The National Puerto Rican Day Parade

Fashion, Identity and Decoloniality on la Quinta Avenida

It was only about 73°F (about 23°C) on June 8, 2024—far from the horrid heatwaves yet to come—when we both attended the National Puerto Rican Day Parade for the first time ever. We had moved to New York City only a week before and, although we were beyond tired and still had boxes upon boxes to unpack, we knew we could not miss it.

We analyze the parade in the epilogue of our upcoming book Dress, Fashion, and National Identity in Puerto Rico: Taínos to Beauty Queens (Bloomsbury 2025) in which we explore Puerto Rican dress and fashion as material culture, paying particular attention to the role personal adornment plays in shaping culture and social relations in Puerto Rico—the last Spanish-speaking colony in the world. Up to that day, we were only able to analyze the parade through photos, videos and second-hand accounts.

Oh, and by the way, using both dress and fashion in the same sentence can get some fashion scholars quite anxious. So, to clarify, when we talk about “dress,” we follow the anthropological definition to describe any type of modification and supplement to the way a person looks. By “fashion” we mean notions of appearance that change over time and are shared by a significant group of people at a given period and/or space. We also occasionally use the word “costume,” a problematic term that usually denotes the idea of a form of dressing that is different from everyday practices such as those worn at festivals or in “traditional” dances. And at the National Puerto Rican Day Parade you can see it all: dress, costume and fashion.

The parade, to us, was central in demonstrating our view that no analysis of Puerto Rican culture can exclude the diaspora and that, as some have said, Puerto Rico is clearly a “transnation” no longer contained by a geographic border. Simply put, there is no Puerto Rico without its diaspora and there is no Puerto Rican national identity without the diaspora. The movement of material culture in the hands of the diaspora implies that dress practices and costume traditions are not just relocated to the United States with them but also modified by them to adapt to their new identity as minoritzed citizens. In turn, that material culture from Puerto Ricans “abroad” eventually makes it back to the island (archipelago, really) where it impacts ways of thinking about national identity, traditions and forms of dress. This cross-border movement also impacts local fashion enterprises, which benefit not only from information but also from capital coming from the diaspora.

Indeed, Puerto Rico’s status as a colony of the United States presents a special opportunity to study national identity and nation formation through dress, costume and fashion—central elements of visual culture in the country both in the past and the present. For us, this analysis started in 2006, when Raúl—the Puerto Rican one—casually told José—the Costa Rican one—about the Máscaras de Hatillo festival celebrated just next door from Raúl’s hometown of Arecibo. Decades of research, many trips and several published essays led to the publication of our upcoming book—in the meantime, we lived in three different states and finally got married almost 10 years ago. We found researching Puerto Rican fashion and dress together, not just fulfilling but also a thrilling common project. But, back to the parade.

The National Puerto Rican Day Parade is the oldest celebration of the Latin American diaspora in the United States. It is also considered the largest festival of its kind in the country—that scale, we finally experienced in person in 2024. The parade began in 1958 as a celebration of the Nuyorican community—Puerto Ricans living in New York City. The event is particularly interesting because it constitutes a festive gathering of an ethnic group that is not an immigrant group. This puts it in stark contrast with most ethnic parades in the United States and elsewhere in the world that are celebrated by members of communities that belong to immigrant ethnicities and, often, to a specific nation.

The National Puerto Rican Day Parade provides an excellent place for the exploration of the complexity of Puerto Rican identity. As we said, the parade shows how a form of national identity is shared between those in the Puerto Rican archipelago and those in the diaspora, but it is also clear that the parade highlights differences between the two groups and that, occasionally, it can create tension between them. In that sense, it seems clear to us that Puerto Ricans cannot look at the national state to provide an imaginary unity because their identity is strongly defined by people living across the world—particularly in the United States.

A group of women dance bomba wearing the skirts and headpieces typically associated with the dance style during the 2024 edition of the National Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City. Photo courtesy of the authors.

