The Riverside County Fair and National Date Festival in Indio, California, is full of the usual fairground Americana – corn dogs, rides, face painting. But walk toward the heart of the hubbub, and the scene transforms. 

What looks like a minaret rising tall among the palms is part of an outdoor stage. It’s meant to conjure long-ago Baghdad, or what a Hollywood set designer in the 1940s envisioned as such – a fantasy of how the West imagined the East.

This fairground folklore is tied to the local date palms, which were introduced to the Coachella Valley starting around the turn of the 20th century from Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco. The arid Southwest matched the growing conditions in those countries.

Local boosters marketed the eastern Coachella Valley as “America’s Arabia,” says Sarah Seekatz, professor of history at San Joaquin Delta College. “It’s strange, because it is a cultural appropriation, but it’s based on Hollywood – and the locals are sort of not hiding that,” she says.

Mohammed Bwaneh, representing the Islamic Society of Palm Springs at a booth, said his family has enjoyed coming here for several years. ”It’s just imagination,” he says about the annual pageant. “It does not represent or give you the culture of the Middle East.”

This Indio, California, fair is pure Americana – corn dogs, rides, demolition derby, face painters who can turn a child’s cheeks into butterfly wings. For 10 days in February, the desert city fairground glows with candy-colored lights while the wind flicks American flags.

But walk toward the heart of the hubbub, past the smoke of sizzling turkey legs, and the scene transforms.

What looks like a minaret rising tall among the palms is part of an outdoor stage. It’s meant to conjure long-ago Baghdad – or what a Hollywood set designer in the 1940s envisioned as such. Here, Coachella Valley locals have long paid tribute to the origins of a local cash crop, the date, by performing pageants loosely tied to tales in “One Thousand and One Nights.” The half-hour version of “Aladdin” this year was based on the 1992 Disney film.

As a kid at the fair, “I’d come here every day and I forced my parents to come and watch. … It’d come to the point where I knew the dance numbers to all the songs,” said teenager Linda Ceniceros. Backstage before a show, she sat still as a helper affixed her Princess Jasmine headpiece.

Local nostalgia runs deep at the Riverside County Fair and National Date Festival, where guests once got in for free for wearing “Arabian Nights” attire. Such fairground folklore is tied to local date palms, which originated in the Middle East and North Africa. The full-blown event, which ended Sunday, returned after a pandemic hiatus with a new operator, who has scaled back some traditions while keeping more typical events found at a county fair. The traces of sequined fantasies that endure may reveal more about America than about the Arabian Peninsula.