Fiesta Proves a Tougher Sell With Crowds

Fiesta Broadway, the largest Cinco de Mayo celebration in the nation, ran out of vapor Sunday.

Vapor, as in steam. The streets were crowded, but hardly packed, and well below last year’s throng of 300,000. By the end of the festival at 6 p.m., the Los Angeles Police Department’s crowd estimate had climbed to between 150,000 and 170,000.

And most who did come to the seventh annual fiesta did not exactly wear festive faces: Thousands had to stand in line in summer-like weather--sometimes for more than an hour--for free samples of goodies ranging from breakfast cereal to shaving cream to cigarette lighters, giveaways that hardly seemed worth the effort.

“Yeah, it’s crazy,” said Jorge Esparza as he directed the movement of a long line of people waiting for cereal and other freebies. “It’s crowded, crazy and good.”

Others, however, were not so upbeat in their assessment, especially those who saw the festival as having devolved from a celebration to a huge sell job.

“I don’t like it,” Roque Munoz said as he and his wife, Sylvia, headed for their car about 1 p.m., little more than two hours after the festival began. They had simply had enough and were heading home to the San Fernando Valley.

“It’s so commercial; it’s not a real festival,” Munoz said, as the couple passed the corner of 3rd Street and Broadway, only steps from one of the dozens of canopied booths hawking everything from tacos to cellular telephones.

“Everybody’s trying to sell something,” he said.

And then there was Jesus Mendoza, who said he stood in a long line just for the chance to spin a game wheel for the top prize: an assortment of Kraft foods. He walked away with nothing.

“I waited for two hours and I didn’t get anything,” he groused.

This is the seventh year of the festival, and the first in which corporate America has attached its name to the music fest featuring some of the nation’s best-known Latino entertainers, including Tito Puente. This year it was officially dubbed AT&T; Fiesta Broadway, and the number of corporate sponsors has doubled, a testament to the recognition of Latino buying power.

Men and women armed with clipboards roamed downtown Los Angeles, offering applications for everything from credit cards to long-distance service. AT&T; alone had more than 350 employees dressed in powder blue T-shirts who spent the day trying to reach out and sign up customers for long-distance service.

But there were also those who used the festival for both good work and making personal contacts in the community.

At a T-shirt and hat sales booth benefiting the Salesian Boys and Girls Club of East Los Angeles, Vince Guillen said he and other volunteers were happy to collect whatever they could in donations as well as sales.

“We’re trying to sell as much as we can . . . anything to bring in money for our club,” Guillen said. “If it’s only a few hundred [dollars], that’s good. It will help us to pay at least one of our bills.”

And nearby, the Los Angeles Fire Department saw the event as an opportunity to recruit new personnel and strengthen relations with a community that may only know it during tragedies.

“It’s very valuable,” firefighter/paramedic Martin Enriquez said of the festival.

“I don’t think we can place a value [on the festival] in terms of exposing us to the community,” Capt. Henry R. Olvera said. “It’s an all-around plus for us.”

Some who attended the festival played it smart and came early, avoiding the lines as they made their way from freebie booth to freebie booth.

Cynthia Thompson and Kathy Harrison arrived at the fiesta at 10 a.m. to beat the crowds. They started at its northernmost point on Temple Avenue and were planning to hit every booth along Broadway until they reached Olympic Boulevard--the southern point of the 36-square-block event.

“I’ve got drinking bottles, some goodies from Thrifty’s, cereal, juices, Marlboro lighters . . . lots of stuff,” said Harrison, a 37-year-old Los Angeles resident, as she stood in line to spin a prize wheel.

Midway booths created a carnival atmosphere, as vendors called crowds over to play games and win the large, plush toys hanging on display.

Dora Martinez carried a large yellow Tweety Bird under her arm. She said she won it with a single softball toss.

“I’m giving it to my daughter,” laughed Martinez, a 30-year-old cleaning woman from Downey.

The fiesta may have been a boon to the food and drink booths that lined Broadway, but it seemed to have the opposite effect on the stores in the city’s major Latino shopping district.

Several shop owners along Broadway, a street normally teeming with customers on weekends, said business was only a fraction of what it would be any other Sunday.

“Everybody likes it [the fiesta], but business is dead,” said Ghaleb Higazi, 37, owner of El Fino, a shop specializing in jeans, hats and T-shirts.

Any other Sunday, Higazi said, he might make $500 to $600 in sales. On festival Sunday, he figured he’d be lucky to make $100.

He wasn’t alone.

Two blocks away, Shawn Hamadan stood with a salesman and watched crowds of potential customers just stroll by his L.A. Sports Shoes.

“People come out here, but just to get something free” at vendors’ booths, Hamadan said.

As for why the attendance dropped so precipitously, there was little in the way of immediate analysis. In fact, fiesta producer Larry Gonzalez insisted that the police estimate was off by nearly 400,000, and that the event had drawn 500,000 people.

But one police official did speculate that one reason behind the lower turnout might be only a few miles away in Pasadena, where Los Angeles’ new Galaxy soccer team was playing before a large crowd in the Rose Bowl.

Times staff writers Matea Gold and Paul Johnson contributed to this story.