In Boston, Hispanics press for cultural recognition
Jason Szep
Reuters
Mar 1, 2007
BOSTON (Reuters) - The grocers sell chili pods and sugar cane. Salsa dance rhythms boom from cafes, and people crowd into sidewalk restaurants for batidos, empanadas and other Latin delicacies.
Boston's Spanish-speaking Jamaica Plain neighborhood, which teemed with European factory workers in the 19th-century, is now the city's unofficial "Latin Quarter" -- and its residents are flexing their political muscle.
The city, one of America's oldest and still closely identified with the country's European heritage, elected its first Hispanic councilor, Felix Arroyo, in 2003. Arroyo, a native of Puerto Rico, wants to change a half-mile stretch of Jamaica Plain's Center Street to "Avenue las Americas," one of several proposals he is resubmitting to Boston's City Council.
Flags representing each country in the Americas -- from the Caribbean to Central America, South America and Canada -- would fly from street corners in the spirit of the Avenue of the Americas in New York, Miami and El Paso, Texas, he said.
"People will feel welcome if they see that the symbols that identify them are welcomed and accepted as part of the city," Arroyo, who circulated copies of the proposal to city councilors in August, said in an interview. "We will resubmit them no later than the last week of February."
Another group of residents want Mozart Park, where neighborhood teenagers play basketball, to be renamed "Park de las Americas". Some have proposed erecting a statue in Boston to Latin American independence hero Simon Bolivar.
