Go Beyond the Sights and Smells at Ethnic Festivals

It's summertime, fellow journalists. It's hot, school's out, the news cycle is slower, and it feels as if your editors dispatch you to a hokey festival every weekend.

Stop the groaning. View this time as a great way to build sources and get ideas for bigger and better stories.

The festivals can provide windows into what's really going on in a particular community.

Some ideas:

1. Frame the festivals around international politics.
2. Profile festival organizers.
3. Is there any community infighting? Why? About what?
4. Is there any tension between older immigrants and their American-born children?
5. How does this particular ethnic festival compare with others in your area? Is it larger? Is it a copycat event?

And don't forget that writing a feature or two about an ethnic festival wins you great admiration from sources, whom you'll probably cultivate later for more substantial stories.

My newspaper, the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, documented the life cycle of the Festival of India in Fremont, Calif., for more than 10 years, and writers found new angles each summer. Here's a look at how we used one festival to explore larger issues in the community.

After writing the standard stuff for a year or two -- about the sights and smells of the festival, and how the event connected young people to their parents' homeland -- the story provided me with the backdrop for a more encompassing story about friction between two Indo-American camps.

The Mercury News' first stories about the annual Festival of India in the 1990s simply talked about how these festivals provided ways for the Indo-American community to teach their children about their parents' homeland through food, dancing and art. This is a standard way of approaching a story, and it's pretty much the same story for every ethnic group, year after year. (See Phoung T. Le's story in 1994, "Passage to India festival transforms Union City area,'' and T.T. Nhu's 1998 feature, "Celebrating India tastes of a culture reaching out.'')

Where I live and work, this type of story could be repeated for Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos and other ethnic groups. These themes get boring unless you find someone to tell the story through or you're a superb writer who can turn every article into a fascinating read.

But our stories evolved, and we began to use the occasion to discuss international events. In 1999, Marcus Walton used the backdrop of fighting between India and Pakistan as the launchpad for his story on the annual event.

The stories evolved further. In 2000, writer Sandra Gonzales wrote a front-page story about the growing number of Indo-American immigrants in Silicon Valley, and how fighting between them led to the start of a second summer festival.

Here's her lede:

"There was a time when Indo-Americans felt proud to have one festival in the Bay Area to celebrate India's independence. Now, festival promoters are dueling over two -- within days of each other, no less.

"A rift in the leadership of the Federation of Indo-American Associations of Northern California has spawned a group with an almost identical name holding a second festival in August -- one week earlier, and only a few miles away."

I picked up the story in 2001 and spent a few years following the intra-ethnic drama of dueling summer Indian festivals. First there were two festivals, then three, then the groups united for one year, and then they began fighting again. We even offered a chart so readers could follow the history of the infighting. (Here's one of the stories about the ongoing dispute, and a story about when they united in 2007.)

Finally, I took what I had been hearing all this time -- complaints about a prominent doctor and newspaper publisher, Romesh Japra, who put on the first festival and was criticized for being egotistical -- and I realized that he wasn't all that relevant to Silicon Valley's Indo-American community any more. High-tech money was replacing his old-world style. My 2005 story wasn't really about the festival at all. Rather it was a profile of two Indo-American camps: the one led by Japra, who ran his "empire'' like an autocratic maharaja, and the newcomers' circle, composed of Silicon Valley engineers whose style was entrepreneurial. The newcomers were even wealthier than Japra and didn't need his stamp of approval. The story showed how the lack of unity among the community of about 150,000 Indo-American immigrants was thwarting their efforts to realize their shared goal of gaining political power.

After this story ran, members of both camps were angry with me. They were embarrassed their rift was exposed in the newspaper -- but they didn't say I was wrong.

Afterward, sources in the community told me the story was the best thing that happened to them because it prompted some of the major leaders to discuss how they could resolve their differences and work together.

The lesson? Don't fret when your editor strolls by your desk, asking you to cover a ho-hum Saturday festival. Use the event as a launchpad for something more: international politics, personal drama, demographic shifts or community infighting.

Lisa Fernandez is a reporter at the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News. She covers everything from crime to community, and believes that a person's cultural background is often a key motivating factor, but is sadly overlooked by the mainstream media. She has a degree in anthropology from McGill University in Montreal and a master's degree from Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago. Please submit ideas or stories for Lisa to review.