Will Third Fiesta Work Like a Charm?

Thanks to “cholo punks,” Armando Garza is a two-time loser when it comes to celebrating Cinco de Mayo.

Back in 1989, Garza, his wife and a dozen family members went to Lincoln Park to celebrate the holiday. About 30,000 showed up, and by all accounts, they had a great time, for a while. But gang members from all over the city showed up and eventually turned the fiesta into a pitched battle among themselves and then with police. One person was shot to death and several others were injured in the melee.

I interviewed Garza, an insurance salesman from Pico Rivera who grew up in Lincoln Heights, after the city decided it would no longer hold large-scale events at the park because of the problems that occurred that Sunday afternoon.

“The cholo punks,” Garza told me back then, referring to the gang members, “ruined it for all of us. I hate them.”

With last week’s news of Latino gang members running amok at L.A. Fiesta Broadway, causing chagrined city officials to denounce the troublemakers and vow to stage the event again next year, I remembered Garza.

When I reached him by phone at home the other day, Garza said he, his wife, Irene, and three teen-age daughters had been at 4th and Spring streets where the trouble broke out. They were forced to flee when things got out of hand.

“The cholo punks did it again,” he growled.

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Like a lot of us who grew up in the barrio, Armando Garza has lived with the reality of street gangs all his life. He knows some gang members by name, and considers them his friends.

These friends defend the cholo moniker much the same way an earlier generation of gang toughs had to deal with the term pachuco. Pachuco came into our vocabulary because it came to describe the zoot suits and the many young people who wore them before and during World War II.

In L.A., pachuco took on a demeaning connotation because it referred to the few young Mexican Americans who dressed up in those suits and also got involved in several riots with soldiers and sailors on leave. What most forget, Garza likes to point out, is that the servicemen went out of their way to assault brown-skinned kids in their “unpatriotic” suits.

“My dad got beat up and he did nothing wrong,” he says.

Times, however, have changed and so have the gangs. And so have Garza’s feelings about them.

“Lookit,” he begins, “I can put up with the graffiti, the guys calling me ese . But it’s now getting out of hand--the drugs, the guns, the drive-by shootings. And now this, messing up celebrations like Cinco de Mayo.

“I took my family to Lincoln Park in ’89 and we had to take off because of the cholos who showed up. I was thinking that wouldn’t happen at L.A. Fiesta Broadway because of all the good people involved and the heavy presence of police. But the same damned thing happened again.”

He is enraged that Los Angeles’ cultural celebrations are now threatened by the gangbangers.

There used to be a time when there were a lot of community-sponsored celebrations of both Cinco de Mayo and Mexican independence day in September.

But the Lincoln Park event was canceled shortly after the ’89 trouble. Other than L.A. Fiesta Broadway, Central City’s only official observance of Cinco de Mayo this year was at Olvera Street.

Garza and I agree that celebrations of Cinco de Mayo are overblown and misplaced because they have nothing to do with Mexico’s independence from Spain. But while they inexplicably include rap music or heavy metal on occasion, these events do provide opportunities for Chicanos to revel in their Mexican traditions. In a town that’s the third-largest Mexican city in the world, that’s no small thing.

It’s important to keep up those traditions.

Garza hopes L.A. Fiesta Broadway comes back next year.

“Don’t give in to the punks,” he says. “Tell the cholos we run the city, not them.”

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I’m no law-and-order type, but I have to agree with Garza. Give in to the gangs and you might as well say adios to all public celebrations.

Word circulated in the aftermath of the recent trouble that some at City Hall even fear for the survival of the annual Christmas parade in Hollywood, too. The troublemakers, presumably gang members, are becoming a growing problem there and some city officials wonder if the Yuletide tradition can continue as it always has.

“Can you imagine getting rid of that parade?” Garza asked. “I took my daughters to that parade. I remember going as a kid and waving my arms at the celebrities. L.A. won’t be the same if we can’t have those things.”

And what about Cinco de Mayo next year?

“There better not be a third time,” he says.