D.C. Latino History Special Issue
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Latino Adams Morgan
We spent the summer examining what Adams Morgan was like in the 1980s, when the neighborhood was the epicenter of the District’s growing Latino community.
Mary’s Center started in a basement on Columbia Road in 1988. Maria Gomez, the founder of the Center, is one of the people we interviewed for this special issue. Photo courtesy of Mary’s Center
Over the course of Hispanic Heritage Month, we will publish the best work created by our summer interns, a group of talented and hardworking local high school and college students.
Each week we’ll add new interviews, historic photos and other posts exploring the changes in Adams Morgan since the 1980s, a pivot era local Latino history.
FIRST STORY: Adam Morgan & the Twilight of ‘Latinidad‘
Still known as Washington D.C.’s most “Latino” neighborhood, Adams Morgan today is increasingly “white, young and millennial.”
In 1984, Margarita Diloné opened an insurance agency in a tiny office on Columbia Road NW, in the very center of Washington’s Latino community at the time.
Each year, elaborately decorated floats competing in the Latino festival would parade down the street in front of her building. Operating within a few blocks were some of D.C.’s first health and social service agencies catering to Latino residents. “[B]eing in Adams Morgan-Mount Pleasant was very central to the Latino market” at the time, says Diloné, president and CEO of Crystal Insurance Group, Inc.
After 34 years, Crystal Insurance is still going strong in Adams Morgan with roomier offices just a few blocks away on Belmont Road NW. Today, however, her Latino clients represent less than a third of her business. Her building, meanwhile, has a sushi bar on the ground floor and chi-chi nail salon across the street—signs of changing times in the neighborhood.
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