For 75 years, Goya Foods has grown an empire of canned beans and other Latin food staples that have been woven into the city's Latino DNA.
For Puerto Rican and Latino newcomers to the city, and second- and third-generation kids, the sight of a supermarket aisle lined with stacks of familiar navy-blue cans with the blocky Art Deco logo has long translated to "home."
Goya-sponsored floats have been a staple of Puerto Rican and other Latino parades since the 1980s. So it is fitting that Robert Unanue, president of Goya Foods, and Carlos Unanue, president of Goya de Puerto Rico - cousins and the third generation to run the company - will be parade marshals for the National Puerto Rican Day Parade on Sunday.
The company's origins date to when all immigrants from Latin America were called "Spanish." Goya's founder, Prudencio Unanue, was a Spanish migrant by way of Puerto Rico who arrived in New York in 1916, when there were an estimated 16,000 Spanish speakers in the city.
According to the new coffee-table book "If It's Goya It Has to Be Good," by Guillermo Baralt, Unanue studied business and became a customs broker. He set up a food-import business in the Financial District in 1936, just as the city's Puerto Rican population began to grow and settle on the West Side of Manhattan, in East Harlem and in downtown Brooklyn. READ MORE
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