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Across the United States, there are literally thousands of ethnic and community festivals similar to the two described previously. They are festivals that celebrate or commemorate the heritage of the early settlers of a particular town, or the ancestry of the majority of current residents. Some are massive, like St. Patrick’s Day in New York; some are small, such as Belgian Days in Ghent, Minnesota. But the size of the festival is less important for these communities than their determination to hold onto, celebrate, and profit from a specific version of ethnic identity—however vague and inaccurate—even though the contemporary organizers may be separated by generations from the original settlers of a particular community. In 1987Angus Gillespie reported that there were over three thousand festivals organized across the United States in the late 1980s, many of them celebrating a community’s ethnic background (152–161). Lizette Graden says the 1997 Swedish-American Handbook identifies several hundred “Swedish” events alone (3). A vast number of these events, Swedish and otherwise, are staged in the Upper Midwest: A map in Steven Hoelscher’s Heritage on Stage, using data compiled in 1991, records almost 300 ethnically themed festivals in the Upper Midwest/Great Lakes regions (North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio 15).
Despite the prevalence of such events, there has been surprisingly little scholarly interest in them, especially those celebrating European ethnicities, although a handful of scholars in several fields have addressed these ethnic pride festivals on a limited scale. In order to broaden the discussion of this type of event, this study examines five community festivals that celebrate Dutch heritage in the United States in order to determine what these festivals actually mean and do, both in the past and in the present. In approaching the sociocultural significance of these festivals, this study specifically examines the performative elements of these festivals, such as parades, folk dances, costumes, pageants, historical reenactments, and demonstrations.
I am focusing on Dutch festivals for two reasons. First, they represent a limited sample, as there are only about twenty-five of them, as opposed to the hundreds of German, Irish, or Scandinavian festivals.