The Grenadiers are in the World Cup, the Scots left traffic cones on half the statues in town, and somehow the most political thing in Boston this month was a jersey. (FIFA’s words, not ours.)

This week, we get into the kit FIFA tried to ban and what our people did about it, a Love Letters columnist hunting for World Cup romances at a Scottish bar in our backyard, and the flag going up at City Hall.

There’s a lot worth talking about.

Let’s get into it.

Days before the World Cup, FIFA blocked Haiti’s kits for being “too political.”

The jersey depicted the 1803 Battle of Vertières, the final battle of the War of Independence, the one that made us the first free Black republic.

So the image of our founding was the problem.

In Boston, fans doubled down.

On Juneteenth, with Haiti playing Brazil, they filled Boston Common in sharp reds and blues, including pencil skirts, makeshift crop tops, ski goggles, and flags wrapped around heads.

Haiti lost the match, but nobody left.

They kept moving through the park in clusters, photographing one another, singing long after the final whistle.

The presence was the point, not the result.

The jersey at the center of it came from Ayida Solé, founder of The Haitian Croissant, who looked back at the clean 1974 kits and built something you could dress up or down.

“A timeless artifact,” she called it.

Koko Dubuisson, a nurse and part-time influencer, paired hers with a burgundy floral cutout skirt and baby-blue kitten heels.

She told the Globe her mother still demands photographic proof before she leaves the house, and that dressing well was never vanity.

It was armor against being seen as “just another immigrant.”

To Councilor Ruthzee Louijeune, you can’t divorce the Haitian story from the story of independence.

That’s exactly what FIFA tried to do. It didn’t work here.

For about two weeks, Boston was flooded with Scots in town for the World Cup, and the Globe’s Meredith Goldstein spent it doing what she does best: hunting for love connections.

On Friday night, she landed at The Haven, the fully Scottish restaurant in Jamaica Plain that serves haggis and rings in New Year’s at 7 pm (midnight in Scotland).

The place was packed with men in kilts watching Scotland lose to Morocco.

Her question for the locals: did anyone fall for a visitor?

She’s still collecting answers, and she wants Boston’s stories, even anonymous ones.

The same city that filled the Common with Haitian flags had room for kilts in JP.

Not bad for a host city.

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Trump has spent months claiming the United States is the only country that grants citizenship to children born on its soil.

His administration made it a cornerstone of the immigration crackdown, but it’s not true.

About three dozen countries offer birthright citizenship, Mexico among them.

Vivianne Petit Frere knows this firsthand.

She fled Haiti in 2019, ended up in Tijuana, and opened a restaurant called Lakou Lakay, Creole for “home.”

Her granddaughter was born there two years ago: an automatic Mexican citizen.

Petit Frere is a Haitian Bridge Alliance organizer, part of the same network advocating for Haitian migrants across the country.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on Trump’s birthright order soon.

The Dominican Republic removed theirs in 2007.

More than 130,000 people are still stateless.

That’s a warning, not history.

Your weekly map of what’s worth showing up for.

Free, ongoing English conversation classes. Not for you, maybe, but exactly what a newer-arrival neighbor needs. Forward it to someone who could use it.

A hands-on class in authentic Haitian recipes with cultural stories woven in and tastings at the end.

💃🏾 Haitian Folklore Summer Program for Kids

A movement- and culture-based summer program rooted in Haitian folklore. If you’ve got school-age kids in the family, or a cousin who does, this is one to pass along.

Those fans on the Common, singing after Haiti already lost, taught me something important.

That showing up whole, not just when we win, sends a powerful message.

If this issue gave you something to talk about over dinner, that’s the job done.

And if you’ve got someone in your life who should be reading this — a cousin in Brockton, a friend in Randolph — forward it their way.

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Mèsi anpil. See you next Thursday.

GUSTAVE • FOUNDER, SAK PASE BOSTON