Like beauty, the relative success of any year’s Fiesta festivities lies pretty much in the eyes of its beholders. Even though there were notably fewer cascarón vendors this year, State Street and De la Guerra Plaza were still blanketed with the tutti-frutti-colored confetti that says “¡Viva la Fiesta!”
So, somebody must have been having a good time.
As of yet, few of the typical official indicators by which a “good time” is measured — how many people were arrested, cited, warned, or hauled away in ambulances — are not yet available. When this year’s festivities started, an unmistakable pall did seem to hover over the event in the form of a question mark: Would ICE agents intrude over the event? Or would the mere possibility of what many conceded was an unlikely occurrence keep Santa Barbara’s immigrant residents — and people at risk of not looking Anglo — away?
Fritz Olenberger, this year’s El Presidente of Old Spanish Days (OSD), the group that puts on most of the Fiesta events, commented, “This would be difficult to quantify, but I believe the impact of the ICE concern to attendance was far less than some may have anticipated.” Olenberger, a professional photographer who has shot every Fiesta since 2012, added, “This year, I feel attendance was generally equal to or greater than that of previous years.” Event organizers were expecting 250 to attend the Recepción del Presidente fundraiser; 300, he said, showed up. Crowd size for Fiesta Pequeña, he said, was estimated at 5,000; 1,600 attended the Celebración de los Dignatarios movers-and-shakers bash at the zoo for which tickets cost $150…