Puerto Rican flag mistaken for Cuban flag in the NY Daily News
New York Giants’ Victor Cruz…and Cuban flags to promote the Puerto Rican Day Parade.
By NURIA NET
It’s that time of the year, you can see it in the streets: cars all along Manhattan flaunting Puerto Rican flags. “Wepa!” overheard in the subway and appearing as hashtags on Twitter.
This Sunday, the 55th annual Puerto Rican Day Parade is taking place along Fifth Avenue, featuring floats full of celebrities, musicians and community leaders. However, in today’s edition of The New York Daily News, a huge spread that was supposed to celebrate this Sunday’s Parade instead mixed up the Puerto Rican flag with the Cuban one.
It doesn’t get more offensive than this. Not only is this the biggest, most massive parade in the entire country, Puerto Ricans are still the largest Latino community in New York City (723,621 according to the 2012 Census.) For better or worse, the Puerto Rican Day Parade is one of the city’s most important cultural events.
But this inept move also comes as no surprise. Just last month, the Daily News fired longtime editor Maite Junco along with other staffers who worked in the Latino section of the paper, Viva, and its Spanish-language stand-alone weekly, Hora Hispana. (I myself was a contributor to the Viva section for several years).
Just as Latino influence in American society is becoming indisputable (especially during an election year), one of the country’s major newspapers not only shuts down its Latino section, but commits major gaffes when it attempts to cover the community half-assed. And that is not enough.
(Photo: Facebook.com/anlucero1931 and Latino Rebels)
