City’s Mexican Independence Event Canceled : Festival: Santa Ana’s annual crowd-pleasing celebration couldn’t attract enough sponsors to make it a success this Sept. 16, organizers say.

SANTA ANA —  Organizers on Friday abruptly canceled the city’s annual Mexican Independence Day celebration, saying they could not secure the corporate sponsors needed to fund the popular parade and festival.

The announcement stunned fans of the event, which attracted 250,000 people to downtown Santa Ana last year and was telecast to millions on Spanish-language television.

Officials from the Downtown Santa Ana Business Assn., which has sponsored the celebration for a decade, said some longtime corporate sponsors decided to sever their association with the event after violence broke out at a Cinco de Mayo festival in Los Angeles earlier this year.

About 18 people suffered mostly minor injuries in that May 1 event when youths began throwing rocks and bottles.

“We had trouble finding sponsors,” said Julie Nungaray, who works at the business association. She said they weren’t eager to sponsor the event, as they had been “in past years.”

Nungaray said some sponsors were concerned that problems might break out at the festival, even though the event has never attracted trouble.

“We’ve never had violence here on any level,” said business association member Michael Macres, who owns Macres Florists on Broadway. “We have a good crowd.”

The Los Angeles Cinco de Mayo disturbances forced the cancellation in May of the Orange County Mariachi Festival. Organizers said some corporate sponsors pulled their support after the Los Angeles violence.

“It’s sad to see this happen,” said Becky Esparza, a member of the county Human Relations Commission, who has attended several festivals commemorating Mexico’s Independence Day each year on Sept. 16. “It’s always been very peaceful, with lots of children and families. . . . It gives people a chance to enjoy each others’ cultures.”

The cost of producing the Santa Ana festival is at least $100,000, Macres said. About $75,000 of that usually comes from corporate sponsors. The remainder is generated from booth rentals and parking, carnival and soda revenue.

Last year’s event had more than 42 corporate sponsors, including R.J. Reynolds, Pepsi and Kimberly Clark. Business association officials did not disclose which sponsors declined to be involved in the 1994 event.

“It seemed like nobody wanted to spend any money this time,” said Macres, noting that some corporations used all their sponsorship funds on the World Cup.

The business association has spent the last few months searching for ways to save the Sept. 16 festival, which has suffered a series of setbacks.

In May, the promoter who had successfully produced the last two festivals decided to pull out and move his business out of state, according to an association statement released Friday.

The association’s board of directors attempted to produce the event with the help of local Spanish-language media specialists. But finding sponsors proved difficult. By July, only about a fourth of last year’s sponsors had expressed an interest in the 1994 festival.

So the board this week was faced with the choice of either producing a dramatically scaled-down festival or canceling it. They decided to give the festival a “one-year hiatus” and bring it back in 1995, saidRoger Kooi, administrative director of the association, in a statement released Friday to groups and businesses that had planned to be involved.

Had the event been presented this year, “it would have been too small--it wouldn’t have been like before,” Macres said. “We’ll take a year off and hit it hard next year.”

Besides the lack of corporate sponsors, festival organizers also found booth preregistrations to be significantly down from last year.