lamento borincano...

I must confess...

I hate the Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City...so many powerless Puerto Ricans gathering to celebrate Goya food products and bilingualism. 

How unfortunate it is that Puerto Ricans have not figured out how to create economic and political independence...

Over 80,000 people marching, and close to 3 million more lining the parade route for a major Puerto Rican love-fest. Showing love to an Island many have never been to; an Island that speaks a language they can no longer understand. La Guagua Aérea has a flat tire and there is no more circular migration back to the Island. Abuelita is long dead and no one in Ponce can claim you as kin. 

I don't partake in these celebrations. I don't put my ethnicity on display in order to chase barely legal females dressed in PR flag tubetops and little skirts. I don't salute parade floats sponsored by the U.S. Army or the NYPD Corrections Department. 

I've been to Puerto Rico. I have shed tears for it while on the Island. I have stared at the American flags flying over San Juan with the intensity that only centuries of colonization can conjure up. I have visited Spain and its monuments to the Conquest and its cohorts. I have studied the Spanish character and its Empire and have wondered "why?" I have travelled to Washington D.C. and walked around the U.S. Capitol building and pondered how these 99 white Senators and 1 "fast-talking, hustla' preacher voiced" black senator have the legally recognized power to change the political conditions on the Island. 

I pray for the souls of my relatives who first tried to free the Island from the Spanish and then the Americans "by any means of necessary". I shake my head and those who have accepted the certainty of servitude over the pride of self-determination. I have wondered from what corner of this greeen Earth will a Puerto Rican Frantz Fanon come from? A Ponceño Partice Lumumba?

There is someone a little fake about being proud or acknowledging what you are for only one weekend a year. I could do without standing up for hours, subjugated to second-hand weed smoke next to people from the old neighborhood whom I have long left in the past. I'd rather head out to the Island. To see people suffering so far below the poverty level, you could mistake the state of Mississippi for the Principality of Monaco.

I don't do the Puerto Rican parade. It's not worth it. And I am no less Puerto Rican for it. The parade will go on...even if it is 3 million minus 1 this Sunday...