Museum's Cinco de Mayo celebration is Saturday

While Cinco de Mayo may be on Sunday this year, The Mount Airy Museum of Regional History will be celebrating the holiday on Saturday, from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m.

The event, which will feature a number of food and craft vendors — all featuring Mexican goodies — activities for kids, music, and a live performance by the museum’s Ballet Folklorico del Museo de Mount Airy, a group that performs traditional Mexican dance numbers while dressed in traditional Mexican performance clothing.

Most of the activities will take place in the museum courtyard, although the dance performance, slated to begin at 12:30 p.m., will be in the streets just outside the courtyard. There, the annual Craft Beer and Wine Budbreak Festival will be going on, with the dancers among them entertaining the crowd.

Oliva Jessup, membership and marketing director at the museum, said this is the third year the museum has hosted the event.

“We’ve had a lot of growth with attendance, and with vendors, dancers,” she said, adding last year was a bigger event than the first year, and 2024 promises to be even larger.

The museum and its leaders have made concerted efforts in recent years to reach out to the county’s Hispanic population, including their history and culture as part of the local history and culture. One of the organization’s biggest events is the annual Day of the Dead celebration in the autumn.

“The Cinco de Mayo celebration is pretty low key,” compared to that fall event, Jessup said. The museum is able to take advantage of the fact that Main Street in that area is already blocked off because of Budbreak.

While Budbreak does have an admission charge, museum officials point out that their event is free for anyone coming into downtown just to take part in the Cinco de Mayo celebration.

Anyone with questions should contact The Mount Airy Museum of Regional History at mamrh@northcarolinamuseum.org or call 3336-786-4478.