New Year, New Parade: The Back-Story

It's late December, and I'm in Mission, Texas. That can only mean one thing: it's time to build a float for the Texas Citrus Fiesta's annual Parade of Oranges. The event has been happening since 1932. Most of you know that my parents moved to Mission in the mid 1940s. Thus, for all of their ten children who survived to adulthood, the Citrus Fiesta, and its annual Parade of Oranges, provide a vivid part of our collective childhood memories, though each of us likely remembers it differently.

Last year, while finishing up an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was working on a multi-part photo based project about Mission and decided to build a float for the parade as a means of making the town's collective "portrait." The problem at the time was how to get as many residents in front of a camera at the same time and the Parade seemed an obvious way to go about it. I envisioned a deadpan video of the residents of Mission waving and smiling to the camera. The best way to get them to wave seemed to be to enter a float in the parade.

Two brothers, Danny and Donnie, and several sisters, including Charlotte and Martha, pitched in. Many other family members and friends and friends of friends, mostly residents of Mission and the Lower Rio Grande Valley, helped too. We ended up with an inaugural float celebrating conjunto music in the Rio Grande Valley, complete with an 8 foot tall, 12 foot wide accordion (with keyboards that lit up in the dark), two extraordinarily accomplished young musicians (an award-winning accordion player and baja sexto expert), covered with sliced grapefruit, prickly pear cactus, powdered citrus leaves, corn husks (a la tamales) and almost life-sized pinatas of me and my girlfriend, Jane.


The float was titled, "Conjunto: From the Valley to the World," and it was quite an engineering feat. But it failed to win any prizes because we were too late lining up. Part of the problem was my own poor planning, the heart attack (or was it a stroke?) of the 83 year old conjunto hall of fame nominee originally scheduled to play accordion during the parade, and the extraordinary amount of thorns that had to be burned off the cactus we put on the the sides of the float. But this year will be different.

This Blog will catalog the evolution of our entry in the 2011 Parade of Oranges. Wish us luck!