Taking Back the Block: NYC’s Puerto Rican Day Parade

El Grito’s Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade & Festival in 2023. Photo by Salvador Espinoza. Courtesy of Dennis Flores.

Every second Sunday in June, Fifth Avenue beams with kaleidoscopic tropical colors, swirling multi-hued skirts, and a parade of hundreds of vehicles, motorbikes, and community organizations. Following the aroma of cuchifritos and plátanos, afternoon marchers make their way to the hill, cooled by East River breezes that refresh the line of drummers eager for action as they dot the picturesque New York skyline from 59th to 43rd Street along Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park. Yes, this is Brooklyn. 

June 8 marked the ninth Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade and Festival, which kicked off at 5 p.m. after Manhattan’s main event. Although two years were lost in 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic, the event returned in 2022. Yet, this almost wasn’t a reality. There was a time when officials successfully thwarted efforts to spread the festivities, leaving only one parade to take place on that day. However, the younger generation took matters into their own hands, organizing grassroots Puerto Rican Day Parades across Bushwick, the Lower East Side, Long Island, the Bronx, and East Harlem. Today, there are over 50 Puerto Rican Day Parades across the United States, where thousands gather to fly a once-outlawed flag while shouting “¡Yo soy boricua! ¡Pa’que tu lo sepas!”

El Grito’s Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade & Festival in 2022. Photo by Salvador Espinoza. Courtesy of Dennis Flores.

El Grito’s Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade & Festival in 2022. Photo by Salvador Espinoza. Courtesy of Dennis Flores.

El Grito’s Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade & Festival in 2022. Photo by Salvador Espinoza. Courtesy of Dennis Flores.

El Grito’s Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade & Festival in 2022. Photo by Salvador Espinoza. Courtesy of Dennis Flores.

In Manhattan, officers aggressively remove much of the spillage from the National Puerto Rican Day Parade (NPRDP) on the 79th Street exit by 3 p.m., pushing participants and spectators off the historic blocks and back into "their" communities—a stark contrast to the St. Patrick's Day Parade. There, police assist intoxicated spectators vomiting in the streets, rowdy, roving bands of teens openly drinking green beer, allowing celebrants to roam freely across 86th and Lexington, spilling into bars, streets, and parks for hours. Not so with New York's largest and oldest Puerto Rican Day Parade goers, who face early shutdowns and shuttered storefronts—a tradition of exclusion dating back to the first parade in April 1958.

Following the major event in Manhattan, nearly 20,000 people gather annually in Sunset Park, enriching the celebrations through community participation. Unlike the NPRDP, there are no corporate floats, flashy logos, or competitions for prime spots that demand a $10,000 entry fee for 30 seconds of televised time. In Sunset Park, progressive community activists and educators are both visible and welcomed along the parade route. They aren't rushed to the end of the parade as they are on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. Here, they have the opportunity to be in the spotlight. To celebrate themselves, each other, and their beloved isla. 

El Grito’s Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade & Festival in 2024. Photo by Salvador Espinoza. Courtesy of Dennis Flores.

Brooklyn’s after-parade and festival offers a rare haven, where joy, music, and cultural pride fill the streets. Inspired by Bad Bunny’s defiant lyric “De aquí nadie me saca,” event organizers boldly push back against gentrification and heavy-handed policing, emphasizing the message: “No one’s kicking us out.”

Now, almost a decade in, the festival has stood its ground against aggressive tactics that threaten this hard-won day of unity. Just ask Dennis Flores, founder of El Grito’s Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade & Festival. A son of Brooklyn, Flores was weaned on stories of struggle, culture, and music from his elders. Sprung from that emotional well of history, tears, and angst, he founded El Grito—the “shout” heard throughout a community defending their right to be seen and feel secure. Through El Grito, Flores has dedicated his life to building community while honoring the legacy of resistance passed down to him.

It began on a sweltering June 11, 2000, when a group of young men harassed and robbed women along Manhattan’s NPRDP parade route—an incident that quickly drew media attention. In response, police cracked down on parade-goers—herding out participants and attendees with sticks and leveling abusive language—and enforced harsh restrictions, despite the lack of visible community affairs officers typically present at other parades.

El Grito’s Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade & Festival in 2024. Photo by Salvador Espinoza. Courtesy of Dennis Flores.

In the aftermath, Flores began documenting the disparities. He filmed police conduct at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, distributed “Know Your Rights” cards in Brooklyn to inform locals they had the right to assemble, to film, and to photograph police. He organized town halls and demonstrations. He also launched a post-parade celebration on the hottest block in Sunset Park—nicknamed “Vietnam.”

Flores met with car clubs, gangs, social groups, religious and community organizations. When they gathered at 43rd and Fifth, police were already there, but Flores came prepared. Armed with the First Amendment and 30 community members equipped with cameras, they stood their ground, recording every police action.

Scores of Boricua drummers lined the street, leaving a lane open for foot traffic since they could not obtain a permit to close the block. Police surrounded them. They requested a sound permit, required only for amplified sound. But these drummers were unplugged. It was 5 p.m. They beat ancient African rhythms of resistance. When police threatened to confiscate the drums. The music stopped. Flores argued for their right to assemble. Suddenly, an elderly woman stepped between them and the police, armed with a güiro. Picking up her gourd and scratcher, she announced: “¡A tocar!” Leading the charge, the drummers roared bomba beats of resistance. The police fell back, but Flores knew the tensions hadn’t truly passed. 

He continued organizing community meetings to train participants to hold police accountable, record encounters, and encourage others to do the same. When he requested a meeting with the National Puerto Rican Day Parade board, the group refused, sending board member Orlando Plaza to deliver a clear message: They had no intention of associating with Flores—or with any other parade happening in the city that same day.

