Volunteers prepare take-out meals in the basement of San Juan Bautista Catholic Church in Lancaster.
Alanna Elder / WITF
Lancaster Hispanic festival adapts to coronavirus precautions
The COVID-19 pandemic has upended community traditions across the region. A church in Lancaster has tried to make its annual Hispanic festival pandemic-proof this year.
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Alanna Elder/WITF
Alanna Elder / WITF
Volunteers prepare take-out meals in the basement of San Juan Bautista Catholic Church in Lancaster.
(Lancaster) — Luiz Gimenez is standing over a hot stove outside San Juan Bautista Catholic Church in Lancaster.
He´s cooking pinchos – pork marinated in spices, skewered, and grilled – for $5 each. It´s an iconic food across Puerto Rico, prolific in tourist areas and on beaches.
“Tourists like them a lot,” he said.
About six feet from the pinchos zone, Neida Gonzalez is flipping golden orbs of dough in a sizzling pool of oil.
“Cod fritters,” she said. “It’s made from fish – dried fish.”
Gimenez and Gonzalez have been volunteering at San Juan Bautista´s annual Hispanic festival since it began in 1983. Gonzalez, now 60, started when she was in her 30s.
Nelsa Lopez learned how to make funnel cakes when her children were young. Now, she makes them every year for her church’s Hispanic festival in Lancaster, with help from her mother (left). This year, she is the only vendor selling dessert. (Alanna Elder/WITF)
“When my mom did it, I helped. And then,” she remembers, “the old ladies – some are still alive, but some have died, that started this festival. Juanita’s been – whew! – since the church open.”
Juanita Lopez is working in the church’s basement kitchen. She oversees all the Puerto Rican cooking at the festival. This year, the church has scaled way back to prevent the spread of COVID-19 – the church is serving Puerto Rican cuisine all week and Dominican and Mexican over the weekend.
“We chose the foods that are easiest to make, and that the public likes the most,” she said.
Despite the simpler menus, volunteers have been preparing for weeks. Foods like alcapurrias, green banana fritters stuffed with meat, are the most time-consuming. By Wednesday night, they had run out, and the team was working on another batch.
“Sometimes we don’t have all the food because like with this online format, we don’t know how many people are going to place orders,” she said.
This summer, it seemed like the annual festival may not happen. For the San Juan Bautista community, the event is a treasured celebration. It is also a fundraiser that organizers say has attracted as many as 10,000 guests. Last year’s saw the biggest turnout yet.
“But thanks to Father Wolf making the decision to have the festival, here we all are,” she said.
“I think doing this successfully will be real boost to people’s morale. We can still do some of the things we enjoy, even if we have to do it differently,” Allan Wolfe, the church’s pastor, said. To him, this year’s event is unrecognizable.
In the past, “The crowds build and build up until Saturday night when you can’t really move around. But of course, we have to make it safe, so we are doing the takeout version,” he said.
He stands in the mostly empty parking lot, where other volunteers are directing traffic as people come to order food. They send those with online orders across the street. Everyone working indoors has their temperature taken. And the usual live music? Live-streamed, on Friday and Saturday night only.
Allan Wolfe, pastor of San Juan Bautista Catholic Church in Lancaster, says the church may continue to use what it has learned during the pandemic, such as streaming mass and offering take-out food at its annual festival. (Alanna Elder/WITF)
To make social distancing possible, the church added two extra days to the event and pared down the daily menu. That means there is a much narrower variety of Latin American food. But in the parking lot, flags are planted representing countries including Nicaragua, Mexico, and Colombia.
“The reason they’re up, it may seem like it’s because of the festival,” Wolfe said. “The real reason is we’ve been having to celebrate mass outside here in the parking lot because our church is so small. So, it spaces people out so the cars aren’t side-by-side.”
San Juan Bautista was an earlier name Spanish conquistadors placed on the island of Puerto Rico. Wolfe says about half the congregation is Puerto Rican, but the parish also has ties to 14 different Latin American countries. He is not Latino but speaks Spanish.
“This parish is the only ethnic parish in the (Roman Catholic Diocese of Lancaster),” he said. “It means we’re dedicated to serving a particular ethnic group. Most parishes have a territory. Our territory is the entire county.”
The church runs a food bank and preschool. Wolfe said it may soon offer space for students to do their online classwork. Proceeds from the festival go toward the church’s general budget.
The event has grown a lot in recent years. A billboard advertises the festival in reds and yellows off Route 230 from Harrisburg.
But this years’ changes are more drastic. On Monday, several volunteers said the orders that came in were “overwhelming”. They expected another big rush over the weekend.
WITF’s Alanna Elder is part of the “Report for America” program — a national service effort that places journalists in newsrooms across the country to report on under-covered topics and communities.
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