Lansing’s Hispanic community will launch its annual heritage festivities Tuesday — hopefully more smoothly this year than in 2025.
The National Hispanic Heritage Month kickoff is set for noon in Lansing’s City Hall with food, speeches and entertainment
The kickoff was scheduled there last year as well. Then organizers found out that Charlie Kirk supporters had reserved the Capitol grounds across the street for a memorial on the same day. The right-wing political activist and media personality had been assassinated the week before in Utah. Kirk was an outspoken critic of immigration policies.
Concerned about violence, organizers canceled the kickoff.
“The lieutenant governor received bomb threats at his house,” said Lorenzo Lopez, one of the organizers, recalling the climate. “We were also including children in the celebration and didn’t want to put anyone in harm’s way.”
Lopez sees no concerns about holding next week’s kickoff, followed by a weekend festival and other events. “There hasn’t been any speculation about violence, so we are just moving forward.”
In addition to the free kickoff event Tuesday, MI ALMA — the Michigan Alliance of Latinos Moving toward Advancement — will host a program honoring community leaders and activists from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday at VFW 701 Hall, 123 N. Rosemary St., Lansing. Food will be provided.
The three-day 517 Hispanic Heritage Weekend in downtown Lansing kicks off Friday. It is free admission.
Lopez recommended keeping an eye on the website Cafécito Caliente for all the events.
This year’s theme is “reaching out to all groups and trying to improve our relationships in all the different communities that we have here in Lansing and across the Mid-Michigan area,” Lopez said.
To that end, kickoff-event speakers include Lansing NAACP President James McCurtis Jr. and Shirin Kambin, a political science associate professor at Jackson College and an Arab-American.
Other speakers include Clara Martinez, whose election to the Lansing City Council last November helped make that body half Hispanic.
“That is an important, important milestone,” said Lopez.
The 2020 U.S. Census found that Lansing has over 14,500 Hispanic residents, nearly 13% of the city’s population. Greater Lansing’s Hispanic population is about 36,000, which is about 7% of the metropolitan area.
Lopez said he has traced Hispanic residents in Michigan to the turn of the 20th century.
Agricultural work brought many here from Texas, where they had been working the land for centuries, said Elias Lopez, director of the Farmworker Student Services program at Michigan State University. Lopez will also speak at Tuesday’s kickoff.
Part of Lopez’ message will be to “highlight that food doesn't mysteriously just get to our table.”
“There is a lot of effort and laborious work that goes into harvesting many crops,” he said.
He will also point the “misconception that farm workers are all undocumented.
"We have many domestic farm workers that are U.S. citizens, residents of our country, and they're proud to do that work because they enjoy it.”
Food is an important part of the Hispanic culture, Lorenzo Lopez points out. A Lansing native, he conducts Mexican cooking classes.
The Pew Research Center found that 11% of restaurants in the United States serve Mexican cuisine as part of U.S food industry valued at as much as $50 billion a year.
“We often like to say something is American as apple pie,” Lopez said. “I like to say American as a taco.”