trawberry festivals are annual events where traditional agriculture and popular cultures have been converging in southern and central California cities that continue to celebrate and exploit their sweet berry legacies.
As of 2018, there were at least nine different annual strawberry festivals in the state, mostly in late April and May, peaking near the end of traditional harvests on Memorial Day Weekend. In a few of these cities (such as Garden Grove), developments and population growth consumed their strawberry fields long ago; but the festivals live on, as if to celebrate their transitions from rural to urban cultures. And so some of these festivals have evolved to highlight many of their modern cultural attractions for younger generations that may have never seen a strawberry growing on a plant.
Still, the list of strawberry festival locations remains impressive, as if to remind us that the state’s more than $2 billion dollar annual strawberry crop often ranks 6th or 7th in the long list of agricultural commodities within this leading agriculture state. Here’s the rough list in alphabetical order as of 2018: Arroyo Grande, Cal Poly Pomona, Garden Grove, Oxnard, Placer County BerryFest, Santa Maria, Stehly Farm Organics (in Valley Center), Vista, and Watsonville. You will also find the Strawberry Music Festival in the Sierra Nevada foothills during Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends, an event based on a culture of quality music jamming rather than jamming strawberries.
Here, we visit the annual strawberry festival in Vista, an old and new suburban-style community in northern San Diego County, inland form Oceanside and Carlsbad, with a population of more than 100,000. What do these images tell you about the people and cultures of Vista, how they celebrate their Memorial Day weekends, and how they might compare and contrast with the rest of California?
