachael, brought their 3-year-old daughter, Ava, to get a sense of Latino culture and history.
“White people have about as much culture as that dead grass over there,” said Nathan Marcy, an Anglo, while bouncing Ava on his shoulders as she waved a Mexican flag.
Although politics may not have been overt Sunday, some revelers noticed a subtle difference in attitudes this year.
“It seems like people are trying to be more polite,” said Roxanne Villalba, who brought her four kids from Longmont to the festival.
Franco, who has attended at least six Cinco de Mayo festivals in the past, characterized it differently.
“It’s just not as wild as it always is,” he said. “I don’t know what that means.”
Staff writer Allison Sherry can be reached at 303-820-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com.
