Jamaica on August 5. Ecuador on August 11. India on August 18. Three flags, three ceremonies, three different communities at Yonkers City Hall, all inside two weeks.
If you were not at one of them you probably had no idea any of it happened.
It Runs All Year
August is not a fluke. Go back to March 2024 and the city did the same thing in one of the coldest months of the year. The Irish flag on the 5th. The Ghanaian flag on the 7th. The Greek flag on the 25th. Three countries in three weeks, with people standing outside in coats for it.
The List Keeps Going
Italy. El Salvador. Jordan. Portugal. Puerto Rico. Ecuador, Jamaica and Jordan have each had more than one.
The city also raises flags that are not national ones at all. There is a Juneteenth flag raising. A Disability Pride flag raising. One for Vietnam veterans.
And that is nowhere near the whole list. Start naming them out loud and you run out of memory before the city runs out of flags.
What The List Actually Is
Here is the thing about it. Nobody at City Hall sat down and decided Yonkers should be internationalist. Each of those ceremonies happens because a community in this city asked for it, organized it, and turned out for it. The Ghanaian flag went up because there are enough Ghanaians in Yonkers to fill the steps in March. The same is true of every other one.
So the list is not a policy. It is a headcount. Read it back and it is a rough portrait of who actually lives here, assembled one weekday morning at a time.
Mayor Mike Spano is usually standing there when the flag goes up. Small thing, and it means more than it sounds like. Somebody from the city shows up.
Look at the photographs and it is mostly regular stuff. People in kente cloth in the cold. Women in green and gold on the steps. A little girl in a red coat holding a Ghanaian flag almost as big as she is.
Photos courtesy of the City of Yonkers.
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