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Hispanic Heritage Festival Highlights Evolution Of Frankfort's Cultural Conversation

Communities across the country celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month each year. This year in Frankfort, where more than a quarter of the city’s population is Latino, the city sponsored a first-of-its-kind festival to mark the occasion. The Latino community embraced the opportunity—but it’s only part of the conversation about their future in Frankfort.

The members of Frankfort band La Jauria strike a chord with a flourish, and they’re off. The festival has just begun, and Esmeralda Cruz is on stage and at the microphone, making sure the entire audience knows what’s coming next, shifting from Spanish to English. It’s a role she’ll play throughout the evening. Veterans Park in downtown Frankfort is starting to fill up, slowly; no one is sure yet how big the crowd might get for the first year of this event, or who might come.

An inclusive festival

“This is not just for Hispanics,” Cruz says. “And I think that’s one of the things that sometimes, people…I don’t know, may assume, it’s Hispanic Heritage Month, so it’s more for Hispanics. But we want everybody to be a part of this.”

Credit Emilie Syberg / WBAA
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WBAA
The festival featured a performance by the clown act Pastelito y Diamantina.

Cruz, a Purdue Extension educator, was part of a planning committee for the festival. The lineup includes everything from a high school essay contest on the benefits of a multicultural community to homemade tortilla-making demonstrations. Cruz says creating an integrated festival, one that the whole community would want to attend, has been an “explicit” point of discussion.

"Even though we have such a high Hispanic/Latino population, we can still see sort of the division,” Cruz says. “And I think things have been getting better."

But what does integration look and feel like for members of Frankfort’s Latino community?

Is Frankfort integrated?

“I think it’s a work in progress,” says Maria Lopez, a family literacy coordinator at the Frankfort Community Public Library. She’s lived in Frankfort for 19 years. At the library, to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, Lopez filled display cases with some keepsakes from home; she’s originally from the town of Tarandacuao in Mexico.

“I think, for the most part, I feel very comfortable where I live, and I don’t see myself living anywhere else,” Lopez says. “I don’t see my child growing up in any other community. I want him to be involved in both cultures.”

Carla McNelly Valladares, a Purdue University post-doctoral researcher, is studying grants that support bilingual education. She’s a newcomer to Frankfort--she arrived in July with her husband, who’s Honduran and came to the United States in 2017. They like the city, and decided to move there because they wanted to be a part of the large Latino population.

"But there are newcomers that are coming to this area from Latin America --from other continents as well--and as newcomers come, then there still has to be the conversations about how we exist in a small town in central Indiana," McNelly Valladares says. 

Back at the fest, food stand lines are getting long; at one, a crowd of Frankfort firefighters waits together for steak tacos. The picnic tables scattered across the park are packed. While the crowd is mostly Latino, other Frankfort residents have made an appearance. Cheri Carlson says she’s excited for the music and the food as she enters the festival with her family.

“My granddaughters are Hispanic heritage and my son-in-law’s Hispanic,” Carlson says. “I think Frankfort needs a little culture—a little education and culture. That’s what we’re here for. All of it.”

"Cultural anxiety"

People interviewed for this story say they feel welcomed in Frankfort. But it hasn’t always been that way.

"I'm not saying you have to dig everything, right--the past doesn't have to be dug up,” Cruz says. “I do think, though, that if we don't intentionally learn from what was done, are we going to avoid making those mistakes in our future?"

In 2007, Cruz attended two different forums that showed the sharp divide at the time over immigrants and immigration law. News stories from the time describe events with diametrically opposed messages about the role of the Latino community in Frankfort. Allert Brown-Gort, then-Associate Director of The University of Notre Dame’s Institute of Latino Studies, moderated one of the forums. Reached by phone in Mexico City, he says his event was designed to combat what he calls misinformation about immigrants during a time of explosive Latino population growth across the Midwest.

Credit U.S Census Bureau

“These are people that are suffering from cultural anxiety, which is things around me are changing really fast and I don’t know that I like this,” Brown-Gort says. “And what can I point to? The most visible thing is this other that is there in my midst.”

But Brown-Gort says as time passes, people get to know their neighbors—and events like the Hispanic Heritage Festival are a sign of progress.

“The way that we are defining our community constantly changes,” Brown-Gort says. “So these are important signals of civic belonging. They’re important signals of successful integration.”

As night falls, Cruz introduces a folkloric dance group. The dancers, adorned in beads, brightly colored skirts, and elaborate dresses, take the stage with their partners.  The crowd, estimated at around 1,000 by city officials, watches from beneath strands of lights. The group spins and stomps as one.

Mayor Chris McBarnes has already said he expects the festival to return in 2020. The city now has a year to learn from the first one and plan what’s next.