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Los Primeros de Hialeah Park
What links a boy band, mayoral politics, Rudy
Giuliani, gambling and civic windmill-tilting? Those
juicy
Hialeah voters.
By Rebecca Wakefield
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Mayor Julio Robaina is teaming up with the
local teen group Los Primeros to stick it to
the pari-mutuel industry. Photo provided by
the city of Hialeah |
The
trumpets of a long-dead horse race fade into smooth
reggaetón beats. Three young men weave a tale of
history and community pride with voices that until
this moment in their short careers have mainly
captured the hearts of 15-year-old girls throughout
the county.
“El tiempo llegó y junto vamos ayudar/Hialeah! Save
the park/Destruyendo la historia será
criminal/Hialeah! Save the park.”
The young men are Pedro Perez, Andres Pita and Ray
Moreno,
Hialeah’s answers to the Kendall hipster, or maybe
to Aventura’s Chongalicious girls. The three form
the group Los Primeros, the story of which is a teen
movie waiting to happen. More on that later.
Right now a different movie is playing, and this one
stars Hialeah Mayor Julio Robaina. Robaina is
singing “No, no, no,” just as assertively as Amy
Winehouse is refusing rehab.
The fix he’s refusing is slot machines. On Jan. 29,
Miami-Dade County voters will decide whether to
allow slots at the local tracks, as Broward did a
couple of years ago. The pari-mutuels (Miami
Jai-Alai, Calder Race Course and Flagler Dog Track)
have sunk millions into convincing us to say Yes for
a Greater Miami-Dade (as their PAC is named). The
arguments are the usual ones — job creation, money
to local government, a cure for cancer, those sorts
of things.
Robaina is lining up with House Speaker Marco Rubio
in opposing slots. “The money does not stay in this
community,” he argues. “We’ve seen the figures in
Broward. It doesn’t go to education. It doesn’t
create the jobs. It’s a bad economic deal for our
community.”
The somewhat more venal reason Robaina opposes slots
is that, because of the influence of the local horse
tracks, historic Hialeah Park was literally written
out of the bonanza. The track in
Hialeah sits on 220 acres of park land smack in the
middle of the city. For generations it was the most
beautiful, some argue the best, horse racing
facility around. Everybody who was anybody attended
racing events there from the time it opened in 1925
until its closing in 2001.
It closed because the other two regional horse
tracks had succeeded in getting the state to change
the racing schedule to give each of them plum
seasons and leave
Hialeah
with the scraps. The little park couldn’t compete.
Since then, Hialeah politicians have been trying to
get better racing dates. The alternative is that the
park’s owner will try to put a mega development
there, similar to Midtown Miami or Las Olas.
More recently, the other tracks got a law made that
prevents slots at any pari-mutuels that were closed,
thus preventing
Hialeah from trying to come back from the dead. So
Robaina is striking back with the power of his
voting base. He has also secured the support of the
civic activists battling for the past year to save
the park from development.
I asked him, given the abysmal turnout of
Hialeah voters in the last election, whether his
opposition would even matter. He said that Hialeah
does turn out in force “when there’s a president or
a mayor on the ballot.”
That’s why presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani has
eschewed the initial primary states in favor of
visiting
Hialeah three times in recent months.
Hialeah
is a fairly large city, with lots of Republican
voters. Jan. 29 is critical to his survival. Both
parties have been trying to motivate voters with
ballot referendums and absentee ballot campaigns.
Statewide, more than 375,000 people have requested
absentee ballots, about 83,000 of them in Miami-Dade
and 7,200 of those in Hialeah. Hialeah has one of
the most effective absentee ballot operations
around. “To win Florida, you’ve gotta win Hialeah,”
Robaina quips.
Of course, the tracks have paid lots of money to
lobbyists to promote the slots. One of the saddest
is former congresswoman and local icon Carrie Meek,
who told the Herald she supported the slots
“as a form of economic development” for the black
community. Considering that the negative aspects of
gambling tend to hit hardest the poorest of people,
that’s like arguing that high school kids should be
allowed to sell cigarettes and beer at pep rallies
to pay for their books.
Anyway, strange bedfellows are made in politics.
Citizens to
Save Hialeah Park, which spent the past year
struggling with city government to find an
alternative to wholesale development of the city’s
Central Park,
threw in with Robaina on the slots. Alex Fuentes,
the group’s leader, asked the boys of Los Primeros
to come up with a theme song that would capture the
moment.
Stylistically somewhere between Justin Timberlake
and Pitbull, Los Primeros morphed from the
Monsignor Edward Pace High School antics of the
three longtime friends. They used to post funny
videos of themselves on YouTube, including one in
which the Cuban-American teens donned buckteeth and
danced like hillbillies in various locations
throughout Hialeah. It’s delightfully weird.
The video and song that got them the most attention,
though, was called “Eslow Motion,” featuring another
special dance routine, but also some decent music.
Their friends started forwarding that one all over,
and they began performing it at parties. This led to
actual paying gigs.
They got their big break when a
Miami debutante booked them for her quinceañera
party, which was featured on the MTV reality show
My Super Sweet 16. If you haven’t seen the show,
it’s all about crass wealthy people allowing their
spoiled teenagers to throw incredibly ostentatious
bashes to establish social dominance in their tiny
worlds.
After that, Los Primeros’ popularity boomed, and
they began to get more professional, with management
by Manny Castro and Carlos Pita. They’ve got an
album coming out in March that will feature the
catchy “Save
Hialeah Park” song as well as their more typical
party songs.
The three young men also go to community college and
work with their respective families at local
businesses — a construction company, a pharmacy and
a car dealership.
They are deeply rooted to
Hialeah and view the park song as their way of
giving back to the community.
“When I was a little kid, we used to go to a lot of
family gatherings there,” says Andres Pita. “We knew
about the park, but not the in-depth history. We did
a lot of research for this, and then we made it
something you could dance to.”
“Te pedimos un favor/Don’t let the park
diminish/Let’s push real hard/To have a last photo
finish.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Comments? E-mail
wakefield@miamisunpost.com.
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