D.C. Latino History Tapes Now Online
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“In the 1950s, the Hispanic community was not very well known in the (Washington) metropolitan area…by the year 1962, you began to see more Hispanic people in the area.… As the number of Hispanics grew, the politicians began to take interest in the community, making contacts with them with the purpose of helping them with their needs. And with that began the growth of various aid centers for the Hispanic community.” — Luis Gonzales
Newly digitized history collection offers new insights on the formation of Washington D.C.’s Latino Community
Like many Latin Americans who migrated to the District of Columbia during the past half century, Alicia Roque found community, employment, and a stable life in a vibrant ethnic neighborhood.
Arriving from El Salvador in 1969, Roque joined D.C.’s small but growing Latin American population in Adams Morgan and slipped seamlessly into the social fabric of the neighborhood, capitalizing on personal networks woven by her predecessors to land a job as a house cleaner and later as an administrative aide.
Alicia Roque’s experience in Washington, D.C. did not quite match the images she saw on TV, nor did it reflect the rags-to-riches tales that inspired millions to uproot their lives and relocate to the United States. Yet her job, her family, and her community provided the financial security and emotional stability that she desired, allowing her to craft a new life in the nation’s capital.
Roque’s narrative is only one of more than two dozen oral histories recorded by local student-researchers in the Mt. Pleasant, Adams Morgan, and Columbia Heights neighborhoods during the early 1980s, a time when Latin Americans were immigrating to Washington, D.C. in far greater numbers than ever before. Although these taped interviews have long been available to researchers in cassette form in the Washingtoniana Section of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library downtown, they are now available at the click of a button. This past summer, D.C. Public Library archivists digitized many of the oral histories and posted them on the library’s website, making the history of the D.C. Latino community far more accessible to the general public.
“The Latina woman, yes, she tries to push through, she goes to school to take English classes, she goes to the university. Many (women) who have arrived here as domestic help have overcome (barriers)…I came as a social worker from my country, but because I did not know English, I had to wash plates and clean offices…But we (women) are strong, and it is we who open the doors to our husbands and our children.” – Casilda Luna
The early 1980s was a time of rapid change in Washington, D.C.’s ethnic relations. In prior decades, immigrants from across Latin America had settled in the District and had fought to win public recognition and governmental support. As the 1980s began, thousands of Central American migrants fleeing war, civil strife, and economic turmoil in their homelands began arriving in Adams Morgan, the historic hub of D.C.’s Latino community, and neighboring Mount Pleasant. The mixture of Latinos and whites with longtime African American populations engendered a strong multicultural environment in each neighborhood.
Latino-led social service agencies expanded to accommodate the new residents, many of whom had fled their native countries quickly and were in dire need of support. Recognizing the need to both preserve the collective historical memory of the older generation of Latinos and incorporate new migrants into the community, the Latin American Youth Center (LAYC) won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a multimedia project designed to celebrate and promote D.C.’s Latino cultural heritage.
The project strived to give the student-researchers, recruited from local schools and community organizations, a sense of belonging as well as train them as leaders and build valuable communication skills, according to Lori Kaplan, LAYC executive director.
Student-researchers interviewed a wide cross-section of Latin American activists, teachers, health care workers, government employees, and homemakers of all ages and national origins. Although it began with oral histories, the project blossomed over the next few years to incorporate photography, art journals, and video. It led to bilingual curricular materials for classroom and community education use and a learning module book of workshops. Students held workshops, presented their findings to the public in multi-media slide shows, and even sponsored a regional academic conference of their peers up and down the East Coast engaged in similar pursuits.
“They came directly from the embassies…the embassy employees, such as cooks, nannies, chauffeurs, all of these: (their employers) did not allow them to leave, as they were afraid they will flee…(The embassies) paid them less than they would in their own countries….The program was very difficult, because (employees) had to abandon the places where they worked…They were then illegal, so we had to help them.” – Marcela Davila
Dr. Lisa Wheaton, who directed the project, recalled that by the end of the three years, the project had documented the history of D.C.’s Latino community and had given its student-researchers a sense of confidence. At the same time, Wheaton noted, it helped raise consciousness around the District regarding the plight of recent Latin American immigrants and why they had chosen D.C. as their home.
At the same time, Beacon College, an experimental campus-free university based on Ontario Road in Adams Morgan, carried out a set of oral histories designed to capture the voices and experiences of working-class Latina women in the District of Columbia. According to Barbara D’Emilio, who coordinated Beacon’s Oral History Project, researchers sought to give voice to the interviewees and their stories while highlighting their invaluable yet often overlooked contributions to the city. Aided by Mt. Pleasant resident Cristina Espinel, the Beacon College team transcribed the interviews and paired them with slides to present to community groups and at public events.
Beacon College’s transcripts, as well as the LAYC project’s recordings, were donated to the District of Columbia Public Library in the late 1980s. Both sets of oral histories reside in the DCPL’s Oral History Research Center, which has recently digitized much of its collection in order to preserve the integrity of the recordings and increase their accessibility to the general public, according to Lauren Algee, digital curation librarian for D.C. Public Library Special Collections.
“I believe that we have arrived at a period/time in which politically, we have organized well in the city. We have an office of Hispanic affairs, which we have achieved with our political force…I believe that in the next four years, if we continue to progress politically….we will have Latinos in positions of influence and power in the (Marion Barry) administration. I believe… that we will continue to make progress, with pain, natural growing pains, but continue progressing. My attitude is extremely positive….the ‘Latino’ is awakening.” – Sonia Gutierrez
The oral histories cover a myriad of nationalities and professions, from interviews with homemakers to chats with police officers; from small business owners to community activists; from the recently arrived to those who had emigrated in the 1950s. Residents expound on an equally rich variety of topics: the role of language and the difficulty of cultural adaptation; the struggle to obtain social services; the cost of affordable housing; drugs and alcohol; racial and ethnic tensions; questions of identity and assimilation; the purpose of faith and religion; bilingual education; how to start a business; gender and domestic violence; and a host of other themes that continue to be relevant to immigrants today.
Like Alicia Roque, many of these Latin American immigrants managed to cultivate community and a sense of belonging in the Washington metropolitan area, laying the foundation for today’s flourishing Latino population. Her comments and those of her fellow interviewees provide a rare glimpse into the everyday lives of Latin Americans who settled in the District of Columbia during the 1960s and 1970s. As Central Americans began arriving en masse in the early 1980s, D.C.’s established Latino network assisted them in adapting to their new city. These new arrivals then went on to change the face and the dynamics of the District’s Latino community, and it has continued to mature and evolve over the past 35 years.
The LAYC and Beacon College oral histories, recorded at this pivotal moment in D.C. Latino history, aptly capture the memories of the older generation of Latinos while welcoming the voices of the younger generation of immigrants who would soon become leaders themselves in Washington’s Latino community.
Learn more by visiting the Public Library’s DCDig page on the Latino Youth Community History Project.
—Patrick Scallen
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