Philly still hasn’t announced its Hispanic Heritage Month events. Where’s the list, Mayor Parker?
The city usually blasts out an email with a roll call of Hispanic Heritage Month happenings. This year it hasn’t — and it fits a pattern of Philly’s electeds giving Latino communities little respect.
Tuesday is the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15. I’ve always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with this month, which purports to recognize and celebrate that Latinos have been a formative part of the nation since its early days. While the attention to the extraordinary individuals and myriad cultural heritages that comprise “Latinidad” in the United States is gratifying, it is, by its very nature and time limitation, a glancing and shallow attention.
Even so, I always note the arrival of a mass email from the mayor’s office about the events the city has programmed to mark the month.
This year, I’m still waiting.
As yet, there’s been no email from the city of Philadelphia announcing any special programming during Hispanic Heritage Month, and nothing when I search for that on phila.gov.
There aren’t even links to information about two signature events that took place this past Sunday: La Feria del Barrio (organized by Taller Puertorriqueño) and the Mexican Independence Day Festival (organized by the Mexican Cultural Center), nor even the unofficial culminating event in Philadelphia — the Puerto Rican Day Parade, which Concilio has been hosting for more than 60 years — on Sept. 27.
While I’d like to say I’m completely surprised by the elision of Hispanic Heritage Month that the city is doing, I’m not.
Philadelphia’s Latino communities get surprisingly little respect — outside of the high regard for our undeniably wonderful food and dance moves — from our electeds, and have long been slighted by city government in far more significant ways.
For me, nothing epitomizes that more than an example from 2015, when there was a Latino managing director and even so, then-Mayor Michael Nutter convened — at the behest of Attorney General Eric Holder and the U.S. Department of Justice — a Philadelphia roundtable about the imperative of improving police-community relations at which there wasn’t a single person from a Latino-serving organization at the table. In a city where our community was subjected to relatively high stop-and-frisk rates, experienced excessive force incidents (and still does), was historically targeted for extortion by police, and was (and still is) racially profiled by police and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
No. Latinos. At. The. Table.
Is it simply that our political capital has been stagnant since the 1980s — or is there something else?
We’ve had three Latino primary contenders for mayor (two in 2015 and one in 2023), but no substantive progress when it comes to the political power necessary to be taken seriously in Philadelphia.
To wit, in 1983 Philadelphia elected its first Latino City Council member, and a year later it elected a Latino state legislator (the second in the city’s history). The census conducted in 1980 put Philadelphia’s Latino population at 3.9% of the city’s total. Fast-forward some four decades, and Latinos are now about 17% of Philadelphia’s total population, but we still have only one Latina City Council member, and just two Latino Philadelphia state legislators.
The city has mostly relied on department-level appointments — back in the ’80s, it was the Office of Hispanic Community Affairs; now it’s the Office of Immigrant Affairs and the Office of Latino Engagement — to see to the concerns of its Latino residents, and to tout the communities’ contributions to Philadelphia.
But departments and offices reflect the administrations they are part of, and Mayor Cherelle L.Parker has sent mixed signals to her Latino constituents.
On the one hand, she has addressed issues in Kensington in concert with District 7 Councilmember Quetcy Lozada — who is a well-liked and respected Boricua leader. On the other hand, she had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, by City Council’s veto-proof “ICE Out” proposals into offering any public comment about ICE actions under President Donald Trump.
Or maybe the offices that are meant to be in conversation with, and about, Philadelphia’s Latino communities aren’t up to the job?
I’m willing to offer the benefit of the doubt: Maybe they are focusing on important work behind the scenes. But in my opinion, they have minimized Latino visibility — to our detriment, and to all of Philadelphia’s detriment.
I was struck recently by the events the Office of Immigrant Affairs is publicizing as part of its Welcoming Week 2026 (from Sept. 10 to 25), for example. The focus this year is on the Caribbean, but in the publicity I’ve received (or dug up) about it, there seems to be nothing scheduled about or from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. The thing is, this isn’t a zero-sum game — we can (and must) celebrate our significant Haitian and Jamaican communities, for example, and their incredible cultural contributions to Philadelphia, without ghosting our Dominican and Boricua ones.
So, come on, send that Hispanic Heritage Month email, Mayor Parker. List those events and programs on the website. Latinos are here and doing amazing things in service of our city. We should celebrate that together.
