Salsa Tasters Feel the Burn at Festival

The watering eyes, the panting, the frantic tap-tap-tap of anticipation. Becky Dominguez can diagnose it in a second: These folks have hot pepper overload.

And they need relief stat.

“You can tell. Their eyes get wide,” the Oxnard resident said Saturday as she filled a cup with ice. “You get them a soda fast.”

At the Oxnard Salsa Festival in Plaza Park, where Dominguez staffed the beverage booth, a red-hot tongue was an occupational hazard--and one that many of the 20,000 participants expected to attend the sixth annual two-day event seemed to appreciate.

“In my family, they don’t give you milk as a child, they give you salsa,” said Jesse Ramirez, an Oxnard Harbor District commissioner and one of the judges of the weekend’s salsa contest. “My taste buds are dead now. I need to feel the burn.”

And the festival offered the chance to do that, with tables manned by nearly 40 entrants hoping to find their salsa crowned supreme. And while some of the spicy sauces seared the tongue and brought tears to the eyes with their blazing heat, others offered a chance to cool down with chunks of tomato and the tang of lemon.

For some folks, it was all too much.

“I was born in England. The strongest thing we had was salt,” said Patricia Pollock of Oxnard, who leaned more toward the event’s salsa dancing than the salsa tasting.

Nevertheless, she and her husband, Al, carried a big bag of tortilla chips and emptied it within the second hour of the festival.

“My husband eats until he has to take his hat off and wipe his head,” she said, before dashing off for a cool-down. “I’m running to get some water. My mouth is burning.”

John Long , whose salsa was a mix of classic ingredients and home-grown habanero peppers for a hint of fire, believes heat is only one facet of the full salsa experience.

“You want a little bit of heat, a complement,” he said. “Some think a fire salsa’s great, but what’s the point if you end up scalding your mouth?”

The free festival, which continues from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. today, has been expanded from previous years in which it drew about 12,000 people.

On Saturday, the park was studded with booths selling everything from crafts to spicy tacos and Thai food. Kids bounced around in an inflatable jumping gym, and a pair of instructors taught novices how to properly swivel their hips to the percolating rhythms of the salsa music.

Organizers from the Oxnard Downtown Merchants’ Assn. figured the event was the perfect chance to show off downtown Oxnard. The spicy sauce--now America’s favorite condiment, outpacing catsup in 1994--sums up Oxnard to a T, organizers said.

“Salsa, to me, represents an international flavor and that’s what Oxnard is,” said Ruth Bernstein, the festival’s manager. “It’s not strictly Mexican. It’s Caribbean. It’s South American. It’s great to bring it together.”

And when Tom Sugawara, an Oxnard firefighter and Japanese American, offered his “Rising Sun” salsa, it became clear that a taste for a little bit of heat knows no ethnic boundaries. That makes Ramirez proud.

“A lot of us who grew up here in Oxnard were ashamed to take our burritos to school,” Ramirez said. “But now we’re celebrating salsa, and it’s mainstream. Salsa is a part of everyday existence.”

FYI

The sixth annual Oxnard Salsa Festival runs today from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Oxnard’s Plaza Park at 5th and B streets. Free. Call 247-0197 for more information.