So, as of Jan. 15, a full 50 percent of the officially declared Democratic candidates for Mayor of Philadelphia are Latino. 

If you don't think this is significant, you haven't been paying attention. 

One of the Latino mayoral candidates, Nelson Diaz, is part of the storied Puerto Rican community, which has — to date — given us all of our Latino representation in the city and state (currently, María Quiñones-Sánchez in city council; Ángel Cruz and Leslie Acosta in the state legislature). The other Latino candidate, Ken Trujillo, hails from the second most sizable Latino community in the city — those with Mexican heritage — a group that is only now starting to gain political agency with professionals such as Trujillo and his campaign's director of policy Fernando Treviño, at the fore.

The fact that both Diaz and Trujillo have thrown their hats in the ring tells you one thing: Philly's Latinos are done being overlooked politically. So very done.

On the same day as Diaz announced his candidacy in North Philly, in the Old City section of the city U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Zane David Memeger met with selected members of the Philadelphia community to discuss how to build trust between the community and police. Not a single Latino community member was at that table.

Asked about the glaring omission by AL DÍA journalist Arturo Varela who was covering the meeting, a flustered aide was first visibly chagrined, then hustled off to consult with another organizer. When she returned, she showed Varela the email inviting one Latina to the meeting. One. In a city where 13 percent of the population is Latino, and where our community is subject to high stop-and-frisk rates, excessive force (Aida Guzman-Lt. Jonathan Josey case), are targeted for extortion with seeming impunity (police officers vs. bodegueros) and are racially profiled (police collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

Nutter, by the way, in a shamelessly disingenuous response to Varela's question, said he "did not check everyone's ethnic heritage." O-o-o-kay then. How about inviting some people you know are Latino, dude? How about tapping those community organizations that most directly deal with the mistrust and fear of police in both the immigrant and non-immigrant Latino communities in the city? How hard is that?  

It's the "Philly shrug" that gets to me. From political leaders, yet.

But it is not only Nutter and the Department of Justice event organizers. Who can forget that last year, in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rep. Bob Brady, who is chairman of Philadelphia Democratic City Committee, essentially said that Latinos had enough representation with (at that time) two Latinos in political office — Quiñones-Sánchez in the City Council and Cruz in the Pa. legislature?

The city's media has been running full tilt with mayoral candidate coverage, but pitifully little of it concerns the 50 percent of the official candidate slate that is Latino. Philadelphia Magazine's analysis of the city's labor union anguish about the roster of candidates doesn't actually state Trujillo's take on any issues of importance to different unions, for example, instead it gives us a quote from one labor leader who doesn't know who he is. (In a subsequent post at Philly Mag the same labor leader pleads with City Controller Alan Butkovitz — who isn't running — to reconsider because  no one else is "qualified.") 

It's hard not to hear that "not qualified" as code — it's been used so often to dismiss what those of us with accents, identifiably Latino surnames or brown skin have to say, no matter how well reasoned, researched and articulated. It is hard to think anyone would consider Diaz and Trujillo, both of them with years of public service in political posts under their belts, under-qualified. 

The fact is that in Philadelphia as it is today, countless public microaggressions conspire to make us "foreign" to the city, even when we born and bred here, or have made our lives here for decades. From our exclusion from the Holder event, to the lack of real attention paid to the Latino candidates, to the fact that in an otherwise feel-good-article about sibling educators that appeared Jan. 16, Daily News writer Solomon Leach erroneously referred to Puerto Ricans as "immigrants," when they are in fact U.S. citizens from birth .... 

The cognoscenti have already ruled that the odds are not in Trujillo's or Diaz's favor, and yet even if neither end up as the Democratic candidate in the mayor's race, as Philly Latinos we have already won big-time.

I can't help thinking about an anecdote from photographer David Cruz, who covered the beating death of Luis Ramirez in Shenandoah, Pa. for AL DÍA years ago. He told me that as the reporting team got to Shenandoah, some of the residents who saw them — walking into the heart of the city from outskirts where they had parked the AL DÍA car — spread the news. "The Latinos are coming," the residents whispered to each other so the powers-that-be in the town would hear and know about the arrival. 

The Latinos aren't coming to Philadelphia, we're here. And like the town fathers in Shenandoah no doubt understood from the alarmed whispers, our (suddenly visible) arrival signals that Latino perspectives, Latino concerns and voices, our presence here and now in the heart of Philadelphia, is Philadelphia's new narrative. Members of our vital, vibrant and determined Latino communities are making it so, and I, for one, am grateful to Trujillo and Diaz for putting our city's political class on notice.