Portland’s own Fyre Fest has been Cancelled

Emilly Prado
Aug 27, 2017 · 4 min read

This morning, the Portland Taco Festival issued a statement announcing the cancellation of today’s event and apologizing for the disastrous first day of a festival I called out for perpetuating awful Mexican stereotypes.

In the statement, the organizers reveal their identities and write that they are two people of color named Timothy Arguello and Stephen Jones. While my article was a critique of the reductive representation of the Latinx community, it also revealed that the event was a fundraiser for a church based in Denver, Colorado.

Perpetuating stereotypes isn’t okay, even if someone is Brown. Identifying as a Mexican American or as a person of color doesn’t render someone incapable of sustaining oppressive ideas.

As event organizers, the Portland Taco Festival had a responsibility. Not only to curate an event that was culturally respectful, but one that delievered what it promised.

To understand the outrage in our community to this, it’s crucial to understand the geographical context of this event. This is Portland — not Denver — and that matters. As mentioned in the article I wrote, Latinxs account for 9 percent of the city of Portland. By contrast, Denver has one of the highest Latinxs populations in the country at 31 percent.

Portland is a place that has treated communities of color with hostility. Oregon lead as one of the states that faced the highest uptick in hate-based incidents following the first ten days after Trump’s election. This is a city that continues to grapple with racist violence and harassment (and you can view the Oregonian’s report tracking here.) Our communities of color don’t need another event that gives people the opportunity to reduce people of color to stereotypes.

Using St. Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo as examples 0f cultural celebrations only further highlight my qualms with this event. These are drinking holidays, and like the Portland Taco Festival, do not represent either culture accurately.

The Portland Taco Festival also writes that they are “not a giant corporation with unlimited resources making a mountain of money,“ yet it is undeniable that they are still a nonprofit that has made a mountain of money. Considering that they state at least 3,000 attendees arrived at once, that places their gross profits at a minimum of $42,000 using a ticket price of $14 with fees. That estimate doesn’t include the many, many people who paid $69 for their tickets rather than $14 and isn’t taking into account the $10 parking fee that was charged despite promises for free parking.

While it’s wonderful that they claim to be interested in transparency now, they were not transparent in the months leading up to this event. Not about their identities, the funds benefiting a religious organization in Colorado, nor about their inability to keep up with the interest that led them to become “a victim of [their] own success.”

The victims in this situation are the thousands of Portlanders who were duped into an event that was culturally insensitive, backed your religious organization, and was not, in fact, a selection of the best tacos in all of Portland.

In the interest of transparency, I’d be interested in learning whether the organization is paying taxes on any of their earnings. It’s my understanding that nonprofits that sell anything in Colorado are tax-exempt unless they earn over $12,000 in a year — after which the organizations are expected to pay sales tax. It’s also interesting that Archetypos Center for Spiritual Healing (the nonprofit associated with Portland Taco Festival) is registered with the Nonprofit Association of Oregon and lists their city as Golden, a ghost town that is completely uninhabited.

Whether or not it was the intention of the Portland Taco Festival to perpetuate stereotypes or fall short of the expectations they set, at the end of the day they charged people substantial amounts of money for something that was not delivered. In desperation, attendees have turned to their banks to report the charges are fraudulent. However since the GiveBack ticket return policy states, “In the event that an event promoter or organizer cancels, delays, or significantly changes an event, Giveback will attempt to contact you to inform you of refund or exchange procedures. If the event is canceled and you purchased your ticket through givebacktickets.com, you will be automatically issued a refund to the payment method that was used to purchase the ticket(s),” it could be understood that all sales should be returned in full. Only time will tell if the organizers will make good given that they write, “The fact is there were some key issues that made the event fall short in a lot of peoples [sic] minds. For this we are deeply sorry. We are not making any excuses. We take full responsibility for everything.”

Looking for an alternative to the PDX Fyre Fest? Check out the Portland Mercado’s Taste of Latinoamérica on Saturday, September 9th.

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Written by

Feminist. Writer. Photographer. Chicana. Pop culture consumer. www.emillyprado.com

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