Puerto Rican pride takes over Fifth Avenue this weekend

“You’re a powerful guy now. Everyone is looking at you,” said the city lawyers.

Dennis Flores remembers clearly the words said to him a decade ago.

The words scared him. It was 2015. The first city-permitted Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade in 30 years had just ended.

Everyone was impressed that Flores was able to organize a Puerto Rican parade without major issues or violence. This was the result of a long battle, both legal and on the street, to obtain a permit to hold the event. Something changed in the neighborhood that day.

In a neighborhood where power has historically been concentrated among people of European descent, the 2015 parade, along with another parade 30 years earlier, changed the power dynamics within Sunset Park.

On June 14, 2026, El Grito de Sunset Park will celebrate the 10th annual Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade and Festival. El Grito is a community organization founded in 2002 by Dennis Flores out of the need to document police violence in Sunset Park.

The official artwork for the parade was created by Luis “Inca” Ramos, a Sunset Park-based Puerto Rican artist who, along with artist María Domínguez, is serving as one of the grand marshals of the parade.

“We can’t go to the island and bring the island here,” said Ramos of his work. “So I tried to create this poster so that, for one day only, it looks like we’re somewhere in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, en la playa [at the beach].”

From Lares to Sunset Park

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, Puerto Ricans celebrating at the Manhattan Puerto Rican Parade returned to Sunset Park to continue the festivities, but no official parade existed. New York City police tried to control the spontaneous gatherings along Fifth Avenue, but the aggressive response would escalate into violence.

“Their response and how they dealt with this was not about, ‘Let’s open up a clear space for people to congregate and have a safe time.’ I started documenting this. I started going out there with my camera, filming this.”

A 1996 report from Amnesty International documented more than 90 cases in New York City of alleged ill-treatment or excessive force by police officers dating from the late 1980s to early 1996.

The cycle of violence between police and revelers would repeat itself in Sunset Park every June after the Manhattan parade. It turned into a rite of passage for those who joined Flores with cameras in hand.

Out of this documentation grew El Grito de Sunset Park, an action referencing the 1868 Grito de Lares revolt, which attempted to liberate Puerto Rico from the Spanish Empire. The action would take place at the corner of 49th Street and Fifth Avenue, at 5 p.m.

The 1868 revolt was defeated by Spanish forces, but that day in Sunset Park, the group led a gathering of bomba y plena musicians, an Afro-Caribbean musical tradition. Flores and others documented the officers trying and failing, for lack of cause, to shut down the gathering. The music continued.

“We took power away from the police,” Flores said. “And that’s democracy. When the people control the police, not the other way around. That’s democracy.”

After that day, El Grito spent 10 years petitioning for permits to hold a parade and avoid the annual rite of violence. Eventually, the city approved the permit. The first official Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade took place on June 14, 2015, at 5 p.m.

An earlier parade sets the stage

Thirty years earlier, the Puerto Rico Discovery Parade of Sunset Park heralded a shift in institutional power within the neighborhood. In the mid-1980s, a group of young Nuyoricans — Puerto Rican New Yorkers who were politically minded and raised in New York City — wanted change in Sunset Park.

In those days, “it was daily discrimination against the Puerto Rican community here,” shared Javier Nieves, president of the 1986 parade, from his apartment in Sunset Park. “Just to get a teacher who was Puerto Rican or spoke Spanish was a big deal.”

Against this backdrop, young Puerto Ricans such as Javier Nieves and Samuel Cruz, among others, decided to organize under the leadership of Juan Antonio Pérez and accelerate the slow pace of change.

Out of these efforts, various working groups emerged. More importantly, the group took over the organization of the Puerto Rico Discovery Parade in 1985 during a contentious meeting.

As a result of that parade, the group influenced institutions in Sunset Park and rode the wave of minority political representation growing in New York City. For instance, in 1993 Javier Nieves became the first Puerto Rican state assemblyman for Brooklyn’s 51st District.

“We had a big impact in the neighborhood,” shared Rev. Samuel Cruz, head of Trinity Lutheran Church in Sunset Park. “Because we even challenged the Democratic machinery there, but also the Latinos who were in the Democratic machinery that we thought had sold out,” added the reverend.

Both parades are manifestations of the pride of Sunset Park’s Puerto Rican community, but they also reflect a struggle for political power within the neighborhood. In the case of the current Sunset Park Puerto Rican Parade, it helped create a space for a community that wanted to celebrate itself.

Cathy Vargas, a Sunset Park native, remembers one year when two men drove around Fifth Avenue, leaning out of a car window while holding a package of Sazón and a bottle of Adobo — both staple seasonings in Puerto Rican cuisine — as the crowd went wild.

“It was like the most ridiculous way [to celebrate our culture],” said Vargas. “But we’re so proud that even the Sazón and the Adobo are symbolic.”