Written by Néstor David Pastor
I had no desire this year to cross the East River and stand along an opulent stretch of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan for the National Puerto Rican Day Parade (NPRDP). Instead, I spent the day in Brooklyn, spending the afternoon on Knickerbocker before moving to Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park. The more community oriented festivals and parades in Brooklyn drew a sharp contrast with the corporatized spectacle that gets broadcast nationally every second Sunday in June. In Bushwick, I watched neighborhood kids run excitedly through the streets during lulls in the procession of cars, trucks, motorcycles, and the occasional float; complemented, of course, by speaker stacks, hydraulics, and an abundance of Puerto Rican flags—a true Nuyorican spectacle with no security wristbands, nor strict barriers enforced by police. An uneasy truce, to say the least. The theme this year was “Empowering Our Youth.” And what’s more formative than running a little wild in the summer with friends? The festive atmosphere, moreover, invited the entire neighborhood to be Puerto Rican for a day—transplant, immigrant, tourist, or otherwise. It’s Bushwick after all.
This was the sixth year of the Knickerbocker Puerto Rican Day Parade, which was revived in 2019 after a fifteen-year ban due to tensions with police and local business owners. The festivities begin in the mid-afternoon, just as the NPRDP is winding down. The spillover to Brooklyn traditionally reaches Puerto Rican neighborhoods like Bushwick, Williamsburg, or Sunset Park, where people continue with impromptu celebrations of their own. This year, Sunset Park also celebrated its eighth annual Puerto Rican Day Parade and Festival. While I didn’t catch the procession that now marches down Fifth Avenue towards the park’s west entrance, I did manage to join the modest crowd surrounding a bomba performance that took place beneath Nuyorican architectural designer and Sunset Park native Vanessa González’s installation, fittingly entitled, “Parada: La Fiesta No Termina Aquí” (Parade: The Party Doesn’t Stop Here). The emphasis on Afro-Puerto Rican tradition paired well with the interactive installation, mirroring somewhat the entanglement between drummer and dancer alike. Moreover, the gathering invoked the Taíno ritual of areito, or communal gathering featuring music and dance. While decidedly more political, Sunset Park itself provided a place of respite after a long day of revelry, as community members lounged on the grassy hill overlooking the makeshift stage, where drummers encircled the ritual space reserved for dancers, or batey. This is Bori weekend, an annual tradition with a legacy spanning decades. It has evolved from a strategic showcase of cultural pride with clear political aims, namely visibility, to a range of experiences, including Brooklyn’s uniquely grassroots approach to Puerto Rican pride and political power.
That Bushwick and Sunset Park now boast their own formal celebrations is a testament to the enduring legacy of Puerto Rican cultural organizing in the borough and by extension, the city at large. In Brooklyn, that legacy goes back more than a century to the first Puerto Ricans who settled along the waterfront during the Interwar Period. Unlike their counterparts in Spanish Harlem, where more professionals and a merchant class settled, Brooklyn Boricuas arrived with few options for employment beyond needlework and cigar rolling. They were forced to live in neighborhoods with extremely poor housing stock while confronting virulent discrimination and police brutality. These conditions arguably dictated a more militant and radical approach to establishing and maintaining the Brooklyn colonia. From Jesús Colón, a Black Puerto Rican communist, organizer, and writer, to lesser known community leaders such as Carlos Tapia and Antonia Denis, conditions were such that mutual aid and grassroots organizing were essential to this small, but close-knit community. The cultural element, however, is never far removed from the political. In the case of Colón, his most famous literary work, a collection of essays and vignettes entitled A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches, provided inspiration for a generation of writers who would later contribute to the broader Nuyorican movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His writing is a perfect synthesis of the intersections between politics and culture. Tapia, on the other hand, did not write about his experiences. Instead, they are recounted in a short hagiography entitled, Carlos Tapia: A Puerto Rican Hero in New York by Ramon Colon. The book contains a series of anecdotes in which Tapia repeatedly puts himself in physical harm’s way to protect other Boricuas from violent aggression. For this reason, among others, he was well respected as an intermediary between Puerto Ricans in Brooklyn and Manhattan, hence the title of the book alluding to New York City, rather than just Brooklyn. Originally a bolitero, or numbers runner, Tapia later ran several small businesses that, in turn, helped support some of the first Puerto Rican political clubs in Brooklyn, such as the Betances Democratic Club, named for the 19th century father of the Puerto Rican independence movement. Likewise, Tapia was also seen as a paternal figure, beloved by his community. This is evidenced by an archival photograph of a community procession featuring a large, posthumous portrait of Tapia—an image that graces the cover of Lorrin Thomas’ book Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City. The most enduring recognition of Tapia, however, is P.S. 120 in Bushwick, which bears his name.
