Watts Shows Diversity for Cinco de Mayo

In the first Cinco de Mayo festival to be held in the community they share, Latinos and African-Americans came together on the streets of Watts Saturday to celebrate each other’s culture and Mexico’s long-ago victory over the French.

Three children--two Latino and one black--held the banner that proclaimed the Cinco de Mayo Watts Parade, and they led marching bands, dancers and carloads of local politicians and celebrities through the heart of Watts as an estimated 10,000 people cheered them on.

“Our children share the same schools, we live in the same barrio. How can we be separate?” asked Arturo Ybarra, president of the Watts Century Latino Organization, which helped organize the event. “We’ve found we have too much to give each other.”

Ybarra said his organization--an association of more than 600 Latino residents in Watts--spent four months working with the Watts Labor Community Action Committee and African-American community leaders to plan the festivities.

“We feel the sharing that’s going on,” Ybarra said. “The idea (of the parade) was the way to make things better was to get involved with other ethnic groups.”

“We don’t want minorities in Watts,” he said. “We’re trying to create the new majority.”

Families came out to watch the festivities, sitting on their porches, patches of grass or sidewalks. And black and Latino children waved, clapped and laughed together as the parade wound past them on its two-mile route from Will Rogers Park on 103rd Street to San Miguel School on 108th Street and Juniper.

The parade’s participants reflected the diversity of the people who came to watch. Farm worker organizer Cesar Chavez was grand marshal, and spectators applauded, waved Mexican flags and yelled “Viva Mexico” as he rode by.

Assemblywoman Marguerite Archie-Hudson (D-Los Angeles) and such celebrities as Iron Eyes Cody and former television star Todd Bridges also participated.

A troupe of dancers in traditional Aztec dress danced through the streets, leaving a trail of incense smoke in its wake. Black and Latina schoolgirls in dresses the colors of the Mexican flag smiled as they sauntered past home video cameras. And a steel band on a truck filled the streets of Watts with the music of the West Indies.

The parade culminated at San Miguel School, where a fiesta and carnival were scheduled to go into the night and continue today from noon to 6 p.m. Signs in Spanish and English advertised tostadas, fruit, ice cream and hamburgers, and children played carnival games as the music of Motown blared.

The Watts parade was one of many Cinco de Mayo celebrations scheduled over the weekend in Southern California. Olvera Street Plaza in downtown Los Angeles offered carnival rides and tours of some of the park’s historic buildings. In Santa Ana, hundreds of people gathered at a pair of festivals, where they were entertained by Spanish-speaking crooners, mariachi bands and clowns. And at San Diego’s Old Town State Historic Park, there were to be four re-enactments over the weekend of the battle of Puebla, when Mexican troops defeated French forces and routed them on May 5, 1862.

Celebrations are also occurring in San Clemente, Anaheim, San Juan Capistrano and on the campus of UC Irvine.

Manton Daley, an organizer of the Watts parade, said he hoped that once the festivities are over, good feelings and a positive relationship between the African-Americans and Latinos of Watts can continue.

“I’m hoping that there’ll be a strong message sent to everybody to get closer together, that we can be friends,” said Daley, who works with children at Grape Street Elementary School.

Many people who came out to enjoy the day felt the parade and all the sharing and happiness that went with it was a good thing. “I’ve seen parades, but not when all people were working together,” said Prentice Mills, who has lived in Watts for more than 10 years and watched the colors of its residents change.

Mills, a 75-year-old black man, sat on the steps of a building watching the parade go by, and said he had no illusions that a weekend of celebration could make two peoples one community at heart.

But, he said, “I think this is making progress for the future, for the generations to come.”

Robert Hernandez, a Latino teen-ager, agreed.

Black and Latino students get along well at his high school, “like a family,” said Hernandez, 16.

That is how it should be, he said. “Since we live together, we should stay together and fight together--as one.”

Times staff writers Henry Chu and Nancy Ray contributed to this story.