A ‘home away from home’ on “La Esquina”
By hola | Published | No Comments
Exhibition pays homage to Mount Pleasant Street as a gathering spot for local immigrants
This story began about four decades ago, during El Salvador’s civil war, when killings, disappearances, torture and other violence propelled a mass exodus from the Central American country. As people fled for their lives, many made the long journey to Washington, D.C., where Quique Aviles recalls the District’s Mount Pleasant Street as a welcoming destination that beckoned them.
“For most of us, Salvadorans who came in the ’80’s and ’90’s, landing in D.C. meant landing on Mt. Pleasant Street one way or another. If you didn’t live there, you were told about it,” says Aviles, a poet and performance artist, who arrived in Washington in 1980 at the age of 15.
Now, after nearly 40 years, Mt. Pleasant is a place rich in Central America culture, including such enduring traditions as playing checkers on the corner, or “La Esquina” as it’s called in Spanish.
“La Esquina,” is also the name of a new photographic exhibition and oral history project directed by Aviles and featuring photographs by Rick Reinhard that capture real moments in the lives of real men who created a home away from home on Mt. Pleasant Street.
“I’ve lived in Mount Pleasant since 1973,” Reinhard says. “Everyday, I’d watch these guys on the corner,” never paying them much attention until he began photographing them last fall for this exhibition.
“There are two primary occupation on La Esquina, playing checkers and talking: talking about politics, life, about whatever they want,” Reinhard says. “It is a kind of living room on the street.”
Aviles, whose own poetic and artist work often returns to matters of interest to the local Salvadoran diaspora, met Reinhard many years ago. So Aviles asked Rick to be “the eye” of the project. They formed a team along with and Quique’s wife, Hilary Binder-Aviles, and retired Smithsonian curator Olivia Cadaval, and others to create a collaborative project that focuses on Mount Pleasant and its significance to the culture of the local Latino community.
With the assistance of the Mt. Pleasant-based immigrant advocacy group, Many Languages One Voice (MLOV), they applied for and won a grant from HumanitiesDC to produce the exhibition. Others in the team included Hugo Najera, a local DJ, writer and community activist; sound engineer Nate Taylor; and master carpenter Alfredo Herrera, who had collaborated many times with Aviles in the past; as well as MLOV’s Miguel Castro Luna and the organization’s executive director, Sapna Pandya.
Besides the photographs Reinhard took last fall on “la esquina”, the exhibition also features important landmarks of Latino Mount Pleasant like the local bodegas and restaurants, and the Monsenor Romero Apartments building that was reconstructed after a five-alarm fire in 2008 left hundreds of Latino residents homeless. When it reopened after the fire, it was renamed for the Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, whose assassination in a San Salvador church in 1980 became symbolic of the violence that forced a quarter of the country’s total population to flee before the war ended in 1996, according to experts.
The Mt. Pleasant neighborhood was also in the epicenter of protests for Latino civil rights in the 1990s. One of the few historic photos by Reinhard included in this show is shot (pictured left) of La Esquina’s 7-Eleven—windows broken and glass shards littering the sidewalk—in the aftermath of “los disturbios” (also known as the Mt. Pleasant riot). In 1991, the riot was sparked by the shooting of a Salvadoran immigrant in Lamont Park at one end of Mt. Pleasant Street.
After police handcuffed the bleeding man and left him lying in the street, the population got angry, setting off two days of protests. As a result of “los disturbios,” new organizations were formed such as the now-defunct Latino Civil Rights Task Force, established to better understand and address the Latino community’s problems. The Latino Economic Development Corporation (LEDC), created to promote Latino businesses and entrepreneurs, also began in the riot’s aftermath and remains an important local institution in the community today.
“My objective with La Esquina was to put a human face, a real face on the corner to represent real lives in the photographs,” Reinhard says.
While fewer and fewer Latinos live in Mount Pleasant with each passing decade, according to U.S. Census figures, the neighborhood and its main thoroughfare that bears the same name remain today at the center of D.C.’s Latino history. Mt. Pleasant street is still a second home for Washington-area Salvadorans, even those who have moved out to the suburbs but return to the neighborhood for shopping, dining, and hanging out on the corner.
“It is the epicenter of home away from home. They find establish people here. It is a really interesting and unique multicultural encounter,” according to Olivia Cadaval, who contributed to the oral history elements of the project.
Outdoor exhibition planned for May
The exhibition was on display at GALA Hispanic Theatre’s lobby in March but there will be several other opportunities to see the work it contains. Reinhard says high winds and bad weather forced them to cancel plans to premiere the exhibition in March on the same corner where many of the photos were taken. The outdoor exhibition is now set for for Sat., May 12, from 1 to 4 p.m..
La Esquina” will also be on display at the Latinx Studies Association conference at the Marriott Wardman Hotel in D.C. this July presented at the D.C. Historical Society conference at the D.C. Convention Center next November.
From math to photography
For a young man majoring in mathematics, becoming a photographer seems a most surprising outcome. Reinhard recalls how he discovered photography as a hobby after college, when he was enrolled in the Peace Corps.
“I was the only person with a major in math,” among his Peace Corp cohort. He accepted a position at a teacher’s college in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
He had taken a Kodak Instamatic with him to Honduras. Other volunteers had better cameras. He noticed that a better camera produced better photographs. As soon as he had a chance, he traveled to the Panama Canal Zone and bought a new camera.
“This started like a pastime,” he says, not unlike the way people use their smartphones to take selfies today.
After returning to the States and settling in Mt. Pleasant, Reinhard freelanced for five years for the Washington Post. Then he began using photography to collaborate with organizations working in solidarity with Central American groups like el Comité en Solidaridad con el pueblo de El Salvador (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, also known as CISPES). That solidarity shines through Reinhard’s photography on La Esquina, giving viewers an intimate and endearing window into the everyday lives of a generation of Salvadoran immigrants.
—Rosa Alejandra Hernandez
Recent Stories
