Antonio De Jesus Lopez arrives at the Fiesta Parade Floats warehouse in Irwindale.
pushing a red dolly carrying two large signs from his first Rose Parade float in 2020.
The warehouse around him was filled with the sound of whirring saws and the flashing sparks of welding equipment as his co-workers dismantled past years’ worth of iconic Rose Parade floats.
In his early days at the company, De Jesus Lopez said, he was excited to work and hone his art skills with designers, decorators, engineers and welders, many of whom were Latino and Latina. He said the camaraderie made it an enjoyable work environment.
“It was like you were working with your uncle or your grandmother,” De Jesus Lopez said. Now, he added, “it just feels depressing.”
Brittany Smith works on the Kaiser float for the Rose Parade at Fiesta Parade Floats on December 26, 2023 in Irwindale.
(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)
It’s been a tough two weeks for the 18 employees. Fiesta Parade FloatsOne of the major float builders for the Tournament of Roses Parade. After nearly 40 years, Fiesta is closing Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association. severed ties with the company, saying the firm no longer met the criteria established for float builders.
David Eads, chief executive officer of the Pasadena Tournament of Roses, said in a phone interview that the criteria included maintaining financial responsibility, insurance coverage, floral suppliers, a physical location and experienced staff to build and run the floats. He declined to say which criteria the Fiesta Parade floats failed to meet.
Eads said the ban “was not a decision that the association made quickly or easily.” He said this is the first time in recent years that a float builder has not been able to participate in the tournament.
Eads said the Rose Parade is grateful for the company’s “decades of service” and its award-winning work, which includes a float recognized by the Guinness World Record For the heaviest and longest single chassis parade float in 2017.
Tim Estes, owner of the Fiesta Parade Floats, said the association’s decision is a major blow.
“I feel terrible,” said Estes, 68. “I feel terrible for my employees. I feel bad for my customers who depended on us to make good floats … I feel like I let them all down.”
Estes said his company has been struggling financially since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, when they had to temporarily close, causing them to lose about $3.2 million. He said 85% of the company’s revenue comes from the floats built for the Rose Parade.
Victoria Boyd, 79, has set out with friends every Christmas night for the past 36 years from a small town in southern Illinois to decorate floats for the annual Rose Parade. Boyd works on a float at the Fiesta Parade floats on Dec. 26, 2023, in Irwindale.
(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)
He said the financial losses also came after he was in a motorcycle accident, fractured his skull, broke seven ribs and had to undergo multiple surgeries. He said he was hospitalized for nine weeks.
Estes said he was falling into debt after falling behind on rent and utilities for a warehouse he leased from the Tournament of Roses Association, which owns two warehouses in Irwindale and one in Azusa.
Things improved a little when the Rose Parade returned in 2022. But by then, Estes said, he had lost about half of his staff to retirement, relocations to other states and other jobs.
Estes said the number of floats the company was making fell by half, from about a dozen at first. Then inflation set in. Soon, he said, a sheet of plywood that once cost $16 rose to $66. The cost of everything from flowers to labor rose.
Estes said he always made sure his employees were paid first. He said he was on his way to paying off debt from unpaid rent and utility bills when he received a letter from the association saying his firm was no longer in good standing and could not build floats for the Rose Parade.
Estes said his company was working on floats for three clients, including one for the city of Torrance and another for One Legacy, a Southern California nonprofit that helps retrieve kidneys, livers and other organs from deceased donors for transplant.
For the past eight years, Eads said Fiesta Parade Floats has been one of three companies authorized to build floats for the Rose Parade. Eads said there was a time in the association’s history when it had up to 10 builders, but back then the floats were much smaller.
Eads is confident the final two float builders will be able to handle the additional workload and doesn’t think the departure of the float builder will have any impact on future parades.
Torrance city spokesman Jin Chun said it’s unfortunate that Fiesta Parade Floats is shutting down. He said the association is connecting the city and others with other float builders.
“We look forward to having another successful and award-winning float for the 2025 Pasadena Tournament of Roses Parade,” Chun said.
