Local Groups Featured in Long Beach Festival

A group of Orange County performers will present the traditional dances of their homelands at a Long Beach multicultural festival today.

“When have you seen a multicultural event like this in Orange County? When?” asked Florinda Mintz, who this year was forced to cancel the Orange County mariachi festival she organizes for lack of sponsors.

The Anaheim Street International Festival and Expo begins in Long Beach at 10 a.m. today with a “unity walk,” and then features performers from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Performing groups that are from Orange County include the Xipe Totec Aztec Dancers; the Polynesian Girls; the Cambodian Family Youth Dance Group; Grupo Renacamiento, which performs dances of Mexico and Latin America; the Joo Myung Sook Korean Dancing School; the Kaiman Hila Dancers, Hawaiian performers; Albert Ramon Y Su Tierra Chicana, and the Spanish Antonia Rojas Dance Theater. Four of the groups are based in Santa Ana, she said.

A host of cultural events planned for Orange County were canceled this year, including Santa Ana’s downtown Sept. 16 celebration of Mexican Independence, in part because sponsors pulled out.

Mintz said the Long Beach festival points out the richness of Orange County’s multicultural artists. The community should be able to come together to celebrate that diversity here, she said.

“I didn’t do any events in Orange County this year. They were all canceled,” Mintz said. “Everyone thinks that in Orange County, everyone’s white and Republican. It’s not true. We choose multicultural dancers who live in the area. When we began doing research, we found them (in Orange County). There are artists here who really are fantastic.”