Cities, like people, may be best known by the way they party. For 
nearly a century and a half, San Antonio has partied well. In this 
look at late-nineteenth-century festivals in San Antonio, Judith 
Berg Sobré brings an art historian’s sensibility to accounts of the 
pageantry, parades, and festive events that typified a city 
welcoming settlers into a community that valued their individuality 
even while it taught them a new identity.

    Six historic festivals provide windows into the culture of this 
polyglot city: the Fourth of July, Juneteenth, Diez y Seis, 
Columbus Day, the German Volksfests, and the Battle of the 
Flowers. The festivals allow their sponsors to showcase the 
language, foods, costumes, and dances of their homeland while 
still identifying themselves as patriotic supporters of their new 
country.

    Sobré describes the festivals vividly, and the result is a 
delightful picture of a city and an era at play—a city and an era 
that would soon find less reason to play and less ability to nurture 
and celebrate diversity.

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JUDITH BERG SOBRÉ is a professor of art history at the 
University of Texas at San Antonio.



What people are saying about this book

". . . an important contribution to the literature of urban and ethnic 
studies."—Kenneth B. Ragsdale