Sitting on the lawn at Weber Point Plaza, Helen O’Reily was taken back to her first Barrio Fiestas.
Getting her fix of rich adobo and sticky-sweet turon from Filipino food vendors hasn’t changed. Neither have the calls of greeting from friends she hasn’t seen in a while.
But at Saturday’s Barrio Fiesta, O’Reily sees the celebration as something bigger, its new waterfront venue giving hundreds room to splay out on the lawn and take in the traditions familiar to her Filipino upbringing.
“It brings me back,” said O’Reily, especially to the days she’d bring her kids, back when they were just about hip height. Now, her daughter has brought her own child “to learn their culture, too.”
For attendees like O’Reily, Saturday marked the return of Barrio Fiesta, Stockton’s decades-old festival rooted in Filipino heritage. After years without it, festivalgoers spent hours weaving between scores of vendors and taking in back-to-back performances of Filipino folk dance and live music.
Gerard Talampas, the festival’s director and vice president of the Friends of Barrio Fiesta Stockton, which put on the event, considers the fiesta as a tradition that has carried Stockton’s Filipinos through both good times and struggles.
In response to plans for the construction of the Crosstown Freeway — a project developed in the 1960s that threatened and later displaced much of the city’s Little Manila neighborhood — founders of the Associated Filipino Organizations of San Joaquin County established the Filipino Plaza, a downtown community center composed of affordable housing units and a business center, Talampas explained to Stocktonia.
The city’s first Barrio Fiesta was held in 1972 to celebrate the completion of the plaza. Since then, it’s been a celebration that “runs deep,” in Stockton, Talampas said.
Early in the festival Talampas explained to the crowd at the plaza what the words “barrio” and “fiesta” meant together.
“’Barrio’ is a small town or neighborhood, and a ‘fiesta’ is a joyful celebration of life and togetherness,” he said. “In Stockton, [Barrio Fiesta] became our way of saying, ‘We as Filipinos are still here. We will not be erased. This is our home.’”
For Tina DeZuniga, the food is always the best part. At the start of the festival, as she helped staff the information booth, DeZuniga took bites of lumpia from a nearby stand, the crispy treat reminding her of the restaurant she once owned in Stockton.
Having volunteered at other Barrio Fiestas, DeZuniga — whose late husband Tony was the subject of a recent museum exhibition for his work as a comic-book artist — sees the celebration as an “iconic part of Filipino culture,” where “everybody gathers.”
“It’s the only place where you’ll see all these Filipino people altogether — people that you don’t see for so many years and now ‘Oh, you’re here, you’re here!’ It’s really nice,” she said.
Until 2019, the festival had gone on for decades at the Filipino Plaza, where families like Nico Belasco’s would join in “a big party.” His relatives would be involved, too — like his mother performing in a dance group or his grandmother selling lumpia at a stand.
“Barrio Fiesta to me means community,” said Belasco, now an organizer for the festival. “It means coming together and finding home in each other.”
But beyond being a place to kick back, the fiesta became a “gathering of Filipino pride,” Belasco said.
“I’m very proud to be Filipino,” he said. “And I hope to instill that in the younger generation and continue that passion and pride, because it definitely is something to celebrate. A large part of who we are as individuals is our culture.”
With the festival here to stay, Talampas said he hopes to continue working with AFO “elders” who helped put the festival together in its early years to make sure future generations can enjoy it as well.
“I want to make sure my kids know what the Barrio Fiesta is. I want their kids to know,” Talampas said. “To be able to carry that torch forward, that is what brings me the most joy.”