Expanded Tamale Festival to return for its 30th year in Indio at new location
The Indio International Tamale Festival will return for its 30th year Dec. 1-4 with an additional two nights of programming and a new location at Miles Avenue Park.
A lineup of over 40 musical acts will be featured at the festival, including Banda Machos, La Santa Cecilia, Together Pangea, Bostich + Fussible and The Egyptian Lover. The festival will also include Julio Morones, Imperial Valley musician Eddie Zuko, Coachella band Israel's Arcade, and Yuma, Arizona trio Conexion Divina.
As a two-day event, the festival has typically drawn over 100,000 attendees and hundreds of vendors.
Other attractions for this year include the World's Biggest Bounce House, a classic car show, mariachis, roller skating and The Chavela Throwdown with 20 luchador wrestlers throughout the weekend. New for 2022, the Mercadito de Noche holiday night market will have holiday lights, entertainment and attractions on Thursday and Friday evening.
Tamale Festival award winner, Juan Carlos Barajas of Outside The Masa, will return as the culinary director of the event, which features new, local and regional food vendors.
The festival was "reimagined" last year, in a new partnership with CUSP Agency and its founding producer, Gopi Sangha, who previously worked as a promoter at Goldenvoice, the company that puts on the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, also in Indio. The partnership with CUSP was approved by the City Council in July 2021 with a contract extending to 2023.
The Indio International Tamale Festival made a comeback in 2021 after being canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, the seven-block festival spanned from Smur Street and Requa Avenue to Indio Boulevard and Fargo Street, with most of the event concentrated between Indio Boulevard and Civic Center Mall.
In addition to traditional Mexican tamales, the 2021 event offered Salvadoran-style tamales and dessert tamales, including strawberry, pineapple and pumpkin spice.
More:Meet La Sonora Dinamita, headline band of the 2021 Indio International Tamale Festival
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Wait times for food in the past have taken as long as 45 minutes in earlier hours, but the tamales were "worth the wait," according to festivalgoers. Those opting not to wait had their choice of shorter lines for pupusas, tacos and other Mexican food, bacon-wrapped hot dogs, churros, ice cream, smoothies, chicken fingers and french fries, or macaroni and cheese.
*A previous version of this article mistakenly referred to Banda Machos as Banda Muchos.
Previous reporting by Desert Sun staff reporter Eliana Perez was included in this report.
Desert Sun reporter Brian Blueskye covers arts and entertainment. He can be reached at brian.blueskye@desertsun.com or on Twitter at @bblueskye.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Get ready to dig in: Tamale Festival to return Indio at new location
