Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - Easter cascarones a smashing success

Marketplace \| Services \| Contact Us \| Community \| Arts & Entertainment \| Local Guides

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Sunday, April 23, 2000

Easter cascarones a smashing success
Popularity of colored, confetti-filled eggs crossing ethnic lines
By Jeremy Schwartz
Caller-Times

John Kennedy/Caller-Times

Irma Rodriguez, 10, paints a cascarone at the display stand outside her family's home on Yale Street. The popularity of these Easter toys reaches across ethnicities.

It's Good Friday and it's so crowded at Tex-Mex Curios on Staples Street that a security guard has to wait for customers to clear the store before letting more in.
   A seemingly endless stream of people leave, clutching clear plastic bags filled with colorful eggs.
   It's Easter season and for many people, that means one thing: cascarones.
   "It's just a tradition," said Jo Ann Gonzales after buying a bag of six dozen cascarones.
   "It wouldn't be an Easter without them. It wouldn't be the same."
   For Gonzales' daughter Casandra, 8, the allure of cascarones is simple.
   "I like to smash them on people's heads," she said.
   But that tradition has changed over the years.
   Once almost exclusively a homespun tradition, store-bought cascarones - eggshells with filled with confetti and dyed in a rainbow of colors - are gaining in popularity around South Texas, many sellers said.
   Frank Fregoso, manager of Tex-Mex Curios, said he sold more than 10,000 cascarones in the days leading up to Easter.
   Many of his customers, he said, are first time cascarone buyers.
   Long a tradition in Mexico and among Mexican-American families, the colored eggshells are being discovered by more and more people, Fregoso said. "The core of our customers is still Hispanic," he said. "But there are more Anglo and black (customers). Basically, it's a neat tradition to do. It's become more mainstream in the last five years."
   Once made and sold only in people's homes, cascarones imported from Mexico can now be found on the Internet and by the dozens at H-E-B, which began selling them last year, said Cheryl Reynolds, drug director of the H-E-B on Staples Street and South Padre Island Drive.
   "They have become more and more popular," Reynolds said. "I think it's just because they're fun."
   While the thrill of sneaking up on someone and breaking a cascarone on their head may appeal most to kids, adults still get into the spirit.
   Vivian Cantu has celebrated Easter for the past 44 years at her family ranch near Benavides, where she says cascarones are an integral part of the Easter experience. This year, Vivian, her husband Rick, and their 10-year-old son Grant are bringing 42 dozen cascarones to the ranch for some Easter warfare.
   "You feel kind of cheesy when you take them out of the kids' stash," Rick Cantu said. "That (42 dozen) will barely be enough to survive and be competitive."
   Sometimes cascarones can get downright nasty. Gonzales, six dozen cascarones in hand, said her daughter puts flour inside her cascarones. "It makes it messier," she said. Others have been known to fill their cascarones with glitter, syrup and beer.
   Cantu's cousin, Michele Walters of Austin, is looking forward to her first cascarone experience at the ranch. "We don't do this in Austin," she said. "It should be a blast."
   The Cantus said they usually make their own cascarones, but they decided to try out the cascarones at Tex-Mex curios this year.
   Fregoso said an entire industry has sprung up around importing cascarones from Mexican border towns.
   Many of the manufacturers are in commercial bakeries, which use a lot of eggs and save the shells.
   The cascarones are then taken to a local distributor in Mexico who funnels them to a wholesaler. Importers truck crates of cascarones across the border where they eventually end up in stores like Tex-Mex Curios.
   Fregoso said that as the price of commercial cascarones has gone down (his sell for 89 cents a dozen) now that people have been able to buy them in bulk.
   "If the demand is there, supply will be there too," he said.
   But the rise of commercialized cascarones has not spelled the end of homemade cascarone making. Signs announcing the sale of brilliantly painted cascarones continue to pop up at a number of houses across the city in the days and weeks preceding Easter.
   Elida Recio has taught her children and her 11 grandchildren how to make cascarones. She said business has been brisk at her Yale Street home.
   "My mom taught me how to make them. We used to paint them with crayons," Recio said. "It's just a fun thing to do."
   Recio said she has seen the appeal of cascarones cross over ethnic lines, but not without some funny moments.
   An Anglo friend of hers once saw people breaking cascarones and decided he wanted to play too. "He boiled an egg and broke it on his wife's head," she said. "It was his first time in Texas and he didn't know what to do."
   The origin of cascarones is nebulous, but according the Institute of Texan Cultures Library in San Antonio, the wife of Emperor Maximilian brought the practice to Mexico with her from Europe in the 1860's.
   Monica Meza Theopistos, of the Cascaron Crazy company in San Antonio, said that before that, the explorer Marco Polo brought cascarones from China, where they were filled with perfumed talcum powder and used as gifts.
   Some even attribute a mystical religious symbolism to the colored eggs. According to the Institute of Texan Cultures, some think the eggshell represents Christ's empty tomb, and the confetti represents the joy and celebration of his resurrection.
   But no matter how cascarones came to South Texas, almost everybody agrees on one thing. "It's a tradition on Easter Sunday," Recio said. "After the egg hunt, the family gets together and says 'Cascarones Time!'"

| Talk about this story | Next Story | Home |

[ Printer-friendly version ]
[ Subscribe to newspaper ]

SEND THIS PAGE TO A FRIEND

[an error occurred while processing this directive]