Philadelphia Weekly

Clemente Sandoval claims to know nothing about carpentry, but you wouldn’t know it to see him carving, chiseling and cutting wood for the muskets he and his brothers will brandish when the Mexican carnaval comes to Philadelphia this weekend.

“It’s just about the passion of being a carnavalero,” he says. “I see the original one [musket] and I figure out the way to make a replica so my brothers and I can have ours to take to the carnaval. There’s no dancer without a musket, you know.”

The Mexican carnaval celebrates the Battle of Puebla. In 1862, an outnumbered Mexican army defeated the French Army outside the city of Puebla. (Puebla fell one year later and Mexico was under French domain from 1862 to 1867.) The outfits the dancers, or carnavaleros, wear symbolize the different groups that fought in the battle.

Sandoval, 41, has made 16 muskets already and he’s finishing two more for the carnaval on April 26.

“Bringing a musket from Mexico is too expensive … around $450. I spend less doing my own; though it’s not the same wood, the ones I make here look pretty similar and we can dance with them.”

It takes him three weeks to finish a musket, probably one of the most important fixtures in the carnavalero’s costume.

“I have to make time for my passion to finish the muskets on time,” he says. “It’s important because the armies fought with those weapons.”

It may seem like a lot of work for someone whose restaurant job demands more than 40 hours a week from him. But the South Philly resident only wants the carnaval to be more authentic.

“I wish we could fire gunpowder with our muskets,” he says.

Firing gunpowder and other hallmarks of authenticity worry not just Sandoval but the carnaval organizers as well. The one thing that doesn’t seem to worry them is money—which is surprising given that other local cultural parades and festivities have struggled to collect cash.

Mayor Michael Nutter’s administration announced last year that, due to the financial crisis, the city wouldn’t help cover police, trash collection and portable toilet expenses for any major outdoor festival. The Mummers and St. Patrick’s Day parades were forced to rely on considerable donations to stage their events.

San Mateo Carnavalero (SMC), the group in charge of organizing the carnaval, is one of the groups that will receive less from the city this year. But the SMC is taking the reduction in stride.

“Money is not a concern for us,” says Gerardo Chico, SMC’s treasurer. “We know that one way or another there will be a carnaval this year, the following [year] and so on.”

His certainty is due to the fact that the majority of the Mexican community in Philadelphia comes from the state of Puebla, primarily from the town of San Mateo Ozolco.

“Everybody there knows what the carnaval means and no one seems to care about money when it comes to being part of it,” he says.

This sentiment is heard from organizers and participants alike.

“El carnaval gives us something we cannot describe with words,” says David Piña, head organizer. “That’s why everybody knows how much they have to pay to be a part of it. The money doesn’t go to somebody’s pocket. It covers all the expenses of staging such an event.”