A taste of Mexico at Mardi Gras

Immigrant krewe adds culture, tequila — and Frida — to parade in New Orleans

In their 162-year history, Mardi Gras parades have included white New Orleanians satirizing British royalty, black New Orleanians satirizing those who satirize British royalty and an all-female group that throws decorated heels instead of beads.

This year, add a new group to the countless list that has paraded in the city: Mexican immigrants dressed as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera paintings.

For immigrants, living in the city is both a source of joy and pain — a place with a rich history that’s reminiscent of home, where exclusion and discrimination still linger. But one Saturday in February, during a crowded carnival parade, about two dozen people took part in the signature celebration of their adopted town.

Krewe de Mayahuel, named after the Aztec goddess of agave (source of the alcoholic beverages pulque and tequila), paraded over two miles of the city’s streets, the first Mardi Gras krewe of its kind.

Roberto Carrillo, a 52-yearold native of Mexico City who has lived in New Orleans for 13 years, helped dream up Mayahuel.

“At some point, I remember saying, ‘There is no Mexicans represented in the culture of New Orleans,’ ” Carrillo said. “Parading is the soul of New Orleans, you show the world what you think.”

Eventually, Carrillo’s desire to counter negative stereotypes of Mexicans in this city and elsewhere boiled over into creating the krewe. “We don’t celebrate Cinco de Mayo, we don’t drink margaritas, we don’t eat burritos,” he said. “All of that is mis-culture.

“Here we are, we’re going nowhere, you may as well know us,” Carrillo added.

Sandwiched between other marching krewes — as parading groups are called here — including the satirical Krewe du Jieux and a krewe of Brooklyn transplants, Mayahuel featured some creative interpretations of its chosen theme of Mexican artists Kahlo and Rivera. Celestino Bustos and his girlfriend, Anna McGowan of Jackson, Miss., dressed up as the 1939 painting “The Two Fridas.” Bustos donned an ankle-length dress and sported a unibrow and makeup. Another marcher dressed as Kahlo in men’s clothing.

The parade crowds adored the Fridas and screamed her name as Krewe de Mayahuel rolled by.

The immigrants who make up the bulk of the krewe grew up in various parts of Mexico, from Ciudad Juarez to Monterrey to Mexico City. Some have lived in New Orleans for a few years, others for decades.

They’re construction workers, doctoral students, engineers and architects.

Mayahuel’s members aren’t the first Latin American immigrants to parade (and the krewe includes other groups). Ten years ago, Antonio Garza, a native of Texas, formed Amigos de los Amigos, a krewe partly made up of Mexican-Americans like himself.

“Carnival is such a reflection of what’s happening with society,” said Rebecca Snedeker, executive director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University. “With the long, unfolding history of the city, there’s been many groups of immigrants who have moved here and forged a response to carnival this time of year.”

The Hispanic population in New Orleans grew by 40 percent, to 20,849, between 2000 and 2013, according to U.S. census data, with larger increases in neighboring areas. Most was due to increases in Mexican and Honduran immigrants.

While Krewe de Mayahuel joins other efforts to insert Latin American culture into New Orleans, Rosa Gomez-Herrin, a doctoral student in urban studies at the University of New Orleans who grew up in Lima, Peru, says representation on policy-making bodies still eludes this immigrant community.

There are no Latinos on the city’s seven-member school board. There is a Latina, Helena Moreno, on the City Council.

As Mayahuel paraded along packed neighborhood streets to the French Quarter, the cultural seemed to overlap with the political.

A parader, one of the Fridas, carried a sign in Spanish saying “Migration is natural.”

Krewe members wore monarch butterflies, a symbol adopted by immigrant rights activists because the monarch migrates across North America without respect to borders.

Hours later, at the end of the route, Mayahuel’s Fridas and Diegos dropped to the ground in exhaustion and drained the last drops of tequila out of numerous bottles. The route ended near where Mexico’s first indigenous president, Oaxaca native Benito Juarez, is believed to have lived when political infighting led to his exile here in the mid-1800s.

It’s an example of how Mexico and New Orleans “are connected on so many levels,” Bustos said.