Flores refused to relent. He organized and educated his community, making police filming a critical tool for public safety. By 2014, tensions escalated. Officers turned violent at the sight of cameras pointed at them from every angle.

They charged like a football team, pushing crowds for three blocks while ripping cameras from people’s hands. They beat many, like one young man an officer hit with a nightstick, splitting his head open. The city charged him with assaulting an officer. In reality, another cop had hit the officer. The charges were later dropped, but the damage was done.

Flores applied for a parade permit but was denied—until he threatened a lawsuit with the help of Brooklyn civil rights attorney Norman Siegel. Though the parade permit was eventually approved, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, who later wanted to participate in the Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade when Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional leader Oscar López Rivera appeared at the NPRDP, tried to block it behind the scenes.

Then city council member Carlos Menchaca issued a competing permit, allocating $36,000 in discretionary funds to a local woman who had organized a similar festival years earlier. Invited to a subsequent meeting, Flores learned that the city had awarded the permit to her, despite his earlier application. The mayor's office stated the city could not have two parades occurring simultaneously on the same day, although Flores’s was an after-parade celebration. Siegel threatened a lawsuit. City officials approved Flores’s event but without any funding.

A smear campaign followed. Rumors of impending violence and crime at the Sunset Park parade ran rampant. Still, Flores had established strong ties with motorcycle clubs, schools, churches, and community organizations, all dedicated to supporting the event and ensuring a peaceful day. On parade day, 15,000 people showed up. Even the politicians, lawyers, and NYPD—including its counterterrorism unit—acknowledged Flores for keeping his word of no violence.

Flores, however, never received any discretionary funds. He has raised modest financial support using his money and savings to keep this festival going. Although the city provides no funding, Flores continues to advocate to keep the nearby restrooms in the park open, rather than renting portable toilets the festival cannot afford.

 "The main problem here is that they just don’t like the messenger,” Flores underscores. Indeed, there is a direct correlation between the Sunset Park community activists and the original 1950s founder who researched, organized, and produced the first Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City: Gilberto Gerena Valentín.

The first Puerto Rican Day Parade was born out of resistance and identity, as Boricuas were American citizens and the majority in New York, outnumbering the many Spaniards and Cuban immigrants already here. In 1954, progressive socialist activist Gerena Valentín spearheaded a coalition to establish a separate parade, distinct from the Spanish-dominated Día de la Raza held each October.

As head of the Congreso de Pueblos, an alliance of Boricuas from towns across Puerto Rico, Gerena Valentín had commissioned a committee to study the routes of other ethnic parades in the city in 1954. He registered the committee for the Puerto Rican Day Parade in Albany in 1957. His goal: to celebrate Puerto Rican pride and unity. At the time, a decade-long gag law in Puerto Rico—banning the flag, patriotic songs, and political gatherings—had just been repealed.

Mayor Robert Wagner initially denied a permit for the Puerto Rican Day Parade to use the official St. Patrick’s Day Fifth Avenue route. As a result, the first parade marched through East Harlem—from 116th to 96th Street—on April 13, 1958. The following year, an election year, Wagner reversed course to court Puerto Rican voters, granting access to Fifth Avenue.

But the welcome was hostile. Shop owners boarded up storefronts from 43rd to 80th Street. Anti-Puerto Rican slurs and upside-down flags lined the route. Police allegedly fed their horses laxatives to soil the streets. Wagner’s coat was pulled.

It was Valentín who, at the 1963 parade, unfurled a massive 50-by-35-foot sky blue Puerto Rican flag, sewn by Boricua women in the garment industry. The sight moved the crowd to tears. Attendees threw so much money onto the flag that marchers struggled to keep it from dragging on the ground. By the end of the parade, they had collected $10,000.

 Gerena Valentín coordinated the Puerto Rican Day Parade from 1958 until 1963. He served as its president until 1974—yet there is no trace of his name on the National Puerto Rican Day Parade’s official website.

A proud socialist and civil rights leader, Gerena Valentín marched with Martin Luther King Jr. at the historic 1963 March on Washington. He delivered a speech—in Spanish—reportedly unsettling some elitist members of the parade’s leadership. This year, as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—founded by Afro-Boricua Arturo Schomburg—celebrates its centennial, it sought to participate in this year's parade. It learned that $10,000 would secure a float and perhaps a few seconds of televised exposure across the reviewing stand. The center didn’t end up participating, shutting out not only an important institution but a founding father of Afro-Boricua identity in New York because of exorbitant fees. 

El Barrio’s East Harlem Parade. Photo courtesy of Marc Reign.

El Barrio’s East Harlem Parade. Photo courtesy of Marc Reign.

 Meanwhile, in Sunset Park, Mejicanos, Peruanos, Ecuatorianos, Colombianos, and other immigrant groups such as the Chinese have become a part of the celebration. Notwithstanding, cops ruined the Bushwick after-party celebrations raiding and traumatizing guests in the process. While in East Harlem, Marc Reign began El Barrio’s Parade in protest of the pandemic cancellations. Starting with one car and 25 people, he utilized his social media to attract hundreds to this new procession in Spanish Harlem, which aims to empower while educating the community on the history of our parades. Amid a wave of overwhelming corporate influence and continued over policing a new generation of Boricuas is reviving that community pride, authenticity, and unity, bringing the celebrations back to the streets, to the people, and their hearts, especially when they holla: “¡Yo soy boricua! ¡Pa’que tu lo sepas!”

El Grito’s Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade & Festival in 2022. Photo by Salvador Espinoza. Courtesy of Dennis Flores.