From my apartment in downtown Santa Barbara, I know Fiesta has arrived before I ever glance at the calendar.

First come the hoofbeats echoing along the pavement. Then the mariachi music drifts through my open windows.

Children armed with glitter-filled cascarones stalk one another along the sidewalks while tourists claim their places for the parade.

For one week every August, Santa Barbara becomes a stage upon which it performs its favorite story about itself.

It is a beautiful spectacle. Families reunite. Dancers spend months preparing performances that last only minutes. Community organizations raise money. Restaurants overflow.

For many Mexican-American families, Fiesta is an annual celebration of heritage, neighborhood and belonging. There is real joy here, and it deserves to be honored.

But watching Fiesta year after year has led me to wonder not simply what we celebrate, but how communities decide which parts of their past deserve celebration.

Public festivals are never merely entertainment. They are acts of collective memory. They tell us who we are by telling us where we came from.

Since its founding in 1924, Old Spanish Days has presented Santa Barbara as the heir to a gracious Spanish colonial civilization.

White stucco buildings, red-tile roofs, mission bells, caballeros on horseback and elegant señoritas combine to create an image that is both visually captivating and instantly recognizable.

It has become the city’s public identity.

The problem is not that this story is false. It is that it is incomplete.

Anthropologist Patricia Ann Hardwick, a Santa Barbara native, argues that Old Spanish Days was deliberately created by civic leaders to accomplish two goals: stimulate tourism and cultivate a distinctive civic identity.

In the years following the 1925 earthquake, Santa Barbara consciously reinvented itself around a romantic Spanish Colonial image that would distinguish it from every other California city.

Fiesta became one of the principal ways that identity was publicly performed.

Hardwick’s research also offers a more nuanced insight. She found that the official story promoted by Fiesta organizers is not necessarily the story experienced by its participants.

For many Mexican-American dancers, musicians, artisans and volunteers, Fiesta is not primarily a celebration of Spanish colonization.

It is a celebration of grandparents who danced before them, neighborhood traditions, cultural artistry and community pride. The official narrative and the lived meanings of participants are often different.

That distinction matters.

Social life is rarely as simple as either critics or defenders imagine.

Yet Hardwick also demonstrates that Fiesta’s official literature has historically privileged a romantic Spanish colonial narrative while minimizing California’s far more complicated ethnic and cultural history.

The California being celebrated was never simply Spanish.

Long before Europeans arrived, the Chumash had lived along this coastline for thousands of years, building sophisticated maritime societies, extensive trade networks and rich ceremonial traditions.

Spanish colonization transformed that world through military occupation, missionization, forced labor, epidemic disease and religious coercion.

The missions remain among California’s most admired landmarks.

They are also among its most contested historical institutions.

Thousands of Chumash men, women and children helped construct the very buildings that visitors now photograph each August.

Once baptized, many could not freely leave mission life. Traditional religious practices were suppressed. Disease devastated Indigenous communities.

These realities seldom occupy center stage during Fiesta.

Even the Chumash Revolt of 1824 — one of the largest Indigenous uprisings in California history — receives relatively little public attention during the week’s festivities.

Yet the revolt reminds us that Indigenous Californians were not passive participants in colonial history. They resisted.

What fascinates me as a sociologist is not simply what Fiesta remembers, but how it remembers.

Public rituals do more than commemorate history; they actively produce public memory. Through parades, costumes, architecture, speeches, music and ritual, communities collectively perform a version of the past until it begins to feel like common sense.

That does not make the story false. But it can make alternative histories harder to see.

Every society creates what historians sometimes call a “usable past” — a version of history that helps explain who “we” are.

The question is never whether communities simplify their histories. All communities do. The more important question is whether they remain willing to enrich those stories as historical understanding deepens.

That is why I do not believe Santa Barbara should abandon Fiesta.

Quite the opposite. I believe it should continue to evolve.

Imagine beginning the celebration with a meaningful Chumash welcome accompanied by educational programming on Indigenous history.

Imagine exhibits explaining not only the beauty of the missions but also the human cost of building them.

Imagine recognizing the African ancestry present within many Californio families, the Chinese immigrants who helped build 19th-century Santa Barbara, and the Mexican laborers whose work sustained the region through successive generations.

Such additions would not diminish Fiesta. They would deepen it.

Communities do not become stronger by protecting comforting myths. They become stronger by embracing historical complexity.

We can admire Spanish architecture while acknowledging the Indigenous labor that built it. We can celebrate Mexican-American cultural traditions while honestly confronting the realities of colonialism.

We can preserve beloved rituals without asking history to become simpler than it was.

As I listen to the music drifting through my windows each August, I still feel the joy that Fiesta brings to this city. But I also think about the many hands that built Santa Barbara and the many stories that remain only partially told.

The richest celebrations are not those that ask us to forget. They are those that invite all of us to remember more.