Early last Sunday morning parking lots near La Fiesta del Valle de Española parade route were bustling as people decorated their floats with colorful banners and streamers and balloons and papier Mache flowers. It was a rainbow of feverous activity.
In the midst of this kaleidoscope of colors an aged, faded gray pick-up with a horse trailer in need of paint, incongruous on this palate, pulled into a lot.
A father and two small children emerged from the truck, unloaded and saddled their ponies. The children, a small boy and his sister, also small, wore straw cowboy hats almost larger than their bodies. Dad helped them with their chaps and then boosted them aboard their horses.
Parade and horses sometimes do not marry well. Their clackety-clack hooves upon the pavement are loud. A balloon can break away from a float and startle them as they drift by, or the noisy crowds can spook them.
Knowing the danger that can be imminent, the dad began leading the horses with his children aboard and continued in the 90-degree heat and for a while going down and then up the hill at the start of the parade.
Being in the parade for these three caballeros was just a sliver of the rich mosaic of culture and traditions and devotion to family that abound in the Española Valley and that was in full view in the La Fiesta Parade. We are made up of many people with a sense of history that does not readily exist outside of New Mexico but is more prevalent here.
La Fiesta Española, brought back after two-year hiatus, was a huge and festive yet mellow celebration of life here in and the past and now in the future. The two young children on horseback with their father leading them will remember their day in the parade forever and will hopefully continue the dedication to history, to family, and to respect for traditions.
Que viva La Fiesta.