Words, only words column: 'Exemplary Latinos' are invisible in today's Philly

(Read Spanish Version / Lea versión en español: 'Latinos ejemplares' son invisibles en la Filadelfia de hoy)

Take Francisco Miranda, whose statue is on the Franklin Parkway, here in downtown Philadelphia.

We walk by, indifferent to the Latin American hero cast in stone and he, frozen in the past as he was about to pull his sword, can't do much to communicate who he was.

He is one of those exemplary Latinos honored by the city with a statue that no one today really knows about. His is one of a number of carefully sculpted statues of South American revolutionaries erected in an English-speaking city populated mostly by those who don't share his ancestry.

This exemplary Latino came from what is today Venezuela. He was an authentic pioneer who envisioned Independence for Latin America much earlier than Simon Bolivar, or José de San Martín.

Miranda set foot in Philadelphia during the Declaration of Independence times, befriended the Founding Fathers in our city, before leaving -- following his adventurous spirit -- to become a protagonist of the French Revolution, a decade or so later.

His name is the only Latino name inscribed on historic Arc de Triomphe in Paris where the heroes of the famous 1789 French Revolution are inscribed. He is, nevertheless, a perfect stranger to the rest of the world.

Here in Philadelphia, the hero was momentarily remembered in what must have been a simple diplomatic ceremony that, very predictably, disappeared quickly into oblivion immediately after it was over.

Francisco Miranda, however, is a towering figure in the fight for Independence in the Americas, with a heart so ample that he went on from North America to France to earn his rank in the French Revolutionary Army, and then even survived a trial against him, when the new government, after decapitating Louis XVI, started devouring its own children...

Of course Miranda spoke French, Spanish, English, and God only knows if Russian as well. He visited the court of Tsarina Catherine in Moscow. He loved women, especially those endowed with natural beauty and sentenced with earthly power….

Next time you walk by his statue in the Parkway, stop and look up to his face. See his grin, his quick right arm grabbing to unsheath the sword, ready for the next fight....