New York City’s Hispanic pride will be on full display this Sunday, when the Hispanic Day Parade marches up Fifth Avenue.
The annual parade, now in its 50th year, celebrates the traditions, music and culture of the city’s more than 2.4 million Hispanic residents.
That includes participants representing 18 Spanish-speaking countries, including from Latin American, Cuba and Spain, as well as the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. Parade organizers anticipate around 6,000 people will march.
There’ll also be two dozen floats, festive dancers and live music.
“It’s very colorful,” said Augustin Nantes, one of the parade’s organizers. “Everybody plays music.”
Nantes expects at least half a million people to attend this year’s parade, whose backgrounds are as diverse as Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Central American, South American, or Spanish, but who are all united by one common language.
“All the communities are unified,” said Nantes. “It’s very complicated to organize a parade of this magnitude, but we’ve been doing it for 50 years.”
The parade is timed to run near Columbus Day, celebrated as Día de la Raza in Latin America and honoring Christopher Columbus, the Genoese explorer who started the Spanish colonization of the Americas.
It also falls near the end of Hispanic Heritage Month, an annual national observance held from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15.
If you go: The Hispanic Day Parade is Oct. 12 from 11 a.m.-4 p.m. on Fifth Avenue between 44th and 70th streets.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Cuba as a U.S. territory. The story has been updated since then.
