“Celebrating Hispanics”

“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” is, perhaps, the most brilliant marketing phrase in the world. Something happened in Vegas (Las Vegas) on Saturday the 13th of September, it will not stay in Vegas.
September 15-16 is Independence Day in Mexico and myriad other countries formerly colonies of Spain; it also is the kick-off of Hispanic Heritage Month in the United States of America.
The Las Vegas Hispanic community kicked off the month with a parade that was jammed with Mexicans, Guatemalans, Panamanians, Nicaraguans, Colombians, Ecuadorians and others from almost every country south of the Rio Grande. I even met people from Belize, formerly British Honduras.
It wasn’t the Rose Parade or a Presidential Inaugural Parade, certainly, but people from various national and local groups representing various communities in Mexico, for example, organized into informal marching groups, a smart marching drum and bugle corps, Mexican folk (folklorico) dancers, a hundred Zumba dancers, new and antique cars and marvelously, dozens of Mexican cowboys wearing Stetson western hats riding their horses in the last of the Wild West towns, Las Vegas, Nevada.
How fitting it was that Mexican cowboys rode in the parade, after all, it was Spanish settlers and their sons and grandson Mexicans that invented the “cowboy” (the Vaquero) in Mexico over two hundred years before Amer