Today is the 50th National Puerto Rican parade. Today, todos somos boricuas. Tacomix on 116th St., one of my favorite taco joints in a city that now has more good ones than you can shake a palo at, displayed a Puerto Rican flag that obscured its entire store front a couple of days ago.
Leaving aside the status issue (H.R. 900 sounds like the same ol' plebiscite, with extra pro-statehood flavor!), and staying out of the ongoing "are there still more Puerto Ricans than Dominicans, or will the Mexicans pass us all" demographic tussle, what does this parade mean? Viva (the outlet where I publish most regularly) and Tempo (the monthly Latino section for the tabloid whose name shall not be spoken) and of course El Diario pondered the meaning of the parade and the existential/politico-economic condition of the Puerto Rican community.
It's common knowledge, but worth repeating: Puerto Ricans laid the groundwork, and gave blood sweat and tears, for a Latino infrastructure in this city and in the Northeast. We Dominicans sometimes forget that, or resent the Puerto Rican preponderance in the tiny slice of the Latin-flavored public/political/non-profit pie in this city. We need to get over it. I think we are getting over it. I hope we are. Not to let my old Marxist stripes show too much, but it's basically a way to keep us like jaibas in a barrel, climbing over each other for the chance to be the first thrown in the boiling pot.
And on the subject of class struggle, I was really disturbed, but not surprised, by a NY Remezcla post, where editor Nuria Net, an island-born Puerto Rican who moved to NY in her 20s, polled some friends about their opinions of the parade. The responses were predictably aghast at the chusmería of paradegoers and their lack of "representativeness" of "true" Puerto Rican culture and identity.
A typical response (my translation) concludes:
I think that what "La Parada" [pointing out, of course, as all speakers of "correct" Spanish like to do, that this is an anglicism, as opposed to "El Desfile" -- ed.] has done is solidify in the minds of gringos and others, a stereotype of Puerto Ricans. Which is? People from a certain social and educational level who live on welfare, who have like 10 kids (who get slapped equally) who dress with their flag and say, "I'll cut you."
A few other comments: (my translation):
I love "el kitsch," the banal, and "el camp," but I feel I don't have to be part of a parade to show my Puerto Rican pride... Don’t even get me started on JLo. She’s American. Not Boricua.
To me it doesn't represent the true Puerto Rican or his culture. Maybe it did before, and we've lost that tradition, it's turned into an urban parade that is far from being a Puerto Rican parade. They should call it the "Nuyorican ghetto day parade"
I could go on, but you get the idea.
In a lovely El Barrio backyard wine tasting party full of Island Portorros, power Nuyoricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Venezuelan-Colombians, African-Americans, Ecuadorians et al, a Spanish colleague commented to me, about this post, that these sorts of responses say more about the writers, their class position and ob(li)vious whiteness than they say about La Parada or the plebería that supposedly dominates it.
To be fair, a couple of responses were more nuanced, especially in the comments section. One respondent reduces the parade to "Goya y política," and that's a fair criticism of the event's commercialization and cynical use by elected officials. And commenter Johanna Laracuente, who when she has been "complimented" by gringos about how she does not seem PR because of her accent and education, has replied, "I am Puertorican not Nuyorican, we are two different animals," became a convert when she actually went to the parade, and concludes, it hit me a so called boricua de pura sepa had something to learn from the "cacos, cafres, nuyorican " : be proud of where you come from.
Fittingly, the last commenter as of this post, New York-born boricua Jennifer Carmona, at last brings up the socio-political realities. In retrospect, besides our pride, we don't have a lot to celebrate. We don't have an independence day and the younger generations of Puerto Ricans (or Nuyoricans) are often ignorant of the political issues that are all but burried in the past (operation bootstrap, a plot to sterilize Puerto Rican women, Agent Orange, a massacre in Ponce, the fight for independence) - otherwise known as topics we've missed while reading our carefully constructed United States History text books.
In an incredibly unscientific survey of my John Jay students, I can vouch that this is all true. Very few of my Puerto Rican students understand what commonwealth status is, never mind the history of groups like the Young Lords and Los Macheteros.
Am I going to the parade? To be honest, no. But that's basically because, after a few years on a Sunday morning shift that forced me to cover EVERY parade for the NYDN, I still have a hangover and dislike parades categorically. But the NYRemezcla thread almost made me overcome it, and put on a t-shirt using excellent and correct PR vocabulary: "Soy cafre, ¿Y qué?"
[Image of 1868 Lares Revolutionary Flag via Wikipedia]
Your Spanish colleague’s assumption regarding the supposed racism and classist tendencies of the respondents to Nuria Net’s post leads me to ask, does he/she meant to say that the Puerto Rican Day Parade is an unblemished, civil, gracious, highly well-mannered event that these people look down upon simply because of the race, class and economic status of its participants? I hope not. Are we now to be oblivious to what goes on at the Puerto Rican—and Dominican—Day/Parade? I truly believe these events should be renamed "Perpetuate a [fill in nationality here] Stereotype Day/Parade" because that's exactly what they do. Your colleague’s one-sided, head-in-the-sand remark is a classic example of what gave the term ‘politically correct’ a bad rap. Oh, and here’s a t-shirt slogan I'd like to see: “Be proud. Not ignorant.”
Posted by: Kiko Jones | June 12, 2007 at 11:52 AM
Kiko, read the comments on Remezcla. A lot of them are super-classist. You don't like the parades and the fact that they are loud and that people who don't have any power the rest of the year bust out there, that's fine. But I totally agreed with my colleague's comments. Should people only show community solidarity by attending a parade once a year? No. Should we get rid of the parade and become less visible? No. It's complicated, I grant you, but can you pull that punch just a little bit?
Posted by: caro | June 12, 2007 at 01:16 PM
"You don't like...the fact...that people who don't have any power the rest of the year bust out there..."
Wow. Speaking of pulling punches, consider yourself lucky to be female and that I am a gentleman, since I would NEVER let a dude get away with the above without a rumble, for the above is both insulting and a textbook definition of the phrase 'fighting words' if I ever saw one. I believe an apology for your class-baiting assumption is in order. (Actually, I believe it's more of a lashing out to a dissimilar point of view since you know very well I'm not a class warrior.)
Anyway, while I have my issues with these parades, I'm all for them--I'm not the censoring type. I simply choose not to go.
I'm not naive to think that class does not play a large role in the way certain people perceive these events. I just hope that those like your colleague who come to the defense of the parades' status quo while questioning the solidarity and sense of community of those who have a different p.o.v. formulate their positions from the 5th Ave sidelines and not some lofty perch.
Posted by: Kiko Jones | June 14, 2007 at 05:09 PM
*sigh* We can take this discussion off line if you like. I think you read my colleague's comment wrong and I think you're reading me wrong. I'm not class-baiting, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be apologizing about.
My point is that you're jumping on this person for saying that many of the Remezcla commenters are classist (which I also said). Saying that the sort of people who go to the parade aren't "real" Puerto Ricans IS classist. Punto.
That there are aspects of our cultures that are corrosive, self-destructive, etc. is true. But seeing someone who comes to the U.S. in a privileged position crap on people shaped by poverty, discrimination and destructive U.S. policies, and I have to object. Which is what I was doing.
Peace!
Posted by: caro | June 15, 2007 at 12:07 PM