Viva!

It’s Fiesta time in Santa Barbara and the city is geared up for brisk tourist business, catering to wide-eyed Europeans flush with cash, out-of-towners here to enjoy Flamenco dancing and overpriced tortas. Most locals head for the hills when Fiesta rolls around, or, if they stay in town, do no more than check out the happenings at Our Lady of Guadalupe church, where the scene feels organic and authentic and one isn’t likely to see many Caucasian guys wearing silly sombreros and shouting “Viva La Fiesta!”

Again this year, the “El Presidente” is a pudgy Caucasian fellow with a European surname.

Fiesta wasn’t always such a big production around here. True, the event has always had a commercial angle, though in the old days it wasn’t as crassly commercial as it is now, but then again, the entire U.S. economy grooves to a crassly commercial tune, twenty-four hours a day, so why should the good merchants of SB (most of them now upscale corporate chains) miss an opportunity to hawk their wares? If some German tourist is willing to lay down $10 for a watered-down house margarita, and $25 for an official Fiesta T-shirt, what’s the problem?

Our Spanish heritage is hailed without getting into the messy details of what the Spanish did to indigenous people during their reign. Instead of an imperial campaign for God, Gold, Guns, and Genocide, the arrival of the Spanish in SB is placed in a benevolent light during Fiesta; the Spanish were decent folk who came to spread the Good Word and bring civilization to the heathen. OK, maybe some Indians croaked laying adobe bricks for the Mission, but on the whole it was a worthwhile endeavor, right? Maybe a few Indians didn’t cotton to the new arrivals, didn’t appreciate their style, and made it a point to say so and were summarily beaten to a pulp, but that was the exception, not the rule, the work of some bad apples. Just like Abu Ghraib a few hundred years later, right?

But despite the commercialism and the historical myopia, it’s still sweet to see the kids in the parade, and the dancers who work so hard at their art. For a few days these events take our minds off the failed Occupation of Iraq, the crumbling economy, and the nastiness of the Presidential campaign.

So bring out the mariachis and let’s get our collective Viva on!