For a minute there, I thought showing up in a red t-shirt with an appended “I voted” sticker would allow me to say, “Soy Boricua,” and somebody visibly authoritative would cheer, or at least acknowledge me with a nod, but it didn’t happen and that’s okay.
So I kept my mouth shut and listened to “Pa’lla Voy” on the way there, and felt it to be cheesy and inauthentic until I later heard it on repeat via two crushing JBL speakers. I was participating correctly.
To transplant into the 6th annual Puerto Rican Day Parade is to support your neighbors’ valorization of their own culture and become an extra in so many layered celebrations: the Knicks are champions, the US is relevant in soccer, and Mamdani’s still Mayor of Bushwick and he was there/here, floating on by with Middle Village’s own Jose Alvarado.
There were no mofongo pops, but infinite Bad Bunny tracks and your pick of any local politician: State Senator Julia Salazar, Assemblymember and congressional hopeful Claire Valdez, Borough President and other congressional hopeful Antonio Reynoso (off DR duty to root for PR, which was where the wind was blowing), Public Advocate Jumaane Williams (above), Assembly 54 hopeful Christian Celeste Tate, Bushwick Councilwoman Jennifer Gutiérrez, and attempted kingmaker/Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez.
Bushwick is officially everything: Caribbean diaspora and complicated commie politics and everything in between, like two white people, presumably from places spoken of only painfully (Conshohocken, Kokomo), rinsing off in the hydrant water streaming down the streets, leaving traces of themselves in the gutter.
In the parade, after the stilt walker and Mario in an off-road cart, a woman wielded a machete and danced around another dressed as an American pig as other revelers walked by or spectated in black and white PR flag capes. Everything is politics: a public PR march for political hopefuls and a moment for citizens to display signals toward independence or statehood, but either way a debt restructuring.
If the PR Parade was about one thing we could all agree on, it was debt restructuring.
Photos by Andrew Karpan.
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