Making the Maps
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Mapping Change in Adams Morgan, Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights
Difficulties, Set-backs and Perseverance in the Creation of Something Exceptional
Although the set of maps created for Hola Cultura’s oral histories and mapping project are straightforward and easy to understand, creating them was a long and complicated process—anything but simple. The Hola Cultura interns soon discovered there were many obstacles that made the work time consuming and demanding