Fiesta, Santa Ana

Posted on September 15, 2002 in Photos Travels - So Cal

Sourthern California is a wonderful land where you can take the freeway to just about any urbanized foreign culture you can imagine. We went down to Santa Ana to walk around the annual fiesta they hold along Fourth and Main Street. Such affairs are usually observed around the feast of a saint. I have no idea if the municipality allowed such an association, but I kept the memory of the four young martyrs of Birmingham, Alabama — who died nearly 40 years ago on this date — as an icon in my heart.

Lynn, ever the collector of ersatz religious artifacts, bought herself a t-shirt representing Our Lady of Guadalupe appearing to St. Juan Diego. She passed on a baseball cap of the Virgin looking over a zoot-suit wearing low rider standing next to his vintage Chevy.

People lined up for tacos, sopas, gorditas, daiquiris, and melon juice that the attendants ladeled out of gigantic jars. Orchard Supply Hardware boasted a long line because it operated a wheel of fortune and gave away prizes such as foam rubber hammers, gift certificates, and stylish pins. Gigantic blowup cameras and cel phones occupied spaces between the pavilions. Leafletters handed out flyers to anyone who appeared to be a local: they knew at a glance that neither Lynn nor I qualified.

Less attractive to the crowd was the table of a local Republican candidate. A smaller than life-sized cut out of the Resident (which folded neatly at the waist) invited passerbys to “Change to Republican Here”. A lone skinhead fingered through the literature. I stopped to take a picture. The campaign workers gaped as if they needed bromoseltzer as I recorded their bit of kitsch.

This series of pictures illustrates my basic weakness when it comes to photographing people in real life situations. Writing the previous paragraphs with a curry-induced headache doesn’t help either.

Click on the picture