Santa Barbara’s Fiesta 2025 Sees Festivities, Fatality

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.

But counting Fiesta celebrants with any precision is akin to counting drops of water in a rushing river. Anecdotally — at least to people working at the Independent and their circles of contact — it seemed that it was much easier to find a parking space for this year’s Saturday morning Children’s Parade than in years past, the taco lines at Our Lady of Guadalupe seemed to move considerably faster, and it was easier for even late arrivals to secure a street’s-eye perch along Cabrillo Boulevard to watch this year’s annual Fiesta parade. 

Olenberger noted there were more horses and carriages in this year’s Fiesta parade along the waterfront, but with three fewer entries, he said, than last year. Olenberger also reported a 21 percent increase in the number of vendors at the Mercado de la Guerra: 113 compared to 94. But to some attendees, it seemed that more were selling merchandise — shirts, fans, parasols — rather than food.

Nothing changes faster than the past, as the people running Old Spanish Days are learning the hard way. Today’s Fiesta is not yesterday’s. Gone is the traditional State Street parade, and the Fiesta rodeo — a staple event — at Earl Warren has become competitive events: The OSD rodeo with locals has been forced to move to the Santa Ynez Valley, while Earl Warren Showgrounds administrators provided a touring professional rodeo experience. Also, the satellite mercado at MacKenzie Park is long gone, as is the more recent carnival at the City College Parking lot. 

If that weren’t enough, the burbling discontent over the colonial connotations of the name “Old Spanish Days” now finds itself questioned more frequently and from a broader circle of people. With local schools now populated by a solid Latino majority, Fiesta organizers might well find themselves increasingly challenged over the name. 

However, the fact remains, Fiesta is the single biggest, best, and most expansively inclusive party Santa Barbara throws for itself. Never was that more obvious than on Saturday night on State Street, when a spooky red half-moon — reflecting the distortion of light molecules caused by all the ash generated by the Gifford Fire raging 15 miles outside of Santa Maria — shone down on a very crowded Mercado stage. There, cumbia bands alternated with Spencer the Gardener and musicians playing norteño music. Most of the people wearing cowboy hats were Latino. 

But the real action, it seemed, was on State Street itself. Galvanizing the lower stretches on Saturday night was a spontaneous and impromptu eruption of multiple banda bands — each one a high-propulsion assembly of tubas, trombones, trumpets, drums, and an occasional saxophone or three. People danced solo; couples danced together; kids danced all over. And the bands themselves danced, shifting from one spot on the street to another, creating new audiences and dancers as they went.

Even self-described grumpy old white guys who don’t dance — such as City Councilmember Mike Jordan — found themselves utterly transfixed and bewitched by the raucous and joyous magic. “Where did they come from?” Jordan wondered. The question was put to El Presidente Olenberger, who said he didn’t know. Last year’s El Presidente, Dave Bolton, said this was the third year banda bands showed up in a pop-up fashion. “They merely show and then the crowd grows,” he said, adding that the video Old Spanish Days made depicting State Street on Saturday night has drawn more than 70,000 views. 

All this illustrates just how unpredictably creative Santa Barbarans can be when animating what had been abandoned public spaces. It also shows that Old Spanish Days aren’t that Spanish anymore. 

As for the specter of ICE, they were the boogeymen who never showed. There were a couple of false alarms reported, but typically they involved some of the out-of-town law enforcement officers called in to help keep the peace. In some instances, bar and restaurant workers were reportedly told they could go home early if they didn’t feel safe. The real tragedy of the celebration was the fatal stabbing of Anthony Bisquera-Hartley, a 30-year-old father of three, in what police are describing as a gang-related event just after midnight Friday morning on the 500 block. Details of what happened remain sketchy, but police suggest the individuals involved may have known each other, and instead of push coming to shove, knives were drawn and three individuals sustained multiple stab wounds to the torso. 

Police have since arrested three individuals, and this Tuesday, the district attorney charged two with murder and one with attempted murder. The details, such as they’ve been presented, are alarming. One of the alleged assailants, Juan Fernado Rios, was out on bail at the time on an as-yet-undisclosed felony offense. In 2013, Rios — then a juvenile — was charged with attempted murder for a gang-related assault on the Westside near Bohnett Park. He served 354 days in county jail with three years of probation after pleading no contest to assault with a deadly weapon with a street gang enhancement. In 2018, Rios and an accomplice got in a fight on the 600 block of State Street with a man and his niece. The niece was punched in the face and the uncle was stabbed, as were two Good Samaritans who sought to intervene. Rios was sentenced to four years on attempted murder charges; his accomplice got 18 and remains in prison. 

According to the City Fire Department, calls for service were down slightly during the four days of Fiesta: 172 total calls for service, 121 of which were emergency calls for service. The year before, those numbers were 196 and 150. What that means is hard to say; fire department stats don’t reveal which events were actually Fiesta-related and which ones happened to happen as Fiesta was happening. AMR, by contrast, reported a slight increase in the number of ambulance calls, posting 178 calls this year during Fiesta week as opposed to 153 last year. Again, these numbers don’t differentiate regular calls from Fiesta-involved calls.