Sunday was a day of Latino celebration in New York. Thousands of people took the streets of southeastern Manhattan on the occasion of the Loisaida festival, which for three decades has celebrated Puerto Rican culture with a day of food, music and art on the streets of New York, as reported in EFE.

Loisaida is how the Boricua poet Bimbo Rivas called the Lower East Side.

About 15,000 people attended the event, a stunning show of typical Latin American cuisine and traditions. The Festival included workshops and and open spaces to dance salsa, samba, charanga and even rock and roll performed by artists such as the Boricua musician Fran Ferrer or the band Afro-Brazilian Batalá.

The event began with a lively carnival, which toured part of the six blocks that Loisaida encompasses with a parade of heads dedicated to community figures such as Carmen Pabón, Bimbo Rivas, Tato Laviera or Armando Pérez, as reported in EFE.

The festival, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, takes place a few days before the great celebration of Puerto Rican culture in the city, the Puerto Rican national parade, which has been the subject of controversy in recent weeks for the homage that will pay the independence leader Oscar López Rivera.

López Rivera is an FALN leader who is recently released from prison. The FALN was a Puerto Rican paramilitary group that fought for Puerto Rican independence, as reported in New York Latin Culture. 

The 2017 parade is Sunday, June 11 starting at 11am. Fore more information, visit www.nprdpinc.org