The 'Beat Street' team wanted to look at Flores's photographs to make sure they got the look and feel of the culture right. 'This is not a film about break dancing,' Harry Belafonte said. 'It's about the people who make up the hip-hop culture.'
Flores kept capturing images of his neighborhood and beyond. He photographed the protests in Washington Heights in response to the murder, by police, of a twenty-two-year-old Dominican immigrant named Jose Garcia, just a couple of months after the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
In subsequent years, Flores took pictures of a Mexican rodeo in Yonkers, Ecuadorian migrants who settled in Ossining, and Puerto Rico after the devastation of Hurricane Maria. He received citations from New York's City Council and the State Assembly for his 'service to their community.'
The bastards,' Flores said, when I spoke with him recently. 'They used my shit as source material, and all they gave me was a free subscription to The New Republic.' They gave him no credit, and little compensation.
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