Fighting Fear with Confetti During Santa Barbara’s Fiesta

Florentino Jimenez and his wife, Belen, arrived downtown before 7 a.m on the first day of Santa Barbara’s Fiesta week. The couple has been making and selling confetti-filled cascarones for more than 25 years, and they have to get there early to snag their usual spots, right on State Street where the crowds walk by to go to El Mercado de la Guerra Plaza. 

It’s a family business that takes year-round dedication. Their home on the Eastside is packed with cartons of eggs, painstakingly painted in bright colors, or customized to look like recognizable characters. There’s Mickey Mouse eggs with big ears, striped clownfish Nemos, minions from Despicable Me, or birds, bees, and clowns with little party hats. Belen sits proudly in front of her inventory, while Florentino, sitting in a wheelchair, plays the cheerful salesman. 

They’re three for a dollar for the solid-colored eggs or a dollar each for the special ones. “They take a long time for my wife to make,” Florentino tells a customer.

Selling cascarones helps the family earn extra money in the summer months — they also sell Belen’s homemade tamales during the rest of the year — but this year they say there’s been fewer vendors showing up during Fiesta, something they attribute to the fear and uncertainty over immigration enforcement.

“I hope [ICE] doesn’t come, because we’re not doing anything wrong,” Florentino said. “We’re just trying to make money to survive with our family.”

Florentino came to Santa Barbara from Acapulco, Mexico, more than 33 years ago. He came to work as a landscaper, though an accident shattered his right leg and hip, limiting his mobility and forcing him into early retirement.

He says that most of the other vendors who make and sell cascarones are immigrant families, and the recent escalation of federal immigration enforcement (which resulted in more than 111 arrests in Santa Barbara County) has stoked fears in the immigrant community, and as a result, some of his fellow vendors have decided to stay home this year.

Florentino said he’s disappointed to see how immigrants have been targeted by the Trump administration, but he’s not surprised. Their family was featured in the 2018 short film, Cascarón, directed by Casey McGarry. It was filmed during Trump’s first term and documents the Jimenez family and two more Santa Barbara vendors. Florentino said he remembers the community being worried about the last Trump presidency, but he doesn’t want to live in fear anymore.

“If they come, they’re going to have to take me out of my wheelchair,” Florentino says with a defiant smile. 

He said that many immigrants came to the U.S. for the same reasons his family did: to escape a dangerous situation in their home country and have a chance for their children to have an opportunity to flourish themselves. 

“People [come] here because they’re afraid to live there,” he said. “But they get here, and they’re afraid again because they don’t know if they’re going to be caught.”

Florentino and Belen’s two children and their new baby granddaughter now help them run the family Fiesta business, overseeing two more stands selling cascarones on the corner of De la Guerra. He says they haven’t sold as many confetti eggs this year, though it’s early and he’s having fun talking to people and watching the celebration from his spot on the corner.

“We can’t be too afraid to come to Fiestas,” Florentino said.