Thousands of revelers decked out in the red, white and blue are marching down New York City’s Fifth Avenue for the 56th annual Puerto Rican Day Parade.
Celebrities and politicians are taking part in the festive event, featuring colorful floats, costumes and music.
Tony Award-winning actress Chita Rivera is serving as grand marshal for this year’s parade. This year’s theme is “Salud: Celebrating Your Health.”
The parade runs along Fifth Avenue from 44th Street to 79th Street.
The event evolved in the early 1950s as a pan-Latino affair but later became more focused on celebrating Puerto Rican heritage.
An estimated two million people were expected to line the streets to watch.
An uproar recently erupted among the Puerto Rican community over a logo of their island flag on a commemorative Coors Light beer can created for the parade.
Coors, a parade sponsor, halted the production and sale of the 22-ounce cans.
Organizers denied the image was meant to represent the Puerto Rican flag or the parade’s logo.
Puerto Rico’s population has fallen below 3.7 million while the number of Puerto Ricans living in the states has surged to nearly 4.7 million. Most Puerto Ricans in the United States — 3.2 million in all — were born in the 50 states or the District of Columbia. Additionally, one-third of the Puerto Rican population in the U.S.—1.4 million—was born in Puerto Rico, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
Puerto Ricans are the second-largest population of Hispanic origin living in the United States, accounting for 9.2 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population in 2010. Mexicans, the nation’s largest Hispanic origin group, constituted 32.9 million, or 64.9 percent, of the Hispanic population in 2010.
Puerto Ricans are concentrated in the Northeast (52 percent), mostly in New York (23 percent), and in the South (30 percent), mostly in Florida (18 percent).
Read the whole story
· · ·
The United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization will again discuss Puerto Rico’s political status as its annual session kicks off Monday in New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment