Cinco de Mayo starts early with Bluffton festival

Consuelo Saldivar stood back and watched Sunday as hundreds of people whooped and clapped for one young Hispanic pageant competitor after another, each girl hoping to be crowned Little Miss Chiquitita.

One graceful 9-year-old, wearing a dress that took her mother 30 hours to sew, gestured to the stripes of her floor-length skirt when it was her turn to stand on the Bluffton Village stage.

“The green represents our faith; the white represents peace and the red represents the sacrifice of the blood of our heroes,” Ivy Villalobos said, sharing the history she learned from her father, Juan.

“It took a lot of practice and a lot of courage,” Ivy said afterward, with a shy smile.

The Bluffton Village event was a far cry from the celebrations Saldivar experienced as a child growing up in a Mexican border town, just a few hours from the site of the battle that Cinco de Mayo commemorates. Each year on the holiday, Saldivar would get to leave school, feast on tacos and watch the men in her community re-enact the Mexican army’s 1862 victory over the French in the city of Puebla.

Modern as it was, Sunday’s Festival Latino was just as meaningful for Saldivar, who organized the inaugural event in coordination with Va Queva, a 2-year-old Spanish magazine in Bluffton. She said she expected more than 1,500 people to attend, beating the crowds they drew at a Hispanic heritage festival last September.

“I’m very proud. (The children) care about their parents’ culture,” Saldivar said. “We hope we can do another one. The population is growing, and there’s a lot of people coming from a lot of places.”

The Cinco de Mayo festivities included the pageant — with each girl wearing traditional dresses from their parents’ cultures — evening Salsa dancing, half a dozen lowrider cars on display, and El Judicial, a miniature mechanical bull with pictures of Our Lady of Guadalupe stamped on the front and a long, braided tail swinging in the back.

Giggles erupted from the pint-sized cowboys each time they went flying off the bull and bouncing onto the floor of the inflatable ring.

But for many, the highlight was the food. Tacos, of course, but also treats like street corn, ceviche and chamoyada — shaved ice flavored with a salty, sour sauce, sweetened with mango and drunk through a tamarind candy straw.

Several booths also served up skewered meat, called pinchos or brochettes depending on the chef’s roots. One Colombian stand also offered the country’s twist on hot dogs, topped with the salty-sweet mix of queso fresco, crushed potato chips, mayonnaise and ketchup, and strawberry sauce.

“It’s so good. It’s delicious,” gushed Luz Maria Correa of Bluffton, who ran the booth with her husband, Carlos Lopez.

While serving, she and the customers playfully argued about the names of the foods and traditional flavors. It’s why she decided to participate in the festival — to help create one Latino community from a dozen different cultures.

“The Mexican people is a lot of people,” she said of the Bluffton area’s Latino population. “The Colombian people is a few people. For us, it’s very important to give the other people our flavor, a little bit. It’s so good.”

This story was originally published May 1, 2016 at 8:17 PM with the headline "Cinco de Mayo starts early with Bluffton festival."