Nancy Melendez was thrilled last year when a California commission approved the inclusion of her “grandma’s house” in the National Register of Historic Places.
The announcement came 12 years after she started the annual Riverside Tamale Festival to raise awareness of the building’s cultural significance.
“Through the support of the people at the festival and all of those who have come to know us over the years, we’re really thankful that todos juntos we got it done,” Melendez said in an interview with The Riverside Record.
Melendez, who is the president of the Spanish Town Heritage Foundation, and her team have spent the last few months preparing for this year’s 13th Annual Riverside Tamale Festival. The event, started in 2013, has become a staple in the community and serves to both celebrate and raise funds for the preservation of the Historic Trujillo Adobe, a house at the edge of the Riverside’s Northside neighborhood built before the city was founded.
The Trujillo Adobe was built by Melendez’s ancestors around 1862 on a Native American commercial route settlers used to slowly establish what is now Southern California. The area surrounding the home quickly became one of the region’s largest non-native settlements at the time.
Centuries later, only the shell of the Trujillo’s ancestral home remains.
“No one knew about the adobe, no one knew where it was…so we decided to do a tamale festival,” Melendez said. “We made a little bit of a profit that year, but the major goal was to tell people about the adobe.”
Since the first festival, the Trujillo Adobe has received several cultural and historic designations and was most recently awarded $10 million in state funding in 2022 for preservation.
At this year’s festival, the team plans to celebrate its newest national recognition with the theme “Todos Juntos,” which translates to “all together,” as a way to highlight the community effort it took to get the home on the national register. Melendez said she expects more than 5,000 people to take part in the festival and hopes to raise $50,000 to pay for the installation of educational panels at the site.
“We really see it as a learning center, not only for our history, but for the history of our area in the Inland Empire,” Melendez said. “In 2013 it was almost an ethereal dream, and now it’s really starting to come to pass.”
The Riverside Tamale Festival is set to take place April 18 between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. at White Park, 3936 Chestnut St. in Riverside.
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