On that Sunday in June, Puerto Rican flags were abundant and the flag’s colors—the red and white from the Star and Stripes and the blue from the isosceles triangle on the left side of the flag—were part of the clothing and accessories worn by almost everyone watching the event—not us, see, we were still unpacking. The five-pointed white star in the triangle was also a central motif in clothing. Onlookers’ t-shirts included flag images, Puerto Rico maps and other symbols referencing various aspects of Puerto Rican culture. As one would expect, some of the imagery seen in t-shirts included coquí frogs, jíbaro pavas (straw hats), cockfighting, well-known buildings and monuments and images of famous individuals like baseball legend and philanthropist Roberto Clemente and salsa singer Héctor Lavoe.But it was the costumes and apparel of those who were official participants in the parade that drew our attention to the great diversity of ideas and motifs presented as part of the celebration of Puerto Rican cultural heritage. There was, for example, a large group of vejigantes from the Ponce festival in full costume, including elaborate papier-mâché masks. Several groups of women and children—with musical accompaniment or not—wearing bomba costumes—voluminous skirts sometimes matched with elaborate tops and sometimes simply worn with t-shirts identifying their organization.

Bomba, for the uninitiated, is a music and dance style with deep African roots that emerged by the middle of the 18th century. Originally, women wore underskirts or enaguas given to them by the hacendados (landowners) which they painstakingly decorated with jumbie-beads (Adenanthera pavonina) and glass shards. Along with bomba dancers, there were people walking along or riding floats wearing pava hats—a symbol of the Puerto Rican jíbaro. Some were holding sugarcane—a reference to an essential crop in the history of the island. One person wore a large muscular costume of the coquí frog with a pava hat, thus combining two essential elements of Puerto Rican cultural heritage.

A person dressed as a muscular coquí wears a pava hat and other elements of clothing inspired by the Puerto Rican flag during the 2024 edition of the National Puerto Rican Day Parade. Photo courtesy of the authors.

Groups of children dressed in what is usually considered the traditional national costume. There were women carrying colorful fans like those used during the Spanish colonial period, Caribbean carnival costumes, people dressed as cabezudos—giant figures with large papier-mâché or foam heads, and groups dancing singing plena—another autochthonous Puerto Rican dance with strong African influences originating in the late 1910s. Many children and adults dressed as what spectators might perceive to have been Indigenous Taíno dress or used apparel with Taíno symbols. Some people painted their faces with stripes and motifs stereotypically assumed to be Indigenous.

Nonetheless, many people were participating with elements not directly related to Puerto Rican national identity such as clowns, someone dressed in Egyptian garb and a couple of cosplaying Mandalorians with a uniform featuring the Puerto Rican flag and colors—with one of them carrying a Grogu doll from the famous television show. We were amused and entertained but, above all, excited to see our research all together parading along Fifth Avenue.

Group wearing a version of what is considered the Puerto Rican national costume. Men are seeing wearing pava hats. Photo courtesy of the authors.

We believe that the meaning of Puerto Rican fashion and dress is ambiguous, complex and constantly shifting both in the residents of the diaspora and those living in the archipelago. What better place than Puerto Rico to explore how this fluidity and, to an extent, ambiguity questions the notion that objects of dress have an essential meaning? Laura Briggs (2003) describes Puerto Rico as “the most important place in the world.” A country that is not a nation, a colony that is a nation. Borinquen (as the Taínos originally called the archipielago) became a colony and then a colony again. Worlds continue colliding in a place with long-standing ways of thinking and institutions set in place first by Spain and then by the United States.

And then, there is the Puerto Rican diaspora which keeps strong ties to their culture as they face racism and discrimination as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) citizens in the United States. They have furthered the effectiveness of dress as a political tool. Following on Briggs’ statement of Puerto Rico’s centrality in the world, Sandra Ruiz (2019) calls the country “…the perfect site to detangle the threads of modern globalization and the incessant desires of colonialism …” (1). Ruiz specifically talks about the Puerto Rican body as one that has endured colonialism for centuries. In her view, this was clear in the response—or lack of appropriate response—of the U.S. government for the tragic emergency brought by Hurricane Maria in 2017. So, how do bodies that continuously endure colonialism care about how they dress—whether on a regular basis, for a special occasion, or to follow global fashion trends?

The Puerto Rican diaspora offers a clear example of the practice of decoloniality as a lived experience by those engaged in the struggle for survival as colonized and racialized subjects that look to forms of fashion and dress—among other practices—to keep their culture alive. We believe that the celebration of the full spectrum of Puerto Rican national identity on display at the National Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York every year is not merely a celebration but an effort to assert a Puerto Rican presence right at the center of the U.S. capitalist/colonizer universe. Dressed in a variety of Puerto Rican elements of material culture, the diaspora and those who join from the archipelago make their existence more than visible—in front of the eyes of those displeased by the celebration of non-white culture in the United States—a reaction that plays over also in September during the celebration of Mexican and Central American Independence Day in large cities across the United States. This is decoloniality as lived experience manifested in the way we dress and fashion ourselves.

