The First Dominican Day Parade in New York City (1982)
and a tribute in cloth for 2025
In the summer of 1982, something new moved through the streets of Washington Heights. It wasn’t just a parade—it was a declaration. For the first time, Dominican New Yorkers gathered by the thousands not to protest, but to celebrate. Lining Audubon Avenue with flags, music, folklore, and pride, they created a space that hadn’t existed before: a public ritual of Dominican visibility.
The First Dominican Day Parade was organized by a community still finding its footing in New York. In the two decades prior, waves of Dominican immigrants—many settling in Upper Manhattan—had built businesses, raised families, and quietly shaped the city’s rhythms. By 1982, they were ready to be seen. Inspired by Restoration Day (August 16, the anniversary of the Dominican Republic’s second independence), the parade was both homage and arrival. It honored heroes like Gregorio Luperón while placing new names—like Normandía Maldonado and Mike Amaro—into the story of Dominican-American identity.
The route was modest: 165th to 190th Street. But the scale was anything but. Folk dancers in full Carnival regalia marched alongside floats, merengue bands, and neighborhood associations. The NYPD and FDNY joined in, signaling civic recognition. Families waved flags. Artists performed. Volunteers stayed after to clean the streets. It was grassroots at its finest—part performance, part proclamation, part block party.
And yet, it was more than celebration. It was infrastructure-building. The parade became an institution, one that would eventually move to Sixth Avenue, attract hundreds of thousands, award scholarships, and help usher in a generation of Dominican elected officials. What began as a neighborhood effort has become a global symbol of Dominican pride in diaspora.
In honor of that first step in 1982, we’ve created a special edition cap for this year’s 2025 Dominican Day Parade[1]. At its center is a commemorative patch: the Statue of Liberty, draped in the Dominican flag—a symbol of arrival, of visibility, of home. It’s a tribute stitched in thread and memory, tying Uptown to the island, the past to the present.
Available in limited quantities, the cap is a wearable archive. A reminder that once upon a time, a group of neighbors gathered on Audubon Avenue and reshaped how Dominicanidad lives in New York.