DARDANELLE — The first Downtown Dardanelle Fiesta is scheduled for just a few hours on Saturday, but it will leave a lasting contribution for the community — a mural.
The free event, set for 5-9 p.m.,
is sponsored by the Traveling Arts Fiesta, a nonprofit organization based in Russellville.
“It’s turning into not just a fiesta, but a community festival,” said Jeannie Fowler Rodriguez Stone, executive director of the organization. “We’re really excited because [Yell County is] one of the top three counties in the state for Hispanic population.”
Stone said the Traveling Arts Fiesta is collaborating with McElroy House in Dardanelle and the Arkansas River Valley Community Coalition.
The Traveling Arts Fiesta, starting its fourth year in existence, provides traditional fiestas “to expose folks to the arts and culture of Hispanic communities and always includes an education component that helps to overcome the lack of knowledge about the differences in Latin American countries. We always have a participatory arts component,” Stone said.
“A first for us — it’s really exciting — is a professional muralist from Little Rock, Jose Hernandez, will be painting the facade of Tarascos, a Mexican restaurant on Front Street,” Stone said. She said Hernandez, with the help of his brother, will paint throughout the weekend, starting Friday.
“It’s really exciting because we have a funder from Seattle, one of my grants [Tides Foundation Art4Moore], and it is specifically for the murals, but we’ve never been able to procure permission from a site. This isn’t just a chalk or temporary mural that we’ve done on pieces of board and put up for a short amount of time … so we’re really excited.”
Stone said Hernandez and the restaurant owners, Antonio and Maricela Zamora, have worked together to come up with the imagery for the mural.
The owners’ daughter, Denise Garcia of Russellville, works at the restaurant and is vice president of the Traveling Arts Fiesta Board of Directors.
Garcia said Stone “likes to incorporate visual art — either artists bring their paintings so people can look at them or, at the fiesta, do a type of mural, even if it’s just chalk on paper or on the floor.”
Garcia’s parents agreed to have a mural painted on the building, she said, and made suggestions to the artist.
“Just pretty much, [Maricela] wanted it to be colorful and, obviously, Mexican themes because it’s a Mexican restaurant, and just bringing different things together,” Garcia said. “She wants a Monarch butterfly in there” because the insect is from the state in Mexico where Garcia’s mother is from, “and a woman dressed in Mexican attire.”
Garcia said she has been to fiestas sponsored by the Traveling Arts Fiesta and is happy to see one taking place in Dardanelle.
“I feel like it’s a really great idea to do something in downtown Dardanelle because there are really no events there, except the farmers market on Saturday, which I also think is really neat,” she said.
Stone said other Downtown Dardanelle Fiesta activities include a bilingual entertainer, Papa Rap of northwest Arkansas.
“He gets everyone involved in playing percussion — he even sings the Razorback fight song to the Latin beat,” Stone said. “We’ll have the best mariachi band in the state — Mariachi Amistad de Arkansas — and we also have local dancers from St. Augustine, the Catholic church in Dardanelle. It’s traditional Hispanic dancing.”
Also, the Los Chinelos de Morelos of Dardanelle will perform, a group from a specific region in Mexico with “highly elaborate costumes, a marching-type dance to percussion.”
Vendors include a voter-registration booth, sponsored by the Arkansas United Community Coalition.
“One of their specific goals is to raise the level of political engagement, or civic engagement, among the Hispanic population. It’s a homegrown group,” Stone said.
For more information, go to www.travelingartsfiesta.com or the Traveling Arts Fiesta’s Facebook page, or call Stone at (479) 747-0210.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.