Tags Posts tagged with "Hispanic Heritage Month"

Hispanic Heritage Month

Second graders at Frank J. Carasiti Elementary School. Photo courtesy RPUFSD

Students at Frank J. Carasiti Elementary School are celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month in numerous ways.

Erin DeMarco and Julianne Warren’s second-grade class worked on a special project by researching well-known Hispanic people and each completed a flag on interesting things they learned about their person.

Students then presented their flags to the class and then students went on a museum walk of each flag. They discovered and recorded facts about different people and made connections.

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Image courtesy of USPS

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15 to Oct. 15), the U.S. Postal Service recently introduced new festive Piñatas! stamps in a dedication ceremony at the 36th Annual Piñata Festival in Roswell, New Mexico.

These Forever stamps come in four designs — two donkeys and two seven-pointed stars — celebrating the traditional Mexican fiesta favorite.

This is the third consecutive year the Postal Service has issued a Hispanic-themed stamp. In September 2021, USPS issued Day of the Dead stamps, and in July 2022, USPS issued Mariachi stamps.

“One of the reasons I feel proud to work at the Postal Service is because we are one of the nation’s oldest and most admired public service institutions. Part of that proud history is celebrating our multi-faceted heritage through stamps. Ours is truly a world culture, and our stamps allow us to weave together the many threads of our national tapestry, and piñatas are the perfect example of this,” said Isaac Cronkhite, chief processing and distribution officer and executive vice president, U.S. Postal Service, who served as the stamps’ dedicating official.

Other participants at the stamp ceremony were Juan P. Oropesa, City Councilor, Roswell, NM; Timothy Z. Jennings, Mayor of Roswell, NM; Alma Salas, Board President, Roswell Hispano Chamber of Commerce; Felipe Flores, Jr., Western Division, Senior Director of Processing Operations, U.S. Postal Service; Yesenia Prieto, Executive Director and Piñata Maker and Artist, Piñata Design Studio; and Emily Zaiden, Director and Curator, Craft in America Center.

Background

Image courtesy of USPS

Scholars believe piñatas might have their origins in China, where medieval European explorers described a New Year’s custom that sounds familiar to us today. A brightly decorated animal figurine was beaten with a stick until it broke open, releasing the seeds contained in the hollow interior. After the remains of the vessel were burned, the ashes were gathered for good luck during the coming year.

By the 14th century in Italy, a similar practice — possibly imported from China by Marco Polo — became part of festivities during the season of Lent. Rather than the brightly adorned figure that featured in the Chinese ceremonies, the Italians used an undecorated clay vessel called the pignatta (“fragile pot”), which was filled with sweets rather than seeds. As the custom migrated to Spain, breaking the pignatta — piñata in Spanish — evolved into a form of celebration on the first Sunday in Lent. The piñata came to the New World with Christian missionaries in the 16th century.

At the time of the Spanish arrival in what is now Mexico, the Indigenous people had their own traditions. The Aztecs, for example, decorated clay pots with feathers and filled them with small gifts. After hanging clay pots in front of statues of their gods, they struck the pots with sticks until the vessels broke and the treasures inside fell to the ground as offerings.

Spanish missionaries combined these ceremonies with their own Lenten tradition to attract Christian converts. Used as religious instruction, the piñata represented the devil and temptation. The blindfolded “player” symbolized blind faith armed with the stick of goodness; breaking open the piñata showed the triumph of good over evil.

Today, the piñata is still an important part of many celebrations in Mexico and the United States, and the custom has spread to other countries. Piñatas feature in all manner of festivities: holidays, birthdays, anniversaries and weddings. They are a traditional part of the posadas, a nine-day festival held in early December that commemorates Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem before the birth of Jesus.

Historically, the piñata-maker — called the piñatero or piñatera — began with a clay pot as the base, which was covered with shredded paper and engrudo (a paste made from water and flour or cornstarch).

The design emerged as the maker attached cones and other forms to the prepared pot. Gluing strips of curled and cut tissue paper over the entire structure, the artist turned the clay vessel into a swan or a bull or a seven-point star — almost anything imaginable. Today, a traditionally crafted piñata might begin with a frame made of reeds tied with string; a homemade piñata sometimes uses a balloon as the base. Whether mass-produced, handcrafted by artisans or made at home, piñatas are easily found to fit any occasion or taste.

The customs surrounding piñatas today are very similar to those from centuries ago. Filled with treats and presents, the piñata hangs by ropes that can be manipulated to move up, down or sideways. A blindfolded player tries to strike the piñata with a stick while the rope is pulled to make a direct hit more difficult. Each player takes a turn until one breaks the piñata, scattering its contents on the ground to be gathered up by all the participants. Though the meaning of breaking the piñata has evolved, the result is still the same: bounty for all.

Stamp Art

The stamp art features four digital illustrations of two traditional piñata designs — a donkey and a seven-pointed star. The bright, saturated color palette was inspired by Mexican culture, including the vibrant colors of small-town houses, traditional hand-sewn dresses, handmade toys and flowers, and classic piñatas themselves. The donkey illustrations are set against either a pink or orange background; the stars feature either a purple or green background. The background colors add to the exuberant and celebratory feel of the stamps.

Víctor Meléndez created the original art and designed the stamps. Antonio Alcalá was the art director.

The Piñatas! stamps are being issued in booklets of 20 stamps. These Forever stamps will always be equal in value to the current First-Class Mail 1-ounce price.

Postal Products

Customers may purchase stamps and other philatelic products through the Postal Store at usps.com/shopstamps, by calling 844-737-7826, by mail through USA Philatelic or at Post Office locations nationwide. For officially licensed stamp products, shop the USPS Officially Licensed Collection on Amazon.

