Marching bands, floats and
Burning Man performers will share space with lion dancers, áo dài
fashion shows and “KPop Demon Hunters” cosplayers at two
combination Lunar New Year and Mardi Gras celebrations this
month.

First, Elk Grove’s annual Lunar
New Year festival and parade will take place Feb. 14-15 at Elk
Grove Regional Park, this year billed as 2026 Lunar New Year Tết Festival & Parade
Introducing Mardi Gras and Asian Cajun Village. A few weeks later,
the City of Trees Parade and Mardi Gras
Festival will return
to downtown Sacramento Feb. 28, featuring Lunar New Year elements
along with performers from the city’s Burning Man
contingent.

Organizers say the fusion of
traditions from Louisiana, East and Southeast Asia, and Burning
Man’s Black Rock City is a perfect fit for the Capital Region’s
diversity. Here’s a preview of what you can expect at February’s
most colorful events in the capital.

Bringing ‘Asian Cajun’ to
Sacramento

Sue
Ramon, known as “Louisiana Sue,” has been
organizing Mardi Gras events for nearly 40 years. A native of the
historic city of Chalmette near New Orleans, Ramon has already
brought heritage parties from her hometown to Old Sacramento,
Yuba City, Rancho Cordova and the Delta city of Isleton.
Sometimes these bashes are Mardi Gras parades; other times
they’re crawdad cooking
festivals. In either
case, Ramon always finds fellow “NOLA” transplants to help make
the food and vibes authentic.

With so many parties under her
belt, Ramon is particularly excited to be working on a new
endeavor around Sacramento-area Mardi Gras. It was set in motion
when two organizations, the Vietnamese American Community of
Sacramento and the Community Partners Advocate of Little Saigon,
decided that Elk Grove’s annual Tết observances should have some
Crescent City ingredients thrown in. VACOS and CPALS recruited
Ramon and veteran publicist and radio personality Jimmy T. Chong
to help develop the idea.

Attendees enjoy Mardi Gras festivities in Sacramento. (Courtesy
photo)

The combination makes sense, says
Ramon. “I will say, in Louisiana, since we’re already such a
gumbo of people, we tend to fuse fast whenever a new community
moves in,” Ramon says. “Before we had the Vietnamese influence,
we had the French Quarter, we had the German Quarter, we had the
Italian Quarter. So they became part of an ongoing story. What
we’re trying to do with this new event is blend all the cooking
and musical styles together and have a really great time. The
‘Asian Cajun’ thing was just a natural fit.”

She adds, “This is also part of
my broader belief that Sacramento Mardi Gras should be its own
kind of Mardi Gras.”

The Lunar New Year Tết Festival
in Elk Grove will feature a “Mardi Gras and Asian Cajun Village”
hosting Southern-inspired food trucks like Rowe’s Low & Slow
BBQ, Lizetta’s Southern Soul Food
and Savory Dave’s Barbecue
alongside Hmong food truck

Wonton Crunchies,
Brazilian-Chinese Fusion Bites and Filipino Baboy Boys.

“We’ve also done a number of
events with Louisiana Sue, and we just like to be part of her
team,” says Kenneth Rowe II, the pit master behind Low & Slow
BBQ.

Kenneth Rowe II, the pit master behind Low & Slow BBQ, says he’s
looking forward to being part of combined Lunar New Year and
Mardi Gras events this year. (Courtesy photo)

Hip-hop and karaoke at
Lunar New Year

Known around Sacramento as “the
Wok Star,” Jimmy T. Chong previously emceed the Vietnamese Lunar
Flower Festival in Sacramento and the Chinese New Year Parade and
Festival in Stockton.

Chong has been helping Ramon and
the organizers line up a mix of impressive musical performers for
the Lunar New Year Tết Festival & Parade in Elk Grove, including
New Orleans-influenced performers like the Big Chiefs, the Mark
St. Mary Louisiana Blues & Zydeco Band and the Fortune Panthers
Marching Band.

The local hip-hop artist Aaron Le will headline this year’s Lunar
New Year Tết Festival. (Courtesy photo)

The Lunar
New Year Tết Festival’s headliner is Aaron Le, a young, rising
hip hop artist from Sacramento. “Aaron Le is really local and has
been getting a lot of play on Instagram,” Chong says.