Estes said he is still reeling from the closure of his company, which he founded in 1988. He said building Rose Parade floats was his childhood dream. He said he helped decorate his first floats when he was 8 years old and played with floats with a friend.
“I always had fun crawling on them as a kid. I was fascinated by the way they were made,” he said.
He said although he struggled financially toward the end, he is very proud of his employees, saying they are a “great crew” who have contributed to the company’s long success. The warehouse now has about 18 full-time employees. Many employees have been with the company for more than 20 years.
He said that in the last three years, 17 out of 18 tableaux of the company received awards.
Estes said he informed employees of the association’s decision on June 21.
“God, it was murder,” he said. “Standing there and telling them what’s happening and that they’re going to be unemployed soon … it’s a horrible feeling.”
Estes said he hasn’t been able to sleep since then. He worries about the well-being of the workers and how he’ll clean the entire float-building warehouse.
He said that he has had to move house three times before and each time it cost lakhs of dollars and it took about three and a half months. He said that he has two weeks left to vacate the building.
He’s not the only one who suffers from sleep deprivation.
Marisela Arambula, 61, said she doesn’t get much rest at night since she learned the company was closing and she would be without a job.
“As you get older, it gets harder to find work,” he said.
Tim Desjean (left), Elsa Goodman and other volunteers at Fiesta Parade Floats working on the Torrance float for the Rose Parade.
(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)
On a recent Thursday afternoon, she was cutting away the mesh curtain on a flower sculpture, putting it into a plastic bag and placing the sculpture in a pile for the next company to use.
Arambula said she has been involved with the company since it has been in existence.
“My son was two years old when I started working. Now he is 40 years old,” he said with a smile.
Arambula said she began working in the float-building business in 1986, five years after coming to the U.S. from Mexico, where she made a living making paper flowers.
He said this skill helped him get a job at the company, where he learnt to put screen mesh on metal sculptures that would later be decorated with flowers, petals, spices and seeds. He said his time at the company gave him the opportunity to learn other skills.
“I love this job,” she said. “I don’t think I would have been able to work this long if I didn’t have this job.”
He said working for the company not only helped him raise his son and daughter, but it also allowed him to support his parents in Mexico.
When they visited a few years ago, she took them to see the Rose Parade. It was raining really hard, but her parents were enjoying the parade so much that they didn’t care. She said she remembers telling her mom which float she had helped build.
“I used to say: ‘Look, Mom, I worked on those flowers on that float,'” she recalled. “And my mom used to say: ‘Oh, it looks so nice dear.'”
She paused to pick up her glasses and wipe away tears.
“It’s all over now,” he said. “It’s sad.”
Ivan Villegas, 32, of Duarte, and Vicente Avila, 60, of Pasadena, work on the Donate Life “Lifting Each Other Up” float at the Fiesta Parade Floats on Dec. 29, 2022.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Nearby, turning a bird sculpture into scrap with a metal-cutting tool, Markus Politz, 60, said it was devastating to see artwork that involved the efforts of many workers like him destroyed.
“We always cut things up at the end of the year and put the best stuff aside, but now we won’t be able to see it again, which is very sad,” he said. “Everything you see here has been fabricated, painted and decorated by a welder to make it look like the concept.”
Pollitz said he felt an empty feeling when he heard Estes tell employees the company was closing.
“There wasn’t going to be a miracle,” Pollitz said. “There wasn’t going to be someone standing behind us and picking us up and taking us to the next step. Instead, we had to prepare to shut down.”
On Thursday afternoon, the warehouse reverberated with the sounds of saws, forklift engines and the crunch of metal crashing to the ground. Workers screamed as they heard a song by Vicente Fernandez playing on a ceiling-mounted speaker.
While workers were dismantling old floats and some were cleaning the floor, welding sparks began to fly.
Closing time was near when Estes left his office and walked around the 80,000-square-foot warehouse. He stopped occasionally to talk to workers and light his cigar.
“I wanted to keep doing this for the next four or five years and not retire,” he said. “But now, it looks like I don’t have a choice in the matter.”
