US:It was as if Mardi Gras had come a few days early to east Los Angeles as thousands of people in a gymnasium at Cal State University clapped and sang along to a mariachi band, many of them wearing the red T-shirts of Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers of America (UFW).
They came to hear Hillary Clinton make her final pitch before tomorrow's Super Tuesday primaries, in which California is the biggest prize for both parties. Clinton has seen her lead in the state vanish in recent days and she is depending on a big turnout of Latino voters, who have been among her most reliable supporters in the primary season so far.
East LA is almost 90 per cent Hispanic, a fact reflected at Cal State as one speaker after another addressed the crowd in a mixture of Spanish and English and the huge cheer that greeted UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta as she spoke about Super Tuesday.
"You know what else it is - Super Latino Tuesday - because the Latino vote and the women's vote and people who care about labour unions, all of us, we're going to elect the next president of the United States of America," Ms Huerta said.
This being LA, the stars came out for Hillary Clinton too, among them Sally Field and West Wing actor Bradley Whitfield and Ugly Betty star America Ferrera. The message could not have been less glitzy, however, as Mrs Clinton and her supporters sought to contrast her sober, workmanlike approach to power with Barack Obama's soaring rhetoric about hope.
"I didn't just learn about hope yesterday. I've had hope all my life," said Congresswoman Maxine Waters. "It's not more hope we need. We need help."
Mrs Clinton has little of Mr Obama's power to reach audiences emotionally in campaign speeches and her delivery is often didactic and a little leaden. As she ran methodically through her list of policy commitments, however, she sought to make a virtue of her lack of panache, telling her audience that what they were seeing is exactly what they'll get if she becomes president.
"There will be no guesswork. I'm not asking you to take a leap of faith. I'm asking you to hire me to do the hardest job in the world," she said.
It was an approach that worked with Michelle Riggan, an 18-year-old student who said that most of her friends were backing Mr Obama. "It's because he's more charismatic. He's such a good speaker and that's what they like but I was, like, you've got to be more about what he's actually saying than, like, how he's saying it. I think Hillary Clinton's really detailed about what she'll do," she said.
A few miles away from the Clinton rally, in the one-storey office building that is Barack Obama's East LA headquarters, 22-year-old Sal Camarena was manning a phone bank, working his way through a list of voters. "A lot of people aren't answering," he said. "And a lot of people are for Hillary."
When he did get through to a voter, he explained in English or Spanish why Mr Obama would be good for Latinos, citing his support for giving drivers' licences to undocumented immigrants. At the end, he rated each voter on a scale from one to six, ranging from "strongly supporting Obama and willing to volunteer" to "strongly supporting another candidate".
Richard Zaldiavar has taken a vacation from his work at a HIV education project to volunteer for Mr Obama, the first candidate who has caught his imagination for almost 30 years.
"He inspires me and he inspires a lot of people to not give up, to have hope and to have faith in the system, basically faith in ourselves," he said.
In Nevada and Florida, however, Mr Obama failed to inspire large numbers of Latino voters and Mr Zaldivar acknowledges that there is some reluctance within his community to support an African-American.
"I would be lying if I said there wasn't. I think there is some resistance," he said. "There's always a tension. But I think this could be different."
He is doing everything from making phone calls to organising "get out the vote" parties, offering lifts to supporters on polling day and canvassing door to door, although he was conscious that most voters were more focused yesterday on the Super Bowl, the country's biggest sporting event. "With the Super Bowl coming up, you have to be very careful going door to door because you don't want to bother them."