One of the largest autumn Latino street festivals in the Twin Cities will take place Saturday on St. Paul’s East Side.

The annual Fiesta Latina, hosted by Comunidades Latinas Unidas en Servicio (CLUES), is the weekend ahead of Mexican Independence Day — a holiday as important to many U.S. Latino communities as Cinco de Mayo.

The free festival at 797 E. Seventh St. will feature food vendors, live performances, arts and crafts and free health checks, said Carla Manzoni, director of arts and cultural engagement at CLUES.

CLUES expects about 5,000 to attend this year’s festival, she said.

“The sheer numbers” of those attending the festival each year show the size and diversity of Minnesota’s growing Latino community, she said. 

All-women salsa group Las Guaracheras, based in Colombia, will perform free at Fiesta Latina ahead of their Saturday night show at the Cedar Cultural Center. 

Other performers include Monserrat Santana, the Twin Cities Latin Band, René Thompson, Baila Venezuela and Kuyayki Peru.

El Burrito Mercado, Clandestinos Venezuelan Food, Abogados Café, Chowé Empanadas and other vendors will serve up food from Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia and other Latin American countries.

This will be the second year in a row at Fiesta Latina for Aris Sweets owner Brenda Cubias.

Cubias makes chamoy-covered gummy candies, fresh fruit water and fruit cups from her Edina home. Her biggest seller is the tamarind-based chamoy sauce she uses in her products.

She said last year’s festival led to a boom in business. “We don’t really go to sell. We go to get known,” she said.

Cubias said her clientele is in large part Latino, but just as big of a portion of it comes from the Asian community, and she said the diverse audience at Fiesta Latina has helped her reach a wider customer base.

One new event at this year’s Fiesta Latina is the “Representing Latinidad” art exhibit in the CLUES Latino Art Gallery.

Saturday’s festival will include guided tours of the exhibit led by Mikhayl Dominguez, a featured artist. They will lead four guided tours for attendees with many of the other artists present as well.

CLUES worked with a group of 19 Latino artists with Minnesota ties to organize the exhibit, Manzoni said.

“We are a nuanced culture with many cultures inside our larger Latina culture. So I think that diversifying the pool of artists is actually the way that we can really get to this nuanced way of depicting our community,” Manzoni said.

CLUES surveyed the applicants and the results showed 71% considered themselves to be “emerging artists” and 60% identified as self-taught.

Manzoni said CLUES wanted to be able to provide the artists with a platform to showcase themselves and their cultural identity.

“It’s a way to see [where we are] today, but actually, when you also invite younger artists, you are also able to start imagining a future that is different, that is more inclusive, or where we have more opportunities to be ourselves here in Minnesota,” Manzoni said.

Daniel Acevedo, a Minnesotan by birth raised in Monterey, Mexico, who is finishing up his last year at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, is one of the featured artists.

Acevedo said when he came to Minnesota four years ago it was with the intention of following the American dream of a comfortable life, but his passion for photography led him back to school instead.

His piece is a photo book featuring a single model walking through downtown Minneapolis and is inspired by a poem reflecting the elements of water, air, earth and fire. As you flip through the book the model moves through downtown seeing her reflection in different buildings imagining herself in a different place, according to Acevedo.

“It feels really shocking saying, like, 5,000 people. Oh, my God, this is really happening. I just came here and I wasn’t expecting to see my art installed [in the gallery],” Acevedo said.

The “Representing Latinidad” exhibit will run through November 18.