This weekend’s annual Festival Betances in the South End is the oldest and longest running Latino celebration in New England. Attracting thousands over the course of its three days, it is the most authentic of the many Puerto Rican festivities being held this month.

Later in the month, the city will host more formal ceremonies in more culturally neutral spaces, like the flag-raising at City Hall Plaza at noon on Mon., July 25.

On July 31, the celebrations culminate in a parade. After decades of winding along Blue Hill Avenue to an impromptu amusement park in Franklin Park, the parade was moved against the wishes of many organizers to a downtown route (a fate suffered by other ethnic parades as well). These days participants stroll from the Hynes Convention Center in the Back Bay to Government Center. But now the tiara-ed beauty queens wave and men honk their horns at largely unimpressed passers-by.

But Festival Betances is still on Puerto Rican home turf, Villa Victoria. And it’s run by the community-based association, Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA).

During the 70s the hotly contested Parcel 19 was transformed into the Villa Victoria housing development that architects characterized as the island homeland of IBA members. Like the festival, the central plaza honors the father of the Puerto Rican independence movement, Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances, a Puerto Rican patriot and a surgeon whose medical contributions benefited Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. His writings and speeches helped awaken a national consciousness in Puerto Rico.

Besides celebrating Puerto Rican history, customs, and cuisine, the festival seeks to showcase the full range of heterogeneous music and dances that reflect the diverse cultural influences on this US territory. The most conspicuous musical sources have been Spain and West Africa, although many aspects of Puerto Rican music reflect origins elsewhere in Europe and the Caribbean. Puerto Rican music culture today comprises a wide and rich variety of genres, ranging from indigenous genres like bomba y plena, aguinaldo and danza, to recent hybrids like reggae ton.

The official Festival Betances schedule lists Friday night as a “Noche de Bohemia.” A Bohemian Night in Puerto Rican parlance suggests impromptu self-entertainment. The mood is nostalgic and the memories evoked are communal as well as personal. People volunteer from the crowd to sing old favorite songs like boleros, recite poems learned in childhood, and generally recall those good old days.

Saturday is dubbed International Day with a large variety of dance ensembles and bands playing everything from salsa and meringue to hip-hop and timba. Old men too stiff to dance face off in a huge domino tournament, and the headliners at night are Jesus Pagán y Su Orquestra
Sunday is Puerto Rican Heritage Day and it begins with the corny, quaint, but undeniably hilarious greased pole competition.

The afternoon and evening programming features Boston percussionist and bandleader Jorge Arce as well as special guests, Ocho y Mas, an eight-man ensemble that regularly plays dates in NYC. It’s a salsa ensemble that sounds much larger than its numbers suggest. Fans say the group “really gives dancers what they want.”

And speaking of dancing, the word on the street is that this weekend’s Festival Betances will for the very first time attempt to set the Guinness World Record for the “Largest Salsa Dance in the World.” Maybe you’ll consider helping bring that title to Boston.