WWNO skyline header graphic
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Local Newscast
Hear the latest from the WWNO/WRKF Newsroom.

Support local, independent journalism on WWNO with your Member Fest gift now! Click the donate button or Call 844-790-1094.

Unknown New Orleans: Rafael Saddy & The Nicaraguan Association Of Louisiana

Rafael Saddy
Rafael Saddy
/
Nicaraguan Association of Louisiana
Rafael Saddy

The 6th annual Kenner Hispanic Fest is June 11th and 12th.  “You’re going to find Hondurans, you’re going to find folks from the Caribbean, you’re going to find folks from Central America, and from the U.S.” said Rafael Saddy, event coordinator of the Nicaraguan Association of Louisiana (ANDELA).  “This festival’s purpose was to integrate not only the Hispanic community as one community but also share with the entire community to come in for a day of family fun, music, and food.”

If you can’t make it to the Hispanic Fest, Kenner is also host to a more purely Nicaraguan celebration later in the summer.  “It’s called El Tope de Santo Domingo,” said Saddy.  “As a matter of fact we’ll be celebrating it this second Saturday of August…and basically this is…a tradition of the St. Dominic festival in Managua Nicaragua.  This little statue was found in the valley there and it was brought down to Managua and the priest put the little statue in the church, somehow the statue disappeared and my god they found the statue back where it was originally, so that’s how that festivity started in Managua.”

The Nicaraguan version is a ten-day festival.  “Well here, we cannot take ten days off work so we take one day but we do…the procession of the statue and then we recognize the mayor of the city as reigning mayor of Managua for one day and vice versa, and we try to keep the culture up by showing the folks not only in other communities, but more important, keeping those Nicaraguan kids that are born here in the United States, not to forget their culture.

You can expect to see women in folkloric costumes as part of the procession, and later is the crowning of the “India Bonita” (Queen of the Festival). Following the festival is a dance party with salsa and Latin dance music, along with Hispanic dishes and refreshments, including plenty of nacatamales.

“Of course other countries have their similar versions but the Nicaraguan one is a pretty huge one,” said Saddy.  “It’s a cornmeal base, it has meat, it has rice, and then it’s wrapped in banana leaves and then it’s put to boil and it’s a lot of work to prepare one, I tell you, but it’s a good meal.”

Saddy said it’s difficult to put a number on the number of Nicaraguans in the New Orleans area.  “I can say this much, that pre-Katrina, the Nicaraguan community was the third largest…in today’s numbers I would say, it’s probably either third or fourth. I think the Salvadoran community may have surpassed it, but we don’t have a true count of what it is.

“I think probably one of the reasons that a lot of Nicaraguan folks are here, including but not necessarily myself, because my parents brought me at the age, I was still in elementary school, but the majority of Nicaraguans came here with the exodus of the civil war in Nicaragua between Samozans and the Sandanistas.

“And we had a lot of folks that came into the United States and of course Miami was the first stopping city and eventually they spread themselves out to New Orleans, because it also offered a nice connection to go abroad, or to travel back and forth.”

And they didn’t just settle in one part of the city.  “That is one of the beauties that we have here in New Orleans, when we compare ourselves to larger cities like Miami, Chicago, L.A.,” said Saddy.  “There is no concentration here of any Hispanic community here, they’re all integrated, and that’s why the community is able to live in such a peaceful way with this community because we are integrated.

“The only concentration that I recall from 1968, 70’s, was the projects on Elysian Fields, and I think it was called Parchester, and the ones at St. Thomas, and the one at St. Thomas had a concentration of Central Americans, and Hondurans and Nicaraguans and so forth, and the one here on Elysian Fields had the concentration of Cubans.  Once the projects disappeared, most of those in the early 70’s, they moved out to Kenner.”

Saddy said that most Americans aren’t aware of the ties that have bound the two nations going back decades.

“We don’t forget what the United States did to us in the time of Kennedy, when the Alliance for Good Progress came up, that was an excellent thing that happened to us in Nicaragua from a help standpoint,” he said, “so we always looked up to the big brother, the United States, but there is a lot of things that the American community did not know, that Nicaragua was a destination for tourism, was a destination point to go hunting and so forth..and continues to be now in today’s world.”

While there is currently turmoil throughout much of Central America, “according to statistics, Nicaragua is the safest country to travel to go and have a vacation,” said Saddy.  “And they’re opening the doors to business.  Now there is a lot of reasons one can see why it’s the safest I don’t know, but the government right now in Nicaragua has opened the doors and they have a tight control of what takes place in the country and perhaps that is what’s making it safe.”

For more information on Tope Santo Domingo, call event coordinator Rafael Saddy at (504) 464-4619.