Dance of Diversity

Socorro Gallegos couldn’t help dancing when she heard the Jewish man with the clarinet.

The 66-year-old Latina grandmother from Sylmar said she doesn’t have any Jewish friends. And acquaintances? “I know an aide to [Councilman] Hal Bernson,” she offered. “She’s very nice.”

But when Gallegos heard that clarinet player merrily tootling Jewish folk songs known as klezmer music, she felt a familiar tug. “I just started to dance,” she said. “It reminded me of our music. It was very similar, very joyous.”

It was a day of firsts Sunday--many of them small but noteworthy moments among ordinary people--at “Fiesta Shalom,” the Valley’s first Latino-Jewish festival, held at Cal State Northridge. There was the middle-aged Jewish lawyer who tried his first sopa, a sandwich crammed with chicken, guacamole, lettuce and tomatoes. And the young man from El Salvador who had “never experienced any Jewish culture, ever,” marveling over the music of a Jewish string quartet.

Even old pros at cross-cultural connections, namely politicians, picked up a thing or two amid the taquito and kosher pizza stands dotting the college quad.

“I learned that [school board member] Julie Korenstein’s favorite food is tortillas,” said state Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sylmar), who organized the event. “I learned that [Councilman] Michael Feuer’s mother was raised in Boyle Heights.”

Alarcon, a Mexican American whose 1998 election to the state Senate was marred by cries of race-baiting, said he hoped the event would help foster respect and understanding between Latinos and Jews. His slim victory in the ’98 Democratic primary over former Assemblyman Richard Katz, who is Jewish, strained relations between the two groups.

Several politicians visited the festivities Sunday, including Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks) and Feuer. Katz was part of the event’s honorary committee, but he did not attend, Alarcon said.

But politics kept a low profile at the festival, attended by about 1,000 people. Mostly, people spent a sunny afternoon celebrating their own culture and sampling a bit of someone else’s.

“I’ve never really looked into the Jewish culture, because I’ve never been around it,” said 14-year-old Amanda Cueva, a freshman at Palmdale High School. “No one at my school is Jewish. I mean, I don’t know if there is, but I don’t know anyone who’s Jewish.”

She listened to the Hebrew singers carefully, mulling over the unfamiliar words.

“I don’t know what that language is called, but it’s really different from any language I’ve heard before,” she said.

Part of the cultural distance between Latinos and Jews results from the plain fact of segregated neighborhoods, said Dr. Rodolfo Acuna, a Chicano studies professor at CSUN who spoke on a panel discussing Latino-Jewish relations. During the 1940s, he said, Latinos and Jews lived and worked side by side in communities such as Boyle Heights, often intermarrying.

“At that time there was an awful lot of interaction between Mexicans and Jews, because they lived in the same shared space,” Acuna said. “[Today] there’s a space that keeps the two groups separate. You’re not growing up together. You’re not interdating. . . . If you don’t know what people are like, there’s going to be alienation.”

But it was curiosity and appreciation rather than alienation that seemed to prevail at Fiesta Shalom.

“The most amazing thing I saw today was the Aztec dancers,” enthused Howard Klein, a Jewish attorney from Porter Ranch. “It was extraordinary--the drums beating, the conch-shell blowing, the unbelievable headdresses covered with big, flowing feathers. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.”