Festival time was approaching and so my wife and I decided to return to Charlotte this past weekend to attend the 2011 Cinco de Mayo Fanta Festival. After spending the first part of the weekend hanging out with friends, on Sunday afternoon, we went to McAlpine Creek Park for the festival. It felt a little strange to be there and to jump back into the thick of anthropological fieldwork for a day, but I managed to take some photos and make a few observations for my study.
Here's what I saw.
The first band I heard was Los Tarascos de Michoacan. They played acoustic instruments and featured some traditional regional Mexican styles. At one point, a young boy sang with them.
A vendor covered American pop songs on his pan-flutes.
Grupo Painalli vigorously danced Aztec jigs for over a hour on the festival lawn.
The next band, Lizbeth and sus Incomparables de la Sierra, featured Lizbeth on keyboards (another young performer) and bubble gum pop style regional mexicano (if such a thing exists).
D-Amantes Musical were an interesting group. Thay started out a little weak, with some iffy vocals, but they played a variety of styles, including rock covers, and grabbed my attention even if they could use a little vocal tune-up.
Conjunto Escorpion played some cheesy love songs punctuated by the occasional keyboard-synthesized machine gun blast and shot out to Mexican football team Chivas.
By far the best band of the day in my view was Banda Los Guanajuatenses. They came on stage roaring with a Sousaphone, baritone, two drummers, three clarinets, and a brass section. Their sound was loose and blaring, just as a good banda should be. And they coordinated dances as brass and reed sections traded off lines. I found it refreshing that they forego the keyboard and make all the sounds of banda on acoustic instruments; does that make me a banda purist?
By this time the crowd had grown quite large.
Ruben and Jess of the Latin American Coalition were joined onstage by all the student volunteers for the Drop the 'I' Word campaign. The campaign is trying to educate people about how derogatory it is to use the word 'illegal' to generalize about immigrants and their immigration status.
The final act of the day was the headliner, La Autoridad de la Sierra. They played some uptempo numbers that got people dancing.