On Oct. 13, The Ward Melville Heritage Organization celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15, at its Educational & Cultural Center with performances from Sol y Sombra Spanish Dance Company.

Attendees, including students from The Stony Brook School, were treated to an array of dances including flamenco, salsa, the Argentine tango, Mexican folk and more. Maria Loreta, founder and artistic director of Sol y Sombra, provided a brief history of the origins of the dances before each performance. After the presentation, audience members got up to try a few steps of salsa, and then sampled empanadas, churros and rice and beans.

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Vivian Viloria-Fisher sitting on her father’s lap in an early 1950s family picture. Photo from Vivian Viloria-Fisher

When Vivian Viloria-Fisher first ran for Suffolk County legislator on the Democratic ticket, during newspaper interviews she felt it was important to talk about her Hispanic heritage.

Holding the accordion, above, in the 1950s is Angel Viloria, father of Vivian-Viloria Fisher. Photo from Vivian-Viloria Fisher

“It was 1999 and there weren’t that many Latinos here at that time, and every time you read about a Latino, they were talking about someone poor or someone who was in trouble, and I wanted to be a role model,” Viloria-Fisher said. “I wanted kids to see that there are successful Latinos in Suffolk County.”

After she was elected, she took things a step further. While she ran the first time only using her married name, due to being registered to vote that way, she said after winning she decided to hyphenate, feeling it was important to include her maiden name because it was part of her identity.

During National Hispanic Heritage Month, Sept. 15 through Oct. 15, the former legislator looked back to her own heritage and was willing to give advice to young Latinos.

More than a former elected official who fought for protections for the environment and immigrants, she is the daughter of a bandleader who was at the forefront of the merengue movement in the United States during the 1950s.

Viloria-Fisher was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in December 1947. At the time, the island’s capital was called Ciudad Trujillo after the dictator Rafael Trujillo. Three months after she was born, her family fled to New York City to escape the tyrant’s regime.

Her father, a merengue bandleader named Angel Viloria, and his family had a music business in the Dominican Republic. Trujillo made himself wealthy by stealing money from different businesses, she said, and when her father spoke up, things weren’t safe for her family.

The Vilorias moved to New York, the birthplace of her mother, Mary. Viloria-Fisher’s mother was a daughter of a Marine of Irish and Scottish descent who was stationed in the Dominican Republic. It was there that he met the former legislator’s grandmother, and they moved to New York. However, when Viloria-Fisher’s grandparents separated, her grandmother moved her children back to the Dominican Republic.

In New York, Viloria-Fisher said her father did everything to earn money from teaching piano lessons, tuning pianos and playing any gigs that came his way.

“He did everything he had to do to make a living which artists have to do,” she said.

Soon after they landed in New York, her father and his band hit it big with hits such as “Palo Bonito (La Cruz)” and “Compadre Pedro Juan.” Angel Viloria y su Conjunto Típico Cibaeño released three albums in two years, while performing in New York City. During the summer months, the band would also play in the Catskills. She said while her father and his group would wear suits when performing in the city, she remembers when they were upstate they would wear the ruffle shirts that many associated with Latin music.

Back on the island of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo wouldn’t let Angel Viloria’s music be played even though he gifted the musician with an accordion before he left, to paint a picture of goodwill. Viloria-Fisher said because money was tight, her father used the accordion throughout his career.

She said she remembers jam sessions in her childhood apartment where a young visitor was Tito Puente, who became known as the “King of Latin Music” with international fame. When she was 6 years old, many merengue and salsa artists held a show for her father at New York City’s Palladium in July of 1954 before he headed to Puerto Rico as a headliner at the Caribe Hilton in San Juan.

“They never thought they would never see him again,” she said.

“I wanted kids to see that there are successful Latinos in Suffolk County.”

— Vivian Viloria-Fisher

 

It was during his trip to Puerto Rico that Angel Viloria died at 41. While the family was told he died of a blood clot, due to his brother being found dead in a river in the Dominican Republic — Trujillo’s calling card — it was believed that Viloria-Fisher’s father was killed by the dictator as well.

“It was really tough,” she said. “There was always a kind of a whispered suspicion that Trujillo had something to do with it.”

After her father’s death, her mother began to work. Due to the nuns at school requiring her and her siblings to speak English, and her mother needing to improve her language skills, her mother insisted they speak only English at home. However, Viloria-Fisher grew up listening to her father’s and other Spanish-language music and developed a talent for speaking foreign languages.

Her ear for languages served her well as she went on to teach English and Spanish in local schools, including Advanced Placement Spanish in the Three Village Central School District for 12 years. She later went on to become chair of the district’s foreign language department. A legacy left behind at Ward Melville High School is the Spanish Honor Society being named the Angel Viloria Chapter.

“I was very proud of that because the name has to qualify as being culturally significant in order to name the chapter after someone,” Viloria-Fisher said.

Today, Viloria-Fisher, who has been married to her husband, Stu, for 36 years, has five children and five grandchildren. Among the photos and mementos she shares with them, including a letter from her father to her mother when he performed in the Catskills, is her dad’s accordion displayed on a shelf in her home. The instrument was pawned many times by her mother, Viloria-Fisher said, whenever money was tight in the early days. However, her mother was always able to buy it back.

Viloria-Fisher served the 5th District in the county legislature from 1999 to 2011 and was deputy presiding officer for six of those years. As the first Latina in a Suffolk County legislature seat, Viloria-Fisher has advice for young Latinas who may want to run for elected office.

“Don’t hide who you are,” she said. “Let people know who you are, but go beyond identity politics.”