The 66th annual Western Weekend parade drew a crowd of thousands to downtown Point Reyes Station on Sunday to carouse and celebrate West Marin. Beginning at high noon, the parade brought a cavalcade of antique cars, festooned floats, Aztec Dancers, expert horsemen, a mariachi band and a drunken and disorganized army battalion to march through town.
Aside from the fair weather, a spontaneous decision to close Main Street for the entire afternoon made this year’s festivities even more enjoyable—at least for some. With the road closed, people walked freely between the chicken barbecue at Toby’s Feed Barn; the Old Western Saloon, where the Haggards played a free, driving set; and a celebration on the manicured West Marin Commons greens that featured Mexican food and performances.
Locals credited the road closure, a decision by Marin County Sheriff’s Lieutenant Doug Pittman, with bringing together the oftentimes separated Anglo and Latino communities of West Marin. For Socorro Romo, the director of the West Marin Community Services’ Resource Center, the closure helped facilitate a kind of “flow” between the Anglos at the saloon and Toby’s and the Latino crowd in the Commons.
“[The Latino community] would really like everyone to know about the richness of the Latino culture,” Ms. Romo said. “The goal is to really build bridges between the two communities. We want one community in West Marin. One mixed group.”
Latinos already represent a majority of students that attend West Marin’s largest school district, and many Latino families work and live on the dozens of ranches that provide the backbone of local agriculture. Since Western Weekend has traditionally been a way to celebrate West Marin’s ranching heritage, an increased presence of the Latinos this year seemed welcome to many.
It was the first year Gilberto Rodriguez, a West Marin School employee, joined Ms. Romo in organizing Latino-centric events at the Commons, where tacos, pozole and cold drinks were sold.
Next year, Mr. Rodriguez said, he plans to encourage Latino organizations to collaborate more with longstanding participants in Western Weekend, such as the West Marin Lions and Rotary Clubs, the Point Reyes-Olema 4-H Club and the Marin County Farm Bureau.
“I think it was a little bit better this year,” he said. “I saw more people, and a lot of people really liked the charros”—the expert horseback riders—“and seeing the community in the parade.”
It was an increasingly common demonstration of cultural pride in West Marin, where the Latino population has seldom been given the opportunity to display its customs on a large scale. That pride was demonstrated by the superb horsemanship of Jesus Saldoñia and his charros, who took home the parade’s grand prize trophy from among the 35 parade entries.
The road closure had other unintended consequences, however. With traffic diverted to Toby Street, one block north of Main Street, and the loss of parking along that thoroughfare, the normal stream of weekend tourists had more trouble accessing businesses downtown.
Melanie Stone, the longtime owner of Zuma, said she lost money on Sunday. “It definitely slowed things down for our store because of everything that was going on,” she said. “A lot of parade-goers went to [the post-parade events], and tourists couldn’t get to town. We still had a good day, but who knows what it could’ve been.”
Ms. Stone said she hopes that next year, the road will open after the parade. Another local business owner, however, hoped the road would remain closed next year.
“It’s a good idea,” said Sheryl Cahill, who owns The Station House Café. “I think that closing Main Street is a nice idea and hope that we can elaborate on that a little next year with more community presence in the streets—street-fair like.”
Ms. Cahill noted that it’s the nature of Western Weekend to lose a little business and that, moreover, “it’s just a different day.”
For Lt. Pittman, the decision to close the road was motivated entirely out of a need to ensure public safety.
“The reality is, that’s been my standing order for several years,” he said, explaining that he has given deputies the discretion to keep the road closed until crowds have safely cleared. “Conditions [on Sunday] were such that people stayed out longer than usual,” in comparison to recent years.
Lt. Pittman can remember a time, 20 or so years ago, when Western Weekend was a much rowdier occasion, with the extended revelry leading to fights, public drunkenness and disorderly conduct. This year’s celebration, he said, went off without a hitch.
(The Light did learn of one unreported incident involving an off-duty probation officer flashing his badge arrogantly at bar patrons and insulting a local’s mother, just before midnight on Saturday. The ensuing brawl spilled out onto the street beside the Grandi Building; none were injured, save for the mother-slandering officer, who sustained a hard blow to the head and was escorted away from the premises by his nephew.)
And many people thanked Lt. Pittman for closing the road. “It caught me by surprise,” he said. “That’s having a good relationship with the community: knowing what people need and providing it to them.”
Western Weekend is sponsored—and its participants are judged—by the West Marin Lions Club, whose president, Larry Brown, thought the decision to keep the road closed made the day all the more special.
“I think it made quite a difference,” said Mr. Brown, who has steered nearly 30 Western Weekends. “I’m going to ask that they close the road again next year.”
The closure created a sort of walking-mall, family-friendly atmosphere downtown. The charros, who hail from both Marin and Sonoma Counties, executed skilled maneuvers on their steeds and twirled rope tricks in a style known as floero de reata after the parade. As horses galloped down Main Street, the Aztec Dancers continued their traditional indigenous dances in the Commons. They were followed by the Richmond-based Mariachi Juvenil los Cachorros and a folkdance troupe from Petaluma, both of which prominently featured youth performers.
Those events were put on by a nascent Latino organization called Abriendo Caminos, which is led by Ms. Romo and a half-dozen others.
For Ms. Romo, the Western Weekend festivities offered a way for Latinos to integrate deeper into the community by taking on leadership roles.
Abriendo Caminos will host several upcoming events, including a three-day training for small-business planning in July and a bicultural gathering, called La Mesa de las Abuelas, in late August.
The Tomales Bay Youth Center also had success with parking and post-parade cleanup. Alden Riley, an incoming junior at Tomales High, led a team of local kids who helped park 45 cars and raised nearly $200. That money, said Madeline Hope, the center’s director, went toward paying another team of kids to clean Main Street—an effort that was much easier with the road closed.
“It ended up being much cleaner this year because trash was not hiding under the cars,” Ms. Hope said.