The young performers of Las Estampas nearly made the dinosaurs dance as the Yale Peabody Museum hosted the seventh annual annual Fiesta Latina. At the same time, stegosaurus-sized cuts in state budget support for founding sponsor Junta for Progressive Action raised questions if there will be an eighth.
Among the 1,500 or so attendees at the free event Saturday were Sandra Josef and her 28 month-old son Rafael, recently adopted from Guatemala. She and her husband Bob were at the festival, they said, to expose Rafael to the sights, sounds, and aromas of his native Hispanic culture.
“The adoption agency,” said Rafael’s mom, “ask you to make a point of exposing him to his birth culture. That’s one of the reasons why we like New Haven so much, there’s such a strong Latino influence.”
They’d come to the right place on Saturday. As Rafael patiently posed in front of a mural of Machu Picchu, already under his belt, or bib, were the salsa sounds of Los Melodicos, a Puerto Rican-flavored musical group that had rocked the dinosaur hall with bone-shaking congas.
The charming 4‑to-10 year-old dancers of Fair Haven’s Las Estampas seemed to please him enough so he emitted “hat, hat,” one of, according to mom, the 25 or so words he’s mastered. And later in the day, his parents were going to take him to watch the Generacion Latina Virgen del Cisne, an Ecuadorean group making its debut at the festival, a bellwether of the growing and diversifying Latino community in town.
However, according to Sandra Trevino, the executive director of Junta, that’s precisely what the state seems not to appreciate.
Trevino was sitting at a table just off the lobby of the museum gathering signatures to bring to Hartford on Wednesday to help head off a state budget cut of $246,000 to the Fair Haven-based agency’s budget. That’s not only serious, she said, that could close down the 40-year-old social service agency for good.
“The governor simply zeroed us out,” said Trevino, who has been running Junta for a year and a half. “That amount is also half our entire budget. I met with the board last night, and they said if we can’t restore it, we just may have to shut the doors.”
Appearing on television on Friday, Trevino characterized the cut as a “criminal act.” On Saturday she was not backing down on the statement.
“We help people who are discriminated against in their jobs, who are picked on because some employers think they can get away with it. We help people get their GEDs. We have ESL classes. We help people gather a down payment for a house. We provide young mothers with diapers, we help people avoid foreclosure and homelessness,. We run a therapeutic after-school program for kids in need of emotional help. I’m telling you if we have to shut down, crime and suffering are going to go up for sure and the whole community is going to feel it.”
Trevino said hundreds of signatures had been gathered and they would be brought up in a caravan of supporters carpooling up from Junta headquarters on Wednesday. That day, she added, has been designated a day of general lobbying for Latino organizations statewide.
Fair Haven-based Junta is funded through the state’s Department of Social Services. It serves nearly 5,000 people a year, most already below the poverty line. “In the first six weeks of this year,” Trevino said, “we have twice as many clients as during the same period last.”
Junta’s budget of roughly $500,000 is half state-funded, and the balance through foundations and individual donors.
“My board said that maybe, if we can’t reverse this, we could stay open two days a week, But how long could we keep our staff who’d have to try to find other work?”
Other foundational New Haven organizations have had their budgets slashed, including International Festival of Arts and Ideas and LEAP. Few if any, according to Trevino, have been utterly zeroed out like Junta.
“I understand there’s a deficit and steps must be taken,” she said, as she huddled up with the David Heiser, Peabody’s head of education and outreach and the chief organizer of the fiesta. “Bbut shutting down community centers like Junta just at the time when there are more and more poor people who need our services most . It makes no sense.”
Heiser said that he too had experienced a contraction of support for the festival this year, especially from corporations who had been long-standing supporters.
“Bristol Meyers Squibb, one of our main sponsors, backed out, saying they just had been so hard hit by the economy… And they were not alone. If the International Association of New Haven had not stepped in,” he said, while offering some CitySeed broccoli to seven-year-old Renee Sanacora, “I don’t know how we would have done it this year.”
Junta is a programmatic, not a financial supporter. Still, even for the Peabody, which can ultimately rely on Yale’s deeper pockets and far more fiscal options than Junta, it was rough going. “We reached into our summer dinosaur overnight camp budget,” he said. “That makes some money and we took revenue from there to pay for the festival.”
The first four years of the festival, the Peabody charged normal admission to the museum and the festival’s activities were part of that. Three years ago, with a gathering of corporate sponsorship, the event was offered free. “Then attendance more than doubled. We do not want to return to charging admission for the fiesta,” he said.
Fortunately, none of this was on the minds of the dancers, or the face-painted kids, or those who participated in the Latin American scavenger hunt or those learning about Taino culture. And certainly not on the minds of Chelisa Santana and Kiara Rivera, competitors in the Connecticut Latina United States Pageant, whose sashes and sparkling tiaras lent glamour to the all-day event.
Trevino said those who would like to help make Junta’s case should call Senators Harp (860‑0393) and Looney (860 – 240-8600) and state reps Toni Walker (860 – 240-8585) and Juan Candelaria (860 – 240-8585).