No-Smoke Signals : Indian Dancers at Oxnard Festival Urge Minorities to Break Tobacco Habit

Garbed in animal skins, feather skirts and ceremonial headgear, the troupe of seven American Indian dancers banged drums, beat sticks and chanted songs Sunday to get their message across to the audience at Oxnard’s Plaza Park.

“Tobacco is bad,” said Tony Romero, the 71-year-old Chumash leader of the group, summarizing the entire message of El Gran Apagon (the Great Stomp-Out), a smoke-out aimed at minority families and youths held throughout the day.

But Tony Romero and the River Bottom Dancers, who live on the Santa Ynez Indian Reservation in Santa Barbara County, didn’t simply repudiate the slender, thick-stemmed tobacco plant.

They performed dances illustrating the role of tobacco in certain American Indian ceremonies, including one in which a woman sprinkled dried tobacco ahead of her as she danced toward the front of the stage.

“This is the way we use the tobacco. We bless the ground,” Romero told the crowd.

Through its performance, Romero’s group suggested that Indians traditionally have respected rather than abused tobacco.

In the mid-1500s, however, sailors introduced the plant in Europe. And in the early 1600s, the plant was reintroduced in the Colonies, when it was begun to be commercially grown.

Now, Indians in the United States are as victimized by nicotine addiction as other minorities, said Thomas R. Smith, director of the California Indian Education Center in Ventura, one of about a dozen groups who put up information tables at the smoke-out.

Sunday’s event was held to counteract the onslaught of tobacco company advertising aimed at minorities, primarily African-Americans and Latinos, organizers said.

“The tobacco companies have to replace 5,000 smokers every day” who either quit or die, said Jean Scott, coordinator of the Ventura County Tobacco and Drug Education Program, one of the 13 service organizations and businesses sponsoring the smoke-out. “They have gotten very smart” and are investing heavily in advertising on billboards and in newspapers and magazines in minority communities, she said.

Already, a greater proportion of blacks smoke than any other ethnic group, although the habit is also common among Latinos and Asian-Americans, Scott said.

Poorer members of minority communities are particularly vulnerable, said Jerry Leavitt, another worker for the tobacco education program.

“They don’t seek out help because they don’t know how to use the system,” Leavitt said. “They become pawns of the tobacco industry.”

Nationwide, the Great American Smokeout, when smokers are urged to forgo the habit for a day, will be held Thursday.

Many of the about 500 people who milled around Plaza Park on Sunday, where no smoking was allowed for the day, said they came to enjoy the entertainment, a lineup of about 10 bands and dance troupes.

But whatever their reasons for coming to El Gran Apagon, more than a few seemed to get the message.

At the American Lung Assn. information table, a small crowd listened raptly as Pat Casiano described in Spanish how smoking destroys one’s health.

Casiano, a health educator for the organization, used props to get her point across: a clean and a dirty automobile air filter to represent a healthy and a diseased lung, and containers of ammonia, formaldehyde and household insecticide.

Tobacco smoke contains many of these products’ chemical ingredients, Casiano animatedly told the men, women and children gathered around her table.

One young man, apparently moved by her demonstration, handed Casiano his empty pack of Marlboro cigarettes in exchange for a pack of playing cards and a bottle of cologne, among the prizes given by the lung association to people who turned in cigarette packs to symbolize their intention to quit.

Javier Rizo, 24, of Oxnard said in Spanish that he would try to quit starting Sunday. He has developed a cough from the habit, he said.

Casiano said that by 3 p.m., about 50 people had exchanged their cigarettes for the items given away by the lung association.

But among those 50, Casiano estimated, only three or four will be able to quit on this try.

Norma Lorenzo, 31, a purchaser for an Oxnard medical-equipment company, came with her husband to enjoy the food and entertainment. “It makes me think why I smoke, why I haven’t quit,” Lorenzo said. She said she doesn’t blame advertisers for the heavy smoking among minorities.

“It actually starts in the family,” she said. “It starts in the environment that you’re in.”