Jellyfish on Palace Avenue: A Hundred Years of the Pet Parade

The Desfile de los Niños came past our door on the Saturday morning of Fiestas, as it has for a century.

Fiestas de Santa Fe reached its three hundred and fourteenth year this September. Most of it happens on and around the Plaza, which is to say most of it happens within a block of our door, and the event we wait for is the smallest one on the calendar.

The Desfile de los Niños, the Pet Parade, stepped off at nine o’clock on the morning of Saturday, September 12. By half past it had reached the portal of the Palace of the Governors, moving west, in the hard clean light Santa Fe only gets in September, under a sky with nothing at all in it.

A run of children had come as jellyfish. Each one carried a translucent umbrella with streamers cut and trailing from the rim in pink, blue, lilac, and green, held high enough that the group did not so much walk as drift. One child went in a turquoise hood. Just ahead of them, a small white dog in a turquoise costume of its own trotted along at the pace of a dog with an appointment.

Someone cut those streamers and fixed them to the ribs of the umbrellas. Entries have to be in line by 8:15 to be judged, so somebody in that household was awake early with a pair of scissors.

Behind the jellyfish came a contingent from Acequia Madre Elementary under a hand-lettered yellow banner, and more dogs on leashes, and one small dog carried the entire distance against a child’s chest, which is a perfectly legitimate way to participate. Nobody was performing. Children were walking their animals down a street in front of neighbors who had come out to watch them do it.

The parade is organized by Santa Fe Fiesta, Inc., and it is designated, formally and firmly, an event for children. Organizers trace it to a children’s animal show held during Santa Fe’s 1926 El Pasatiempo celebration, which makes this year the hundredth. Entries line up on East Alameda, at the former New Mexico School for the Arts. There are prizes, and one of the categories is best message to other children, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the judging goes.

The setting is not arranged for any of this, and that is part of why it works. The shields ranged along the portal carry names that run back through four centuries of the city’s record: the Order of St. Francis, Hurtado, De Vargas, Sanchez, Baca, and Holmes. Cross of Burgundy flags hang out from the vigas on poles, yellow with their red ragged saltires. The Native American Artisans Program sign stands at the west end, where it stands every other day of the year. All of it held perfectly still while a child under a jellyfish umbrella went by on the brick.

Our own door is at 54½ Lincoln Avenue, off the northwest corner, which means the parade comes to us rather than the other way around. We have watched Fiestas from this block for a long time. The processions, the ceremonies, and the burning are the parts that get written about, and they should be. The Pet Parade competes with none of it. It is a hundred years of small children walking a short way with animals they love, and there is nothing about it that anyone should try to improve.

The Desfile de los Niños is held on the Saturday morning of Fiestas de Santa Fe. Lineup and registration details are published each year by Santa Fe Fiesta, Inc.

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Continue exploring

• Above Fort Marcy, on the 102nd burning of Zozobra, watched from a hillside above the field.
• The Plaza, 1885, the same ground in a photograph from the 1880s.
• A Free Summer on the Plaza, on the free summer concerts and outdoor films held in public spaces around the city.
• The Architecture of Daily Life, on portals, vigas, and what the parts of a Santa Fe building are actually for.
• Santa Fe Indian Market, the other August and September fixture that fills the same few blocks.
• See and Do, in Discover, our index of what to see and do in and around the city.
• The Dispatch, the rest of the series.