Brentwood's Latino community celebrates 'great melting pot of awesomeness'

Salsa, cumbia and Latino pride boomed through Brentwood and North Bay Shore on Sunday as thousands of people lined Fifth Avenue to celebrate culture and community during the annual Puerto Rican/Hispanic Day Parade. 

Music blasted from parade trucks and floats along the two-mile parade route for the first time in two years due to COVID-19 restrictions. Teatro Experimental Yerbabruja, the Bay Shore arts organization that sponsors the parade, said 85 groups with about 3,000 participants marched along the route.

The parade, once a celebration of Brentwood’s Puerto Rican residents, now honors and reflects the increasing diversity of Long Island’s Latino community. 

“There are a lot more of us now. The Latino community is a lot more diverse – Puerto Rico, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador,” said Pricilla Gutierrez, of Brentwood. “It is a great melting pot of awesomeness.” 

Members of Long Island’s Latino community have at times felt besieged as immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean, said Steve Bard, president of the board of directors of Teatro Experimental Yerbabruja. The death of Ecuadorean immigrant Marcelo Lucero in 2008 by a group of teens in Patchogue brought to light allegations that Suffolk police had not fully investigated attacks on other immigrants. Police reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2013 to overhaul the department’s policing of minority communities after a yearslong federal civil rights investigation prompted by Lucero’s death. 

Bard said relations between the Latino community and police have improved, and Suffolk’s top law-enforcement officials – Police Commisisoner Rodney Harrison, Sheriff Errol Toulon Jr. and District Attorney Ray Tierney – were warmly applauded when they marched past the review stand. 

“The Third Precinct (which serves Brentwood, Bay Shore and Central Islip) keeps getting better and better and better,” Bard said. “They cooperate with us in any way they can.” 

This year’s parade honored Dr. Harold Fernandez, who came to the United States as an immigrant from Colombia and is now a cardio-thoracic surgeon at South Shore Hospital. It also celebrated essential personnel — hospital staffers, grocery workers, delivery people and truck drivers — who kept Long Island going, sometimes at great cost to their own welfare, during the first two years of the pandemic, according to organizers. 

“Our families and our extended families suffered,” said parade organizer Ana Maria Gonzalez, the programming director at radio station La Fiesta WBON/98.5 FM in Ronkonkoma. “We went through two years of hell.” 

Sunday’s parade, however, was anything but solemn. Music boomed along the route as people danced and clapped. Delicious smoke scents from sizzling grills filled the air. Gutierrez waved a Puerto Rican flag in front of a table where she was selling empanadas. 

“I make really good food,” said Gutierrez, the owner of WepanadasLI. “Food is my love language, and I want to share it with people.”

Celebrants warmly greeted friends they had not seen because of COVID restrictions. Jonathan Galicia Mendez, of Shirley, said he grew up in Brentwood and wouldn’t have any problem locating old pals. 

“I know where everyone will be standing because their families have been watching the parade from the same place for generations,” he said.