Interestingly enough there are certain cultural rituals that don’t need a marketing department. Las Posadas is one of them. It’s a tradition held together by abuelas, borrowed guitars, paper lanterns, and the collective memory of people who have survived more displacement than most cities are willing to admit. You don’t corporatize a Posada; you just show up, eat a tamal, and try not to sing off-key.
Which is why the sponsorship banner hits with the force of accidental comedy.
Of all things to attach a polished logo to, Athens Services chose this, a reenactment of a couple turned away at every door, a story about refuge and scarcity and community stepping up when institutions don’t. And suddenly, the city’s waste contractor is the presenting sponsor, smiling in the program like a benevolent uncle who never paid rent but always wants credit for the lights staying on.
It’s not offensive.
It’s just… funny.
Funny in that quietly familiar Pomona way, where civic life is so intertwined with contractors, nonprofits, and political nostalgia that contradictions start looking normal. Everyone pretends not to see the seams, but there they are, bright as a corporate neon sign glowing above “Dios te salve María.”
Athens showing up as the presenting sponsor of a Posada feels less like community support and more like a vintage How to Privatize for Dummies book from the 20th century political era, an antiquated, outdated neoliberal austere approach that has consternated anyone paying attention to how power launders itself through culture. It’s the old playbook dusted off for a new audience, hoping no one notices the seams. And if Mary and Joseph tried to make this same journey today, they’d probably have to get past ICE before they ever reached an inn, which somehow makes a corporate sponsor feel less strange than it should.
That’s the thing, the irony isn’t subtle; it’s structural. A tradition born from displacement ends up efficiently underwritten by a company that built its reputation navigating municipal contracts, gatekeeping essential services, and increasing everyone’s trash bill. I’m sure they’d increase Jesus’s bill as well. If they lived in the community.
And maybe that’s the part worth sitting with, not the sponsorship, but what it reveals. Corporate goodwill once relied on these gestures: sponsor a youth program, donate to a school play, host a toy drive, stamp your name on a Posada. It was the public relations equivalent of placing a warm tortilla over a cold truth. But that era is thinning out. People read more carefully now. They ask who benefits. They ask who controls the story.
None of this makes Athens villainous. It just makes the sponsorship oddly nostalgic, like watching someone reenact a political strategy from the 1990s and assume everyone still falls for it. That’s the humor buried in the moment. The city changes, sort of, the community evolves, and the corporate playbook stays stuck in a time capsule.
And because of that, the result is a kind of civic uncanny valley. A cultural tradition rooted in scarcity and hospitality ends up looking like a polished corporate goodwill. A story about seeking shelter gets repurposed as a branding opportunity. A ritual that has survived colonization, migration, displacement, and assimilation somehow ends up as a line item on a quarterly outreach report. Why? Hasn’t Athens already monopolized the trash game in the city?
Meanwhile, the community keeps moving. Families show up. Kids step into their papel wings. Elders hum along to songs older than the city’s zoning map. In the actual celebration, none of this corporate choreography matters. And that’s why it stands out, it isn’t about the Posada at all. It’s about the environment the Posada is asked to exist in.
In a city like Pomona, power doesn’t always show up in ordinances or budgets. Sometimes it eases its way quietly into the footer of a flyer. Many times it shakes hands at the door of a cultural events it has nothing to do with, kind of like a book fair at a local urban farm (I really dislike the word “urban”, it’s so passé) hoping repetition will turn visibility into belonging. Or forgetting about the dramatic increase of the trash bill.
Maybe that’s the real story. Not the trash company. Not the Posada. But the long shadow of a political era that taught corporations to treat culture as an entry point, as long as they brought a check and a tagline.
A Posada doesn’t need a presenting sponsor.
But Pomona has learned to live with juxtapositions, old traditions and new optics, sacred stories and contractor logos, community memory and municipal economics. We laugh at it, analyze it, roll our eyes, and then keep showing up for the parts that matter.
Because we understand culture started underground and culture will always outlast the sponsors.
It always does.
Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and PPABF. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million for event photography.