Fellow Afro-Boricua Antonia Denis, alongside Tapia, was one of the founders of the Betances Democratic Club, though she is most remembered for her zealous strategy to voter registration, not only approaching Puerto Ricans to register them to vote, but also accompanying them to the polls on election day. As Puerto Ricans sought political recognition, Denis helped deliver the votes that contributed to building political power for the Puerto Rican community in New York City in the decades to follow. She is also described as a major figure in several other Brooklyn-based cultural organizations such as La Casa de Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican Pioneers Parade, as well as the short-lived Hispanic Day Parade, a precursor to the NPRDP which sought to unite the Latino community as a whole. For all her dedication to the Puerto Rican community, Denis’ papers are housed at the Center for Brooklyn History, which also holds oral histories featuring Brooklyn residents, including pioneros interviewed for the Puerto Rican Oral History Project (1973-1975) and later arrivals included in the Hispanic Communities Documentation Project records (1989).
The Brooklyn waterfront communities surrounding the Navy Yard would disperse somewhat by the 1940s and 1950s as the Great Migration was underway from the Puerto Rican archipelago. With the construction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and other large scale projects, many Puerto Ricans were forced moved further south to areas like Sunset Park, north to Los Sures, or South Williamsburg, as well as further east, to neighborhoods like Bushwick, Brownsville, and East New York, where my family settled in the 1960s. These communities would continue to face displacement in the decades to follow as disinvestment, neglect, and over-policing, as well as the twin epidemics of substance abuse and HIV, took hold. Despite these circumstances, the vitality of these communities can be seen on film, such as the once lost documentary Los Sures (1984) by Diego Echeverría, which focuses on the community of South Williamsburg. Community-based organizations like El Puente, Los Sures, and UPROSE also were established around more or less the same time to confront worsening material conditions. Also noteworthy are the many social clubs that once held together Puerto Rican communities throughout Brooklyn, particularly from the 1950s onwards. The last of its kind in Los Sures, Caribbean Social Club, better known as Toñita’s, coincidentally celebrated its 50th anniversary the week after the NPRDP this year with a block party along Grand Avenue. We’re still here.
All that to say—and I’m leaving a lot out here, in particular the radical student protests at Brooklyn College and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control—Brooklyn Boricuas remain steadfast in preserving our communities, our culture, and our legacy; all of which is critically important as the number of Puerto Ricans in the city accelerates from a steady to sharp decline. But in the same way Antonia Denis, Carlos Tapia, and other pioneros were inspired by the struggle for Puerto Rican liberation, specifically El Grito de Lares, the famous 1868 uprising in which Betances took part, organizations like El Grito (formerly El Grito de Sunset Park) carry on and further that insurgent legacy. The potency of this revolutionary DNA can be seen in the debut of the first annual Puerto Rican Day Parade and Festival in Loisaida (the Lower East Side). The event also took place this past June and was organized by El Grito de LES, an activist-led chapter of El Grito.
Together, these three community-based celebrations in Bushwick, Sunset Park, and the Lower East Side represent a potential inflection point for Puerto Rican enclaves ravaged by gentrification and displacement, by focusing explicitly on the urgent needs of remaining residents in these neighborhoods. Fittingly, the theme of the Sunset Park event was Las playas y las calles son del pueblo or ‘the beaches and streets belong to the people,’ a political statement of solidarity with movements on the archipelago against the gentrification, displacement, and privatization of public beaches in Puerto Rico and in some cases, entire communities. The same can be said in Brooklyn and other parts of the city. In contrast, the NPRDP has struggled with censorship, corruption, and greed. While highlights include support for the movement to remove the U.S. Navy from Vieques, the 2017 attempt to honor recently released political prisoner Óscar López Rivera was marred by a loss of corporate sponsors and media spectacle fomented by right-wing groups. It is telling, for example, that the Bori Collective, which had organized a number of activist groups to march in the 2024 NPRDP, released a statement shortly after the event that they would focus their organizing elsewhere, writing that “the parade is no longer an effective vehicle for organizing and advocacy.” Which is fine. Thankfully, we have options, with Brooklyn leading us back to our roots with a renewed sense of purpose.
About Néstor David Pastor
Néstor David Pastor is a writer, editor, musician, and translator born and raised in New York City. He is the founding editor of Intervenxions, a publication of the Latinx Project at NYU, and Huellas, a bilingual platform for emerging writers of Latin American descent. He is the recipient of a 2022 ‘New Work’ grant from the Queens Council of the Arts and a member of NALAC’s 2023 National Leadership Institute fellowship cohort. His work has been published by NACLA, OkayAfrica, The Nation, and Hyperallergic. He has edited three essay collections, including Intervenxions Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, and has an essay forthcoming in the anthology Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art (Duke University Press, 2025).