Getting a new attitude

Spider-Man is coming to Fiesta Broadway this year, and he doesn’t even speak Spanish.

Sony’s second sequel in the adventure series, “Spider-Man 3,” will get an advance screening Sunday at the annual street festival, billed as the largest Cinco de Mayo event in the country. The Sunday preview, coming a week before the film’s official national opening on May 4, will play at the refurbished Orpheum Theatre, a vaudeville-era venue that lent its stage for a scene from the movie starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst.

Two things are cool about Fiesta Broadway’s first-ever movie feature. One is that organizers did not choose a Latino-themed film, though the event draws an almost exclusively Latino crowd. They chose a major release that’s expected to be a summer blockbuster, acknowledging that Latinos in Los Angeles account for a sizable share of the region’s mainstream box office. (Don’t rush the Orpheum box office, though; 800 tickets will be given away -- not sold.)

The screening also spotlights one of downtown’s under-appreciated assets: its historic movie palaces. In a small way, it helps Fiesta Broadway feel more integrated with its environment rather than being just an annual invasion occupying a dozen blocks of anonymous asphalt.

This marks a significant shift in the philosophy of a festival that came to represent the divisions of class and race in our city, rather than serve as a force for cultural cohesiveness. In recent years, Fiesta Broadway has attracted primarily one segment of society -- the working-class immigrant Mexican family. Many others saw the event as a reason to avoid downtown on the last weekend in April.

Organizers say they want to change that. “You don’t have to be Irish to appreciate St. Patrick’s Day,” says Peter Bellas of All Access Entertainment, the festival producer. “You don’t have to be Latino to appreciate Cinco de Mayo.”

The move to diversify the program’s appeal reflects the changing nature of downtown itself. When the festival was launched 18 years ago, the city center was a cultural wasteland after dark and on weekends. Only Latinos, who kept Broadway alive as a shopping distinct, had a stake in the event. Today, gentrification has brought new, upscale residents to the area.

I met Bellas and his team recently in the parking lot at 1st Street and Broadway, where he held an outdoor planning meeting. The dapper, silver-haired producer made sure to bring representatives of AT&T;, which owns the right to put its name on the day, as in AT&T; Fiesta Broadway. (Woe be the reporter who doesn’t mention it; the omission gets you a correction.) Truth is, Fiesta Broadway would have long ago vanished were it not for corporations eager to tap Latino consumers. Their sponsorships keep the event afloat, but they also inspire an oft-heard complaint: It’s gotten way too commercial.

No getting around that. It costs about $1 million to stage this mass happening, which draws as many as half a million people. The real problem is that the hawking (everything from Jeeps to cellphones) and the freebies (from toothpaste to cigarette lighters) had become the main attraction. The musical program came to feel like an afterthought.

Fiesta Broadway once attracted the biggest names in Latin music, including Celia Cruz, Marc Anthony, Thalia and Tito Puente. But the lineup had recently started losing its marquee appeal, limited primarily to Mexican regional acts that further narrowed the audience.

This year, a few big names are back, and so is the variety.

Pepe Aguilar, one of Mexico’s leading mariachi singers, will be the festival’s grand marshal. And MTV Tr3s, the music network’s new bilingual channel, is sponsoring a stage for younger acts headlined by Calle 13, the hot and outrageously irreverent Puerto Rican duo named best new artist at last year’s Latin Grammy Awards. A community stage will feature local acts, including the creative duo Mezklah, which calls its unique sound tribal electronica.

Rightfully, by now, Fiesta Broadway should have evolved into the kind of top-notch Latino music festival that Los Angeles deserves. Having the much younger Coachella festival on the same weekend only serves to underscore its shortcomings.

But here’s one flicker of hope: This year, Ozomatli, L.A.’s acclaimed multi-culti combo, is set to play both venues -- Coachella on Saturday and Fiesta Broadway on Sunday.

Pros at networking

After the dust settles from Fiesta Broadway, L.A.’s Latino elite will gather well above the hoi polloi Thursday night for a more cosmopolitan cultural celebration. The Latino Professional Network, a social networking group, is sponsoring a night of tequila tasting, mariachi music and salsa dancing under the stars at the Bonaventure Brewing Co. on the pool deck level of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

They’re calling it “Fiesta! Una Noche en Guadalajara,” named for a classy city that’s also a cradle of Mexican culture. The event features a good sampling of local music, including a mariachi, a ballet folklorico, a strolling trio, Aztec dancers and a live salsa band. But the big attraction is the free firewater, featuring 21 premium brands of tequila.

How do you say designated driver en espanol?

The LPN is the brainchild of Alejandro Menchaca, 32, a business and entertainment lawyer raised in Boyle Heights by a Mexican American father and Guatemalan mother. He tells me the group’s events regularly draw between 800 and 1,300, increasingly including Asian and other ethnic groups that want to network and socialize.

When I was at UC Berkeley in the ‘70s, upwardly mobile Chicanos were derisively referred to as Chuppies -- Chicano urban professionals. Call me sheltered, but I just learned that Chinese professionals call themselves Chuppies too.

I think we were first, but all varieties are welcome.

“Una Noche en Guadalajara” at the Bonaventure Brewing Co., 404 S. Figueroa St., fourth floor of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Thursday, 6:30 p.m.-1 a.m. $20. Attire: professional / cocktail attire recommended. RSVP required. (213) 792-0877 or www.lpnonline.com/rsvp.

Gurza covers Latino music, arts and culture. E-mail agustin .gurza@latimes.com with comments, events and ideas for this weekly feature.