This has been a long year. In my line of work, leading an immigrant-serving organization, every day seems like a cavalcade of bad news. As we head into our semiquincentennial, it’s hard to feel a sense of pride or patriotism about where our nation is headed. The collapse of due process, a Congress that has abdicated all of its obligations and responsibilities, the normalization of “disappearing” friends and neighbors — it all leaves me wondering if the aspirational notions America has long offered have finally faded. After all, history tells us that all great civilizations eventually come to their end, don’t they?

It’s only natural then that I go into the new year looking for some ray of hope. Some indicator that the universe’s moral arc does still bend towards justice. That progress is still measured in totality through two steps backwards and a giant leap ahead. The good news is that I’ve found one. It’s from the unlikeliest of sources and, for me, it starts my year off on the right note. It’s the Mummers.

What on earth could this unique Philly tradition have to offer me and the way I feel about the future of my country? Well, it starts with the fact that I’ll be marching in the parade for the first time in my life. If you have the fortitude to brave the elements on New Year’s Day morning, or even care to rise early enough and turn the telecast on in your pajamas, you’ll see me doing my best to strut and bop in a crocodile outfit (still not entirely sure why …) to Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock“.

It’s not the costume I’ll be wearing or the music I’ll be walking to that makes this opportunity so personally significant. It’s the fact that I’ll be participating at all. It’s the people that invited me to join them and the manner in which they did so.

Overturning expectations

A child of Indian immigrants, I’ve grown up in the Delaware Valley. I’ve known about the Mummers parade, probably as long as I’ve followed the Phils, Eagles and Sixers. I can still recall turning on the broadcast, quizzically trying to understand what it was, who these people were and why they seemed to go endlessly from morning ’til night.

As an adult, with a career in Philly’s non-profit, political and government worlds, I came to understand more about the Mummers tradition. I learned about the different brigades, the 2 Street clubhouses and the more sordid side of the parade’s history — its ties to minstrel shows from the early 1900s, the use of blackface in various acts over the decades, and the racially and ethnically charged stereotypes that clubs have leaned into over the century-plus. I just assumed it wasn’t a place for someone with my name and skin color. I grew up in a region that, in the 1980s and 90s, had a relative dearth of any kind of diversity. I was used to encountering tables that had no seat for me.

Humans tend to simplify the complex world around them by making assumptions. When those assumptions harden, we make it harder on ourselves to imagine that another set of facts could exist, defying the reality we’ve created in our mind. I’m as guilty of that as anyone.

It’s why, when a collision of circumstances led me to interact with the Mummers for the first time, I came away with one of my most eye-opening Philadelphia experiences. In 2016, while serving as General Manager of Philly’s historic Reading Terminal Market, I began an experiment called Breaking Bread, Breaking Barriers. It was an effort to test whether food’s innate ability to connect, could get people of completely different backgrounds, strangers to one another, to find some common ground. By getting people to discover what they had in common through staple recipe exchanges, discussing food habits and traditions, we could potentially bring a fast diversifying Philadelphia a bit closer together.

Over a year and a half, the project brought together 12 Philly communities that either lived adjacent to one another and didn’t know each other or had some tension and misunderstanding amongst themselves. One of those pairing, per the request of the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission (one of the Breaking Bread project partners) was to bring the Mummers, Mexican and Chinese communities together over a series of dinners.

The context in which we held those dinners was challenging. In the prior year’s parade, two acts stereotyped both the Mexican and Chinese communities, only further hardening conceptions (at least in my mind) of who the Mummers were open to. We invited members of a Mummers club called Golden Sunrise — the last of the fancies (the Mummers known for elaborate costumes and stage sets), to join leaders of the Chinatown and Mexican diaspora communities.

When we got together to talk about the traditions underlying Pepper Pot Soup (we included a chef who was a Mummer), Chinese dumplings and freshly rolled tortillas, I anticipated a clunky, somewhat tedious set of conversations. At best, maybe the parties would leave the project with an unstated truce to not publicly revile one another. What I experienced was something completely different.

Life is full of second chances and this one came at a time when I most needed it.

The good folks of Golden Sunrise defied every assumption I, and others in the room, had formed about who the Mummers were. They were diverse; they had members of varying religions, and included women in their leadership ranks. They had an intentional ethos of not only leaning into the parade’s true history as an amalgam of various immigrant traditions, but of also making clear that, through their club, anyone could participate in the Mummers.

I recall those dinners as being amongst the freest flowing, jovial conversations that took place through the entirety of the Breaking Bread project. The Chinese participants even invited the Mummers to partake in the annual Dragon Boat racing event along Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River.

But at the end of the project, Golden Sunrise took the unexpected step of inviting me and my two brown skinned children Leela and Ren to march with them in the 2018 parade. The thought would have never crossed my mind. Maybe it wouldn’t have crossed theirs. But by sitting down with each other, allowing food to lead us towards discovery of what we shared with one another, it was impossible to allow my preconceived caricatures to persist.

Thanks to Golden Sunrise for breaking my assumptions

I regretfully never took them up on that offer. My kids were five and nine at the time and my wife would have probably divorced me if I suggested that they be up by 6 am to spend the rest of the day in sub-freezing weather. With the onset of the pandemic, the cancellation of the 2021 parade and the inability to bring people together in person as Breaking Bread did, I lost touch with the club and the remarkable people I met. The story could have ended there. It didn’t.

Life is full of second chances and this one came at a time when I most needed it. Following a press announcement of the 2026 version of Breaking Bread — an effort for which The Citizen is a media sponsor that will bring together over 1,000 diverse Philadelphians to find what they have in common with one another and engage in a conversation about what citizenship should mean in America’s 250th year — Mike Carwile, a Golden Sunrise member I met in 2016, reached out with a surprise email. He wanted to find out if Golden Sunrise could participate in the upcoming Breaking Bread project and, once again, extended an invitation to join them in the parade.

I can still say I live in a city where people are imagining and taking action towards an inclusive future — a notion that is now denigrated in too many circles.

This time, I’ve accepted.

I didn’t accept it simply because of the novelty of doing something I thought I could never do. I did it because as long as there are people like Mike, Jesa Stiglich (the club captain), Mike’s father, Joe, and the various other members I’ve met through Breaking Bread and my pre-parade prep, there is reason to maintain hope. They do this to have fun, but they also carry an ethos towards their club that envisions realizing the kind of community they want to live in. That muscle needs to be flexed now more than ever.

Getting up at 5 am, walking three miles with a heavy iron framed backset, and not quite knowing how or when I can use the bathroom for the parade’s entirety, doesn’t exactly sound like the ideal start to the new year. But this is too important to me personally and culturally. It meant a lot when they extended that invitation eight years ago. It means far more now. I can still say I live in a city where people are imagining and taking action towards an inclusive future — a notion that is now denigrated in too many circles.

I’m looking forward to walking down Broad Street in the crocodile outfit. My kids will probably laugh at me more than with me. But I’ll walk the parade route with a ray of hope that, despite all the forces running counter, gives me a bounce to begin the new year with. A heartfelt thanks to the members of Golden Sunrise for breaking my assumptions, defying the norms of our time and demonstrating how we can still come together, united, despite our differences.

Anuj Gupta is President/CEO of the Welcoming Center.

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