Chong, who also hosts karaoke at
different venues across the region with City Wide Karaoke, will
be personally handling the Lunar New Year Tết Festival’s public
karaoke at the outside pavilion between 3:30 and 5:30 p.m. Feb.
14 before acting as master emcee for the ticketed Valentine’s Day
Karaoke Experience at 7 p.m.

“Karaoke brings people together,”
Chong says. “And that’s the bigger idea with this festival in
general. It’s going to offer a really different experience with
East meets West; and I don’t know of anyone who’s done this
particular kind of event — and especially on this level.”

‘Burner’ lights at Mardi
Gras

It’s not hard for Wes Samms,
founder of the City of Trees Parade and Mardi Gras Festival, to
explain why so many Sacramento-area Burning Man fanatics love
being involved in an event that’s based on New Orleans
traditions.

“I think the one area of overlap
between Burning Man and Mardi Gras is radical self-expression,”
said Samms, who’s had his own burner experiences in the Black
Rock Desert. “You know, the costumes, and the idea of being
completely funky and free, that’s something you find both at
Burning Man and in New Orleans.”

Widely believed to be the biggest
Mardi Gras parade in California, the City of Trees procession
will mark its fifth outing with colorful floats and more than
1,300 performers. Some of its eye-catching spectacles rolling
through Sacramento will be art installations that were previously
showcased at Burning Man.

A float passes through Old Sacramento at the 2025 City of Trees
Mardi Gras parade. (Courtesy photo)

Starting at 3 p.m., the parade
route goes from the west steps of the state Capitol to the city’s
waterfront, passing by two blocks that are sectioned-off festival
grounds on Capitol Mall. Entrance to that festival quarter
is ticketed and includes seating, food trucks, adult
beverages and bathrooms. Oak Park Brewing is also making a
special Mardi Gras beer that will be poured inside the festival
area.

Anyone can catch the parade for
free along its designated route. Later, the festival will host an
electric dance party between 7 and 9 p.m., which will be
augmented by LED-lit floats, glowing art pieces and fire
spinners.

“We have brand new floats that
have never been seen before in our parade this year, especially
the Giving Tree, which is a very large art car in the shape of an
anthropomorphic tree,” Samms explained. “We’re also going to see
the Hundreds Unit, which is a dance troupe led by our Mardi Gras
Queen from 2023. And there will be a return of some of our
favorites, like the Teng Fei Lion Dance of Sacramento, the UC
Davis Marching Band and a number of wonderful surprises.”

“Our parade is about celebrating
Sacramento and Northern California culture, and all of the
different spectacular aspects of our region’s diversity,” Samms
adds. “You’ll find those things completely centered in Sacramento
at this parade.”

History Sidebar: A Hybrid Tradition

Mardi Gras, French for Fat
Tuesday, has always been a hybridized tradition in New Orleans.
Simmering pots of gumbo — a dish that blends French, African,
Spanish and Native American influences — became a standing
metaphor for the menagerie of backstories that gives Mardi Gras
season such profound energy, not to mention shorthand for why
New Orleans itself is so unique on the American
landscape.

Mardi Gras 1878 at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans as
depicted in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. (Public domain
via Wikimedia Commons)

Beginning in the early 1700s,
Mardi Gras was originally a Catholic celebration started by
French settlers, with weeks of masked galas, musical
processions and sumptuous eating binges prior to Lent. Other
Catholic immigrants, including Spanish, Irish, Italian and
German families, added their own traditions through the 18th
and 19th centuries.

Like the rest of the South,
early Mardi Gras celebrations were segregated, but New Orleans’
Black and Afro-Caribbean communities took part from the
beginning (with records suggesting
Black and mixed-race people joined white-only festivities while masked
or otherwise disguised). By the 1900s they were forming their
own krewes, groups that stage balls and organize or take part
in parades. The result is the
Mardi Gras
Indian tradition, a
syncretized culture drawing from Native American, West African
and Caribbean elements.

Mardi Gras Indians at New Orleans Jazz Fest 2014. (Photo by
kowarski via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Given that syncretic trend,
it’s not surprising that Vietnam War refugees who began moving
to the city in 1975 became part of its creative life force.
Today, some of the top
King Cake bakers
in New Orleans are Vietnamese
Americans, while an exciting culinary collision of Vietnamese
techniques and Gulf Coast spices has come to be known as the
“Asian Cajun” phenomenon.

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