Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Carnival in San Antonio. By Laura Hernandez-Ehrisman. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. x, 238 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8263-4310-9.)

Abstract

San Antonio's Fiesta celebrations have a complicated history. Their core is the Battle of Flowers parade that has existed since 1891. The festival, however, dates from 1900, when San Antonio's businessmen decided to put on a spring carnival, which was to center on the original parade, but started its first year without it (the parade would return and be incorporated the following year). Over the years, the festival has constantly changed in content and even name, and many of the transformations reflect changes in the economic, political, and ethnic power structures of San Antonio itself. In Inventing the Festival City, Laura Hernández-Ehrisman gives us an excellent, concise analysis of this ever-changing festival. There are, and have been, literally hundreds of concomitant events attached to what is now called Fiesta. Because Hernández-Ehrisman concentrates on certain predominating events within a particular span of time, she is able to integrate both the positive and negative aspects of each event within the structure of the city. In each chapter, the author analyzes the political and social changes in the city and how they affected (and continue to affect) the festival into the twenty-first century.