Why Massachusetts Latinos Decided to Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month This Year

Editor’s Note: Para la versión en español de este artículo, visita El Planeta.

On a Sunday afternoon in late August, Lucy Pineda was still arranging chairs at Glendale Park in Everett, Massachusetts. For 20 years, the Everett Multicultural Festival has given the city a place to celebrate the cultures represented in its community and bring neighbors together. Organized by Latinos Unidos en Massachusetts (LUMA), the festival brings together families from countries across Latin America, the Caribbean, and beyond. This year, Pineda wasn’t sure anyone would come, as they had in previous years. But they did.

Last year, Pineda canceled the same festival, leaving her community without one of its major annual celebrations. It was one of several Latino and Hispanic community events canceled at a time when families were being separated and detained by ICE agents.

The festival has grown every year, Pineda says, drawing more people and more countries. But getting people to attend in 2026 required a different approach. Pineda made videos on LUMA’s social media assuring families they would be safe.

“The sheriff told me, ‘Lucy, don’t worry, everything is under control,’” she said. “Tell people everything is going to be fine.”

As Massachusetts celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month, Lucy Pineda’s festival is not the only community celebration drawing Latino families back together, even as these events take place alongside continued immigration enforcement. Massachusetts recorded 572 ICE arrests in July, one of the highest monthly totals since last September’s enforcement surge, according to a WBUR analysis of immigration enforcement data.

In the summer of 2025, Massachusetts lost a season of public celebrations.

LUMA canceled the Everett festival in July. Worcester's 33rd Latin American Festival did not happen, as organizers cited costs, lack of sponsorships, and a climate of dread that kept people from events, food banks, work, and school. Everett canceled the fourth annual Fiesta del Río nine days before its September 20 date, after residents reported ICE sightings at Rivergreen Park. Brazil Fest on Martha's Vineyard was postponed indefinitely on September 15 after a community poll found most people feared the event would draw enforcement back to the island.

The 2025 pattern was national. Brookings survey data cited in a recent review of the past year found 15 percent of foreign-born Latinos now avoid parks and public recreation areas.

At La Colaborativa in Chelsea, a community organization that supports the social and economic well-being of vulnerable residents, Gladys Vega, the organization’s President and CEO, watched the same year bring job losses to her community as immigration enforcement intensified.

“There were, and still are, families who don’t know what will happen in an hour or what tomorrow will bring,” she said.

What she describes is not a community that stopped functioning even though they avoid certain places. It is one that keeps going while afraid.

“Our heritage is not only music, flags and dances, though those are essential,” she said. “Our heritage is the ability to get back up. To help a neighbor. To stand in solidarity not only in moments of celebration but in moments of difficulty, which are the moments we are living now.”

Everett was not the only city in Massachusetts prioritizing residents’ safety this summer. Boston and Chelsea spent June and July showing they could safely host enormous crowds while keeping their communities moving. As a host city for the World Cup, Boston ran a 16-day FIFA Fan Festival on City Hall Plaza for up to 5,000 people a day and staged six neighborhood watch parties built around its Cabo Verdean, Haitian, Colombian, Brazilian, and Portuguese communities, including Colombia against Portugal in East Boston. 

Days after the final match, more than 60 tall ships arrived for Sail Boston — Peru's BAP Unión, the largest in the fleet, alongside Chile's Esmeralda, Argentina's Libertad, Ecuador's Guayas and the Dominican Republic's Juan Bautista Cambiaso.

Latino families showed up for all of it, in the same months the arrest numbers climbed.

Liliana Patiño, a psychologist and senior director of community impact and development at Eliot Community Human Services, told The Latino Newsletter that knowing where you come from can create “a sense of belonging” — and that can shape a person’s sense of identity and connection to others.

“I think this year more than ever we have to be conscious that our being Hispanic is our greatest gift,” she said. “In recent years they have made us feel that being Hispanic, that having our Hispanic history, is something bad. And on the contrary, I think that’s our superpower.”

Liliana supervises the Eliot Family Resource Center in Everett, a free access point where families from across the state can get help navigating education, housing, and health systems in their own language. She has tried to help members of her community find that feeling of belonging in ordinary things — their language, food and music, or simply the smile of someone who makes them feel at home. 

That sense of belonging may help explain why so many Latino families participated in this year’s events ahead of Hispanic Heritage Month, helping keep celebrations going across the state.

In August, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed the PROTECT Act into law, legislation the Healey administration describes as providing the strongest protections against ICE in the nation. State Rep. Andy Vargas, who chairs the Legislature’s Black and Latino Caucus — which introduced the bill — said he hopes the law will help restore a sense of security in immigrant communities.

However, the law’s protections are limited to specific settings. It restricts civil immigration arrests without a judicial warrant or court order at public schools, child care centers, health care facilities and, beginning November 3, courthouses.

“We cannot control the federal government,” Vargas said. “But we can make the work harder for them when they come looking for immigrants who are not creating problems in our community.”

Vargas explained the hope is that the law gives families more confidence to take part in everyday community life: “That our community feels more confident bringing their kids to school, participating in community activities, coming out to celebrate and be with each other. Because we know how important it is in our community to gather and laugh and dance and celebrate.”

For Josiane Martínez, who chairs the Massachusetts Governor’s Advisory Council on Latino Empowerment and will host its Hispanic Heritage Month celebration in the State House on September 25, belonging is only part of what the month represents. The other is recognizing the growing influence of the Latino community and the responsibility that comes with it.

“Now we are in positions where decisions get made,” she said. Representation has followed. Stephen Zrike became the state’s first Latino education secretary this year, Pedro Martínez has led the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education since July 2025, and Juana Matías became the state’s first Latina housing secretary in April.

“Our voices have to be present not only during this month, but in every space in Massachusetts,” she added.

Martínez counts more than 30 community meetings in three years, and points to a list of state actions the council pushed for: Executive Order 615 on language access, the 2023 Tuition Equity Law, free community college programs, and the 2024 Affordable Homes Act.

Vega of La Colaborativa, who serves as vice chair of the Governor’s council, sees the month’s impact as something to be measured by what comes after it.

“Our celebration has to come with actions, with goals, with the fight to create more opportunities for our young people,” she said. “Our heritage is not only what we receive today. Our heritage is what we leave built for our children, for our grandchildren, for the people who with so much effort built the economy of this great nation.”

Rosanna Marinelli is a multimedia correspondent for The Latino Newsletter and the News Editor at El Planeta.

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