Cinco de Hype : Some Community Leaders Question If Holiday Is Too Commercial in the Southland. Others Welcome Sponsors and Their Money.

If Vivien Bonzo has her way, Cinco de Mayo celebrants will leave Olvera Street this weekend with a sense of Mexican orgullo --pride. Mariachi music will remind Angelenos of the city’s origins. Colorful ballet folklorico dancers will remind them of Mexico’s rich cultural heritage.

Bonzo’s fear is that the crowds tomorrow and Sunday--expected to number 40,000--will leave, not with a sense of orgullo, but rather, with free cigarettes, disposable diapers and laundry detergent.

“I want my people to leave Olvera Street with pride, not products,” says Bonzo, who is president of the Olvera Street Merchant’s Assn. and one voice in a growing chorus of concern over the commercialization of Cinco de Mayo.

Corporate sponsors now underwrite a portion of the costs of the Olvera Street festivities--which commemorate the Mexican victory over the French forces of Louis Napoleon in the Battle of Puebla 128 years ago--and sponsorship sometimes includes product giveaways. In the past, corporate sponsors of May 5 celebrations in Southern California have included beer and alcohol companies.

Indeed, for many Angelenos, Cinco de Mayo has become synonymous with rowdy behavior and drinking. Last year, gang-related violence, bolstered by drunkenness, ruined a holiday celebration at Lincoln Park in East Los Angeles.

Bonzo and other Latinos would like to substitute history for hype and are working to ensure that the holiday is observed with less fanfare and more dignity--as it is in Mexico.

Alberto Diaz, spokesman for the Mexican Consulate, says that in Mexico, Cinco de Mayo is celebrated “on a smaller scale by civic groups.” He says only the southeastern Mexican state of Puebla celebrates May 5 on a grand scale.

Says Juana Mora, research associate at UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center: “The commercialization of Lincoln Park’s event all but destroyed it.” (The event, which featured rock bands and attracted 60,000 people last year, was shut down early and led to this year’s ban on alcohol. It also prompted a return to a family-oriented atmosphere after more than 20 community-based organizations met to plan this weekend’s event, “without major entertainment and without beer,” says event chairman Tony Trancale.)

Historian Rudy Acuna, a professor of Chicano studies at Cal State Northridge, agrees with Mora.

“I just don’t like the commercialization of Cinco de Mayo. In the past, the day was celebrated (in the United States) like a regular Mexican holiday, but now, everybody wants a piece of it--the commercialization. It’s become the Cinco de Mayo happy hour.”

“It’s not like Black History Month. There is a meaning to Black History Month, (but) I don’t think there is too much meaning that you find with Cinco de Mayo. There should definitely be more thought coming into the real reason for celebrating that day--political, historical and cultural reasons.”

For many Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, Cinco de Mayo serves as “inspiration for their own struggle against injustice,” says Fernando Guerra, chairman of the Chicano Studies Department at Loyola Marymount University.

“Commercializing Cinco de Mayo allows you to communicate it to a much broader audience, but in the process, the real meaning is diluted--and that meaning is survival of a culture.”

Guerra adds that the event’s “commercialization makes it acceptable to be Mexican on Cinco de Mayo, especially with the younger kids, because it has been taken in by the larger culture as a holiday. But it should be acceptable to be Mexican or Mexican-American if that’s your culture and to be proud of the Mexican culture every day.”

Leticia Quezada, a board member of the Los Angeles Unified School District, says this is the first year the board--at her urging--mandated that teachers devote lesson plans to Cinco de Mayo and El Dia del Maestro (Teacher’s Day), another tradition observed in Mexico in May. Teachers have been devoting this week--and some, the entire month of May--to enlightening students about Mexican history, leaders and culture much in the way Black History Month is observed. Parents and community leaders also have been involved.

“It’s important for Latino children (who make up 62% of the district’s enrollment) to feel proud about who they are, proud about the Mexican culture and to see that Mexican culture held up as a model because then that raises their self-esteem as Mexican children,” says Quezada. She adds that although corporate sponsorship for Cinco de Mayo events “enables these activities to carry on in the absence of government funding it is important that Mexican celebrations not lose their cultural value because of heavy drinking and violence.”

Historically, Acuna says Cinco de Mayo observances first became “popular among Chicano activists in the early 1970s. That’s when beer and other corporate sponsors jumped on the bandwagon” by helping to promote the celebration in Mexican-American communities. Before that time, academics say, the celebration was usually a neighborhood or family affair.

“The media picked up on it and so did the beer industry,” says Mora, who is presently conducting a two-year research project on Mexican-American women and alcohol. She says that in 1988, alcohol companies spent close to $25 million on Cinco de Mayo promotions in Southern California alone.

