Small Mexican town fetes donkeys with May Day festival
The annual donkey fair in Otumba attracts up to 40,000 people who come to see the animals compete in costumes and race around a track with jockeys on their backs.
Tourists squeeze through the jammed fairgrounds wearing donkey ears and munching on classic fair cuisine, including the local version of burritos — a dish popular both north and south of the Mexican border that borrows the Spanish word for donkey.
Four families dressed their donkeys in likenesses of the U.S. presidential candidate who has vowed to build a border wall to keep out Mexican immigrants he’s called “rapists.”
Zeus Laredo, a physics teacher who attended the fair with friends, said he backed the eventual winner: a donkey dressed up as Papa Smurf who was attended by an entourage of people in Smurf costumes.
Otumba was an important donkey market during Spanish colonial times, standing at the crossroads of major roads leading to Mexico City, where the beasts pulled heavy loads and carried travelers.
The 12-year-old winning jockey, Wilfrido Lemus Corona, learned to ride his donkey, Veso, when his grandfather plopped him on top when he was just 6 to carry him across the fields, his mother Patricia Corona Espinosa said.