As researchers and privileged academics, we are concerned with the idea of promoting decoloniality as a theoretical and intellectual exercise. We are concerned with the perception of a “canon” on decolonial literature which seems to contradict the very reason decolonial thinking and literature emerged. Catherine E. Walsh (2018) precisely argues this point: “Another danger is the commodification of decoloniality as the property of a group of individuals (i.e. modernity/[de]coloniality project) and as a new canon of sorts, both of which erase and shroud decoloniality’s terrain of political project, praxis, and struggle” (82). Academic canons are dangerous because, once established, they are used to measure any production of knowledge outside academia, but canons favor intellectual and theoretical concepts that are often devoid of connections to real-life praxis and ways of thinking outside academia. Therefore, there is a danger in institutionalizing specific views on decoloniality and decolonizing and assuming that there is one “correct” way to conceptualize and execute the process of decentering Western-centric colonial views. This is of particular importance if it implies centering theory and academic responses over the way people—such as Puerto Ricans and their dress and fashion practices—live their daily embodied experiences of coloniality and decoloniality.

Woman holds political sign during the 2024 edition of the National Puerto Rican Day Parade protesting tax laws in Puerto Rico that allow for tax-dodging practices by non-Puerto Ricans. Photo courtesy of the authors.

But we must wonder, is decoloniality—not decolonization—on people’s minds during the National Puerto Rican Day Parade? Who in the crowd is thinking about delinking from modernity? Even then, can they think of decoloniality without first thinking of decolonization? Would any Puerto Rican be able to “surgically” extract a decolonial essence of Puertoricaness and then dress to present themselves to the rest of the world as Puerto Ricans? If, for example, decoloniality stands in contradiction to Christianity, then what would be the future of the elaborate costumes used at the Festival de Máscaras or the Fiestas de Santiago Apóstol—two Puerto Rican cultural celebrations framed in Catholic traditions? Are there any Puerto Rican—or Latin American—traditions that are fully free of colonial impact? Those involved in the Taíno Revival movement are searching deep into Indigenous roots to find ancestral practices that were violently diminished during the European invasion—a valuable yet difficult endeavor.

Our experience seeing, hearing and reading Puerto Ricans in their own words about how they choose to dress has taught us how complex the search for a visual national identity is. The joyous three hours we spent watching the 2024 parade—they left one of us with long-lasting back pain—felt to us like an approach to true praxis of decoloniality. We do not necesarily mean just at the parade itself but through the years of work resisting persistent colonization—not in our hands, mind you—but in the hands of those seamstresses making costumes for festivals and dances, of those exploring their Taíno heritage and dressing in ways they perceive as autochthonous, of the Young Lords dressing in their military-inspired garb to protest inequality both in the 1970s and now. 

Fashion and dress are used to mark a sense of belonging to a community or a nation. As material culture, dress—just like costumes and, in some cases, fashion—can be a significant visual mark of ethnic identity for Puerto Ricans. These representations of the nation also carry big emotional weight for people, particularly for the diaspora. It is, however, a big expectation for one specific element of dress, any costume used in a performance, or for one fashion design to encompass and represent an entire group of people. We have written about how all these elements and more collide in the national costumes worn by Puerto Rican Miss Universe contestants that strive—often creating controversy—to present the nation as if it can be represented by one outfit on the body of one woman.

Large conversations about how Puerto Rican identity is preserved and expressed through material culture have been conducted for centuries and will continue their ebb and flow, yet there is perhaps a je ne sais quoi that every Puerto Rican perceives and experiences as defining their identity. These conversations and disagreements are essential to continue figuring out what role dress, costume, and fashion play in the shaping and re-shaping of that identity. Dress, costume and fashion as expression of national, cultural and individual identity are and should remain fluid.

José Blanco F. is an Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Most recently, he edited the 5th edition of The Meanings of Dress for Fairchild Books and co-edited Fashion, Dress, and Post-postmodernism for Bloomsbury.

Raúl J. Vázquez López works at Bloomsbury Publishing as adoptions marketing manager for the United States and Canada. He has published extensively on Puerto Rican dress and fashion.