The South Omaha community will celebrate a century of history this weekend marking the 100th anniversary of the Cinco de Mayo festival.
The official 100th anniversary of the festival was in 2020, but was cancelled due to the pandemic. Last year’s festival was pushed later into the summer for the same reason, so the celebration is being held this year.
“This year everything is back to a normal cycle,” executive director of the Cinco de Mayo Omaha Organization, Marco Mora said.
The parade will be held on Saturday and for the first time in years, it will feature groups from Bryan High including: the dance team, cheer squad, band and girls’ soccer team.
“We plan on playing our fight song in it along with some other songs,” band director Christopher Short said. “The kids are really excited for it.”
The parade will honor military veterans.
“This year is actually a salute to the military,” Mora said. “We’ll have military veterans leading the parade.”
The festival will take place on 24th Street like always, but will be expanded to stretch from L Street to Q Street.
“There is no festival that uses that amount of space in Omaha, so it’s going to be pretty huge this year,” Mora said.
The festival has started to bring in bigger bands for the concerts and this year they are going back to their two main stages for concerts on Friday and Saturday. On Friday, they will have Miata perform. Other groups performing include John Sunday, Mundo Risa, Bauna Brisa, North Daniels, Constant Theo and Bruxelles Musika Durango.
Along with all of the bands performing on Sunday, there will also be a mariachi mass, the carnival, another concierto and the baile con caballos, a dance with horses.
In addition to the Omaha Police Department’s horses, the festival is working with Latino peace officers and the Nebraska National Guard to ensure the safety of all guests.
“We want to keep it as a safe family event,” Mora said.