Despite the rain, almost 4000 people attended Long Beach’s second annual international tamale festival at Long Beach City College’s Pacific Coast Campus on Sunday.
The festival, hosted by KCRW and Long Beach Living, brought together the Latinx community through variations of tamales from different countries, live performances from artists such as Sonora Dinamita and Vilma Diaz, dancers and more.
The aroma of tamales guided lines full of people to the vendors’ tents. Attendees blocked the walkways just so they could get a taste.
Some of the tamales available were birria tamales full of stewed meat from Los Cachorritos, chicharrones tamales, as well as classic flavors like chile with cheese, corn, chicken, and pork or beef with red or green sauce.
Evil Cooks took a less traditional take on tamales with their Gansito tamale, topped with strawberry jam garnished with banana and a vanilla wafer.
“In Mexico sweet tamales are very popular. There is this place in Mexico City that has like 40 different tamales,” owner Alex Garicia said, “I saw their Gansito tamale on social media and decided to try and make my own.”
Evil Cooks also sold a torta de tamal which included a meat tamale in between a sandwich roll known as a bolio or telera roll. Each tamale was inspired by tamales from Mexico City as well as several other of the Evil Cooks dishes such as the cheeseburger taco and their Chilakilles torta.
There were also plenty of options for those with restricted diets. Some vendors carried exclusively vegan or vegetarian tamales like Shane’s Tamales whose owner got his start making tamales 14 years ago for vegan potlucks for him and his friends after becoming vegetarian 18 years ago.
“I would make tamales as gifts because my friends liked them so much and a couple years later people started asking me to buy them… I started selling them on Facebook,” owner Chayane Sarabia said.
Now Sarabia’s business has grown so much he employs his mother as his business partner to help keep up with orders. He also runs a pop-up at Trademark Brewing in Long Beach every Monday for their Meatless Monday event.
Along with tamales, the event was accompanied by performances by young folklorico dancers in brightly colored dresses and men dressed in formal clothing with sombreros from JD Dance Company located in North Long Beach.
Aztec dancers performed shortly after JD Dance Company and started off their performance with a blessing using copal, an incense. Copal is a tree sap used by tribes in Mesoamerica that is believed to cleanse energy.
“Copal has been used by our ancestors longer than Jesus has walked the Earth… some people associate it with brujeria (witchcraft) and discourage practicing it but it’s not… it is one of the oldest religions in our culture,” Milagro Ruiz Bello said.
Several bands graced the stage at the festival, playing music with Latin-American roots. This includes Cello Azul, a first generation Mexican American cumbia band whose leader played a blue cello and Arcoiris (rainbow) Mariachi which is made of members of the LGBTQ community including the first transgender mariachi woman, Natalia Mendelez.
To finish off the night, cumbia legend La Sonora Dinamita, most known for songs like “Que Nadie Sepa Mi Sufrir,” “Mi Cucu,” “El Viejo Del Sombreron,” and “Escandalo” did a set playing their most famous titles with singer Vilma Diaz.
The crowd left at the Tamale Festival surrounded the stage and most began to dance in the cold rain as the band played. Despite the poor weather, the crowd cheered for an encore even after the band’s set came to an end.
By the time the event ended, several of the tamale vendors had sold out of almost all the tamales they arrived with, symbolizing the success of the event even with the poor weather.