Sandoval County plans first Pride celebration at Haynes Park

Sandoval County will mark a civic first at Haynes Park in Rio Rancho, where the county’s inaugural Pride celebration will bring vendors, food trucks, live entertainment and a Rainbow Roadrunner car show into the public weekend calendar. The event is set for Saturday, June 6, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and the Rio Rancho Pride site says it will be free and family-friendly.

The celebration is being presented as a community-funded effort, not a city-sponsored one. Organizers say private security and sign-language interpreters will be on site, a detail that reflects both the event’s scale and its attempt to make the gathering accessible to more residents. Planned attractions include face painting, a photo booth and a bouncy house, alongside performances by the New Mexico Women’s Chorus, the New Mexico Gay Men’s Chorus and Encantada, New Mexico’s Pride Band.

For organizers, the day represents more than a festival. Deb Dapson said the event grew from a grassroots push after a prior report noted that Rio Rancho had no Pride events, proclamations or celebrations of any kind. Ericka Van Eckhoutte, the organizing director, said she co-founded the Rio Rancho Pride Facebook group in 2022 after finding no visible LGBTQIA+ community presence in the area. The organizing team then used Discord and shared spreadsheets to coordinate logistics and outreach, a sign of how much of the work depended on volunteers rather than institutions.

That makes the June 6 event stand out in Sandoval County’s early-summer calendar. NM.news said the Pride celebration was expected to resemble Rio Rancho’s Juneteenth celebration in format, emphasizing vendors, food trucks and entertainment over formal speeches. Sandoval County’s economic development site also points to a Tourism Division, underscoring how the county’s visitor calendar now overlaps with community events that draw families, allies and local businesses to familiar public spaces.

In Rio Rancho, where civic visibility has long lagged behind population growth, the first Pride celebration at Haynes Park signals a broader shift in who gets to gather openly and what kinds of events now define the city’s public life.