This year's September celebrations seems to have brought a bumper crop of all manner of pageants, from the traditional Queen of the Bay to the Miss Belize Rural. Tonight we add another pageant to the list; it's called the Miss Banquitas Contest. But more than an ordinary contest? the organizer Gabriel Garcia says the pageant will focus on culture and not so much on beauty.
Gabriel Garcia – Organizer
“We are focusing mainly in presenting the different cultures in Belize under a theme: Enchanting Belize. Each girl has to present five different things in five different segments and each girl is working with a designer and the designer.”
Daisy Perez – contestant
"I wanted to educate the entire Belizean public about the different cultures living in our country. You can expect a lot of cultural talents. Different beliefs and a lot of things."
Q: what can they expect from you?
"They can expect the way in East Indian would represent it’s culture."
Martha Vasquez - Contestant
"I want to educate myself as well and I want to teach other people about culture. This is something new. This won’t be a beauty pageant, any beauty pageant, this will be a culture pageant. It’s something that we are learning about the culture so we can be able to teach other people about culture.”
“They can expect many things from me like, I’m representing the Mestizo culture so they’ll be expecting from me to probably represent the Mestizo culture."
Gabriel Garcia
"It is no longer any ordinary pageant. We are working on the different aspects of Belize and we try to sell Belize as it is in both cultural things and archaeological things as well.
“we are doing this for a fund raising for the Banquitas House of Culture institution that we have in Orange Walk. We are working towards burglar bars and air conditioning for the artifacts since at Orange Walk we want to establish different exhibitions from people from the different communities here that they want to display. We don’t accept some of them because we can’t show things that have too much value because they can break in and steal it.”
The pageant will take place on Saturday at 6:30 at the People's Stadium in Orange Walk town.