HumanitiesDC’s first Latina executive director wants all Washingtonians to feel seen and heard
By hola | Published | No Comments
Growing up in a family that valued activism, Rebecca Lemos Otero learned from an early age how to make a difference in her community. Her mother, former D.C. Deputy Mayor BB Otero, founded the early childhood education nonprofit CentroNía in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood in 1986. Her father, Fernando Lemos, co-founded and continues to lead another key Latino nonprofit in the District, the affordable housing organization Mi Casa.
Lemos Otero jokes that “like any good family business,” her mother put her to work helping out at CentroNía from the time she was a teenager – an experience that led her to start gardening with young people in 1997 and eventually inspired her to co-found City Blossoms in 2005.
“I was pretty young when I started it,” she recalls, “but I had two parents who had started nonprofits and so it just felt like, ‘yeah, I know there’ll be a lot of work, but it’s possible.’”
After about a decade leading the kids, community and gardening organization she co-founded, she began her current role as the executive director of HumanitiesDC in 2021, stepping in to lead an organization that plays a key role in chronicling D.C. history at a time of rapid changes not just to the District’s population, but who considers D.C. home.
She is a D.C. native and first-generation Latina, as well as the first Latina to lead HumanitiesDC in the 43-year history of this local cultural mainstay that receives funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other places, and provides grants and fellowships fueling dozens of local cultural and historic preservation initiatives around the district each year. [Full disclosure: Hola Cultura currently has a grant from HumanitiesDC for its podcast series “Artistas in the Capital” and has received other grants from the organization over the past decade.]
In our interview below with Lemos Otero, she spoke passionately about the power of collaboration, giving people space for creating and her hope the organization can “help D.C. residents really feel seen and heard and respected for their experiences, their cultures, and the value that they bring to the city.”
What role did your mother play in your passion for community development and working with D.C.’s youth?
Both my parents are community activists and very active and always have been. So in our household, there was always one phrase: community activism. It was one of our values and an expectation.
My two brothers and I grew up with that very much instilled in us. It definitely affected all of us and affected my trajectory. Also, our household was always very lively with people who were doing community-based work, political or anything like that, in Latin America or in the U.S. It was also not just that my parents did this, but their circle, people who were always around did too.
What were the values and passions that your parents passed on to you in the realm of working with D.C.’s Latino community?
One of the values was always the expectation that whatever you do in life, you do it with the idea of helping make your community stronger and better. And both because of where I grew up and my heritage, our community was always very D.C., Latinos who had some kind of connection to D.C., or were coming in and being here. My work now expands to all of D.C., but definitely there was very much of an understanding of: ‘how are we helping the Latino community in D.C. have a voice and be represented, [and] just have access to all the same things hopefully everyone else does?’ That was instilled. On top of that was also the idea of partnership and not doing it on your own, but being part of a movement, being part of a group.
What were you most excited about when you stepped into the role of executive director of HumanitiesDC?
I left the role where I had been a founder of another organization. I had been there for a long time. Part of my coming to the HumanitiesDC was being ready for a new adventure and stepping into a new community because humanities are not my background, at least not my academic or professional background.
I was excited to take on this role because I’m so passionate about D.C. and the people that create this city. As someone who grew up here, I definitely know the difference between Washington and D.C.
So [I] want to be able to pass on those stories and make sure that we are helping people advocate for why D.C. is a place that should be respected and considered. We create some really rich stuff. We have real value – really being able to use the humanities as a tool for highlighting community development work, but also for highlighting our story.
That’s kind of what humanities does, right? The human ties.
That sounds like the perfect role for you as a native to D.C. and the work you’ve done, as well as your parents’ work.
I also had a passion for philanthropy, specifically community-based philanthropy. It would be cool to be able to be in a position where I can help think about how funds get to people who would not normally get to tell stories, [stories] that would not normally get heard.
