“Nothing has changed at all,” insists Assembly Member Maritza Davila ahead of this year’s Knickerbocker Avenue Puerto Rico Day Parade, which took place on Sunday. A local version of the storied parade that happens around the same time along Fifth Avenue, the one on Knickerbocker has been going for about six years and involves closing the street for much of the afternoon. 

The tradition had started as a response to the police annual efforts to shut down the neighborhood that day anyway, in order to deter “the young, often inebriated revelers” afterpartying from the city’s main parade. “We were barricaded for about 15 years,” Davila told me, something she called “an insult to the Puerto Rico people.” This was around the time she took office, when she rose to take the place of her old boss, the disgraced politico Vito Lopez, who died shortly after sexual harassment allegations forced him out of office. According to various accounts, the parade itself had been started by a handful of rather active constituents and local business owners who had brought the notion to Davila’s attention as she was establishing her political presence in the neighborhood.

“This is the people’s’ parade. It doesn’t belong to one person. It belongs to the people. However, it take a lot of planning and work goes into it,” says Davila. I had been on the phone with her after hearing from Robert Camacho, who claims to have been among the original instigators of the parade in the last decade. He had written a letter, back in April, to the committee running the parade announcing his resignation. It had become Davila’s show and Camacho wasn’t having it.