
Mayor Martin Walsh cuts the ribbon on the start of the annual Dorchester Day parade.

Vietnamese-American Community of Massachusetts members ride and wave flags in the Dorchester Day Parade.

Members of Dynasty International march through Fields Corner.

Members of the Colonial Pipers Bagpipe Band.


Ayanna Pressley and Michael Capuano greet Dorchester residents.

City Councilor Frank Baker marches in Fields Corner.

Binh Nguyen.

The New Liberty Jazz Band.
Parade route spans Boston’s largest neighborhood
For the better part of the last 22 years, Linda Dorcena Forry has seen the Dorchester Day parade from the front, where the politicians march. First she marched as an aide to former state Rep. Charlotte Golar Richie. Then as 12th Suffolk District representative and finally 1st Suffolk District senator.
Now out of office, Dorcena Forry enjoyed the parade from the sidelines on a stretch of Dorchester Avenue across from St. Gregory’s Church.
“It’s really nice to see the whole parade, because it shows the diversity of Dorchester,” she said.
The largest and most diverse neighborhood in Boston, Dorchester has no dearth of civic pride.
Dorchester Day, first observed in 1904, commemorates the founding of Dorchester by the Puritans in 1630. The parade continued to grow in popularity as the neighborhood’s Irish American population expanded through most of the 20th century.
In the last 50 years, as Vietnamese, African Americans, Cape Verdeans and Latinos have moved into Dorchester, the parade too has evolved from a predominantly Irish event to a more heterogeneous mashup of cultural expressions.
Headed by the bagpipe-bearing Boston Police Gaelic Column and the largely Irish-American elected officials who represent
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the
neighborhood in the Legislature’s House and Senate, the parade last
Sunday also featured several Latino dance troupes, a rainbow-festooned
Dot Out float, a contingent of Cape Verdeans marching with the group CVC
Unido, a large contingent marching with the Vietnamese American
Community of Massachusetts, and the Dynasty International Caribbean
Carnival mas band.
“Thirty
years ago, this was mostly a white parade,” said Dynasty bandleader
Stephen Coker, riding in a pickup that served as a sound truck for a
contingent of a dozen dancers in brightly colored costumes dancing to
pulsing soca music.
When
blacks first began moving to Dorchester in significant numbers in the
1960s, they settled to the west of the neighborhood along Blue Hill
Avenue. As the black population grew in the 1970s, they moved into the
Codman Square area, past Washington Street to Bowdoin and into Ashmont.
The
integration of the neighborhood in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s didn’t
always go smoothly. Binh Nguyen, who moved into Dorchester in the 1980s,
recalls the racial violence he and other political refugees confronted
when they moved to the neighborhood.
“It was tough for everybody,” he said. “We had our car windows smashed, our houses vandalized, our children beaten up.”
But
the Vietnamese who settled in the neighborhood, many of whom were
political refugees, wove themselves into the fabric of Dorchester,
buying homes and opening businesses that revitalized the commercial
backbone of the neighborhood along Dorchester Avenue. Today, the
Vietnamese community of 20,000 occupies approximately four square miles
centered around Fields Corner.
“The
neighborhood is very friendly,” Nguyen said, marching in the midst of
members of the Vietnamese American Community of Massachusetts, bearing
flags of the South Vietnamese republic. “Blacks, whites, everybody has
learned how to live in harmony with other people. We’ve assimilated into American life.”
“You
can walk into the Blarney Stone and there are segments from every part
of Dorchester,” noted state Rep. Dan Hunt, a third-generation Dorchester
resident who grew up in St. Anne’s parish in the Neponset section of
the neighborhood.
Now
with rising real estate values hitting Dorchester and other Boston
neighborhoods, intra-Dorchester rivalries between parishes and
sub-neighborhoods have less meaning, Hunt noted.
“You
can’t always afford to live where you grew up,” he said. “The South
Boston-Dorchester rivalry is gone. People from Savin Hill now live in
Neponset. People from Neponset now live in Savin Hill.”
Beyond
the social and economic forces that have driven change in the
neighborhood, the parade route itself brings the neighborhood together.
It follows Dorchester Avenue for nearly three-anda-half miles from Lower
Mills just shy of Milton to Columbia Road near South Boston, passing
sub-districts and parishes with distinct identities.
“You
see the entire cross section of Dorchester from Lower Mills to Savin
Hill,” said 12th Suffolk Rep. Dan Cullinane, walking at the head of the
parade with other elected officials.
And
the nature of a parade brings together unlikely themes with its mix of
JROTC uniforms, gay pride rainbow outfits, carnival costumes, bagpipes,
South Vietnamese uniforms and flags.
“We
don’t have many other social spaces that bring us all together like
this,” noted Four Corners resident Gibran Rivera, taking in the scene
from in front of the Blarney Stone pub with his son and friends.
Politics and parades
Of
course the Dorchester Day Parade would not be complete without a
healthy dose of campaigning. Leading the parade were Gov. Charlie Baker,
Mayor Martin Walsh, U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano, City Councilor Michael
Flaherty, Suffolk County Sheriff Steve Tompkins, state Reps.
Russell
Holmes, Dan Hunt and Dan Cullinane. Elected officials marching in their
capacity as electeds are not allowed to march with campaign workers,
carry signs or distribute campaign literature.
Marching
behind the front lines with T-shirt-clad campaign volunteers were
at-Large Councilor Ayanna Pressley, running against Capuano for the 7th
District seat; Darren Howell, Liz Miranda and Roy Owens, running for the
5th Suffolk District seat; At-Large City Councilor Annissa
Essaibi-George and District 3 Councilor Frank Baker.
All
five candidates for the Suffolk County district attorney’s office
marched in the parade: 5th Suffolk District Rep. Evandro Carvalho,
Shannon McAuliffe, Brian Henning, Rachael Rollins and Linda Champion.
Charlie
Baker’s campaign crew, marching well behind the governor and other
incumbent electeds, consisted of more than 50 supporters wearing white
Baker/ Polito T-shirts.