Given demographic changes in the last few decades, how has diversity changed in the district? And how did these changes impact HumanitiesDC?
Growing up in Adams Morgan, in many ways, I feel like it was one of the more diverse neighborhoods. The rest of the city sometimes felt very polarized by race and by ethnicity. And it was also Chocolate City, which was awesome in many ways to be able to grow up in a city that really was a center for African American culture and power.
The change, I feel, started happening in Adams Morgan before it happened in other parts of the city. I think the drastic changes in D.C. over the last 10 or 20 years, make those people who grew up here have a fear of erasure. We have [already experienced erasure] to some degree [in] that we were [local] D.C. and people were always talking about [federal] Washington. They weren’t talking about the cultures that make up D.C., right? [Or] all the music and other culture that’s produced here [locally].
As the transitions happen, more and more people move, and new people come in. I think that there is a lack of places and spaces for conversation between new people and those who really consider D.C. home through like the last seven generations or first-generation immigrant families. Our role at HumanitiesDC is to make sure to help people feel like their stories are cared for and are valued and respected, while also trying to make sure that those [stories and history] are shared with new people, so that they understand the community they’re coming into. It influences how they decide to approach their neighbors, live here and act civically. I don’t think it’s going to change the transitory aspects of our city. But how do we figure out how to kind of live all together?
How have demographic changes and rising costs changed the approaches that you guys take and the work being proposed and produced by grantees?
I think one of the biggest issues that we face is that a lot of the people who want to work with HumanitiesDC or want to do projects that we would fund can’t necessarily afford to live in D.C. anymore. We’ve been having a lot of conversations around what does it mean to feel like you’re from D.C. even if you don’t live within the city limits? There are lots of us who grew up within the city limits but now live in Hyattsville or Silver Spring or Alexandria, because it’s more affordable, but still feel D.C. is home. How do we interact and engage those people even though they moved right over the line and not totally out of their own life choices?
Is D.C. a geographic location or state of mind? It’s a state of mind to some degree. How do we make sure that people who feel that they are D.C. still get to participate and share their lives? We’re thinking about that. We’re also thinking about looking at neighborhoods that we know are probably going to change in the next few years. Is there a place for us to be proactive with people in the meantime? Not to be able to control the prices of homes and what they’re selling for, but to be able to [document] this is who was here.
In terms of being proactive in neighborhoods that do appear to be next on the horizon for gentrification, how do you go out and encourage community members to do humanities work?
I’ve been in this position for a little less than two years. My team is relatively new. I think we’re still trying to understand and listen to people to figure out what the best way to do that is. Those are some of the kind of hard questions we are trying to figure out.
I can say that my overall philosophy is that I try to be thoughtful and wait until I’m invited into a community instead of assuming that someone wants to engage with me or our organization. So it’s much more about how to make ourselves known and available, so that when people are ready they know that we’re here and ready to partner or have a conversation.
What is really important for the organization in the future?
First off, for more people to know who we are, what we do and what we have available as far as resources. We grant about a million dollars worth of funding a year. It’s not huge, but I want to make sure that people know that it’s there. It’s a resource for them to consider.
The other is really rooting all of our programming in partnership. Instead of us trying to create and produce content by ourselves, most of our programming is being designed with the idea that we’re not the content experts, that there are lots of scholars, community experts, community historians, etc. that already have the content and the passion and the expertise. It makes much more sense for us to create spaces that they can fill and share their knowledge – whether it’s through a podcast, monthly events, or gatherings.
What kind of legacy do you hope you and your team leave?
I want to be thoughtful of what other people want it to be. So I think a lot of our work in this last little bit of time is really trying to put ourselves in a position where people really see us as their council – not what is our agenda per se. But I can say that we help D.C. residents feel seen and heard and respected for their experiences, their cultures, and the value that they bring to the city.
This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
– Interview and story by Olivia Drey
– Edited by Yaretzi Chavez and Jordan Luz
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