Mora, who contributed to “Marketing Disease to Hispanics,” a booklet published last year by the Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest, has researched the roles alcohol and tobacco companies play in the Latino community. With the center’s support she and Acuna are working to establish the Latino Council on Alcohol and Tobacco “to counter some of the negative aspects brought on by the commercialization of holidays in the Chicano community.

“We are also critical of Latino national organizations and local ones who accept funding for events (like Cinco de Mayo) and how they allow corporate sponsors to promote products such as beer and cigarettes that endanger the health of our community.”

Olvera Street’s May 5 celebrations have been partially funded by commercial sponsors for several years. This year’s events--produced by Riverside Promotions, a Hollywood-based Latino marketing firm appointed by City Councilman Richard Alatorre--have 50 commercial sponsors.

Mike Mariscal, owner of the Velasco Souvenir Shop on Olvera Street and a member of the merchant’s group, says, “If the commercialization of it can be toned down and the Mexican culture elevated that would be terrific.” (Some merchants are also upset over the city’s plans to restore the area; they accuse the city of wanting to “dilute” Olvera Street’s Mexican-American flavor by bringing in multi-ethnic businesses and attractions nearby.)

Al Avila, chief deputy for Councilman Alatorre (Olvera Street is located in Alatorre’s district), and Fernando Favela, general manager for Riverside Promotions, say corporate sponsors who will foot the six-figure bill for the Olvera Street fiesta are necessary because of cutbacks in city funding for such events.

Avila and Favela contend that because of corporate involvement, there is more money to publicize events and pay for entertainment. This year, Cinco de Mayo events and entertainment at Olvera Street include mariachi bands, ballet folklorico dancers, singers and bands.

“These celebrations are not cheap,” Avila says about the celebration he calls “the premiere event in Southern California.”

“You have to do everything from closing streets, build stages, take care of electrical systems, set up booths and pay for entertainment. There is a lot of overhead and you need sponsors for that.” (Last Sunday, commercial sponsors, including Procter & Gamble, AT&T;, Kern’s Juices and Acapulco restaurants, helped underwrite a $1-million pre-Cinco de Mayo festival attended by 500,000 in downtown Los Angeles.)

Avila says Cinco de Mayo participants must look beyond the commercialization of the event and enjoy and share the Mexican culture.

“It’s not just a party in a park. It’s a party in a historical monument,” Favela says, referring to the Olvera Street’s Mexican market area as Los Angeles’ birthplace.

As for the sponsors he has assembled for the Olvera Street event (as well as for the Cinco de Mayo celebration at Centennial Regional Park in Santa Ana--one of the largest in Orange County) Favela says visitors do not have to partake in the product giveaways or drink beer.

He says critics who oppose the commercial sponsors do not realize “that the commercialization needs to be there to make the event work.”

“It says a lot about a company when that company recognizes the Hispanic community and that the community has a lot of potential as consumers,” Favela says.

Two of the Olvera Street booths, as well as some of the restaurants, will sell beer.

None will be sold at Lincoln Park because last year, more than 150 police officers were called to the park to quell a disturbance after one man was shot and several others were injured, including a police officer, when fighting erupted between street gangs.

“We had a lot of drinking going on,” says Trancale, who adds that $22,000 worth of beer was sold. (Miller beer was a sponsor of the event.) “We had a lot of gang violence and there were thousands of people and families who wanted to have a good time and didn’t.”

But, he points out that corporate sponsors bought top-name entertainers like Sheila E. And “thousands of kids in the area were benefiting from the money raised.”

This year’s liquor ban at Lincoln Park has resulted in little attention from major sponsors, which will make the three-day event, which starts today, “financially difficult” to produce, Trancale says. But two sponsors are helping to pay for a carnival and a children’s entertainment area highlighting acrobats, folklorico groups and the California Youth Theatre ensemble.

Trancale is glad to be a part of an event that is being returned to area families.

“We’re offering another option to people. We are trying to rebuild the park’s credibility with the public. We are giving back Cinco de Mayo to the area’s Mexican and Mexican-American families.”

Guillermo Hernandez, co-chairman of the United Neighborhoods Organization, says he and other parents are happy about the renewed focus for this year’s event.

But they are most pleased with ban on beer.

“Our celebration this year is more in the spirit of Cinco de Mayo,” says Hernandez, who lives a few blocks from Lincoln Park and has been attending the Cinco de Mayo celebrations there for years.

“We’ve always wanted for Cinco de Mayo in Lincoln Park to focus more on the family and the kids. Most of the time these celebrations use beer companies to make money but they never focus on why we are celebrating, on the culture.

“So this year we’re having different folklorico groups and mariachis--no rock ‘n’ roll bands, no product giveaways. We want to show different communities that we can do an event without beer and have fun.”