It’s just before 4 pm at Fiesta Evansville. Salsa band Bande Bembé is getting ready to play, sound-checking a 12-string guitar-like instrument, possibly a Spanish Laud.
Flags of dozens of nations billow in the wind as families peruse booths showcasing crafts and food — whether from a food truck or freshly cooked right under the tent.
Held at Wesselman Park in Evansville, this is the 10th annual event designed to celebrate the Latino community in Evansville and beyond.
Abraham Brown is President of the festival. He said the event has changed and grown right along with the local Latino population. Overall, these populations almost doubled in number in the past five years.
“We have noticed a lot of migrants from Colombia, Venezuela and also from Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala,” he said.
And those populations now make up a substantial part of this celebration of culture. The festival was started to showcase the Latino population and the nations they represent.
He said in 2014, they were struggling to get a good number of Hondurans to participate in the parade. “And now we had to limit the number, because they all wanted to come and participate at the parade and that's just how big the community has grown,” Brown said. That also includes Venezuelans.
Aside from food and music there was in attendance the Mexican Consulate to the US, Leticia Maki-Teramoto Sakamoto with an office in Indianapolis.
She said jobs can drive domestic migration. WNIN spoke with her in 2023.
“We've issued documents to people who used to live in California or in New York because in Indiana there's still a lot of work," she said. "You can live freely and nicely so a lot of people are coming to Indiana.”
At the festival, the Bella Torre mini-Family train is full of children and winding through the festival, jingling a warning for the crowd to part.
The 2024 event drew 8,000 people, by volunteer and police counts, a far cry from 800 in 2014. The event was so well attended that they might need to seek a larger venue. There was no parking at some points during the day.
Brown also hopes to have the Honduran, El Salvadoran and Guatemalan consulates next year in addition to Mexico — “Which, in percentages, are the biggest communities, international communities in the area,” he said.
He said Latinos from these different nations of origins are also learning about each other because of the festival. “While most of Latinos speak Spanish, their cultures are completely different,” he said. “Their diets are different,” along with the Spanish dialects.
“I feel that after 10 years, I can say people are knowing more about Latinos, loving more our Latino community and our Latinos are feel more connected, better informed and really embraced with the opportunity to showcase their culture.”
This year there was a mariachi band, salsa band and a norteño band — but he might need even more next year.
“We've been demanded a little bit more of a variety of entertainment that covers like people from Venezuela — they were asking for Venezuelan entertainment and so on for the other different countries,” he said. “So we're trying to have a more diverse entertainment line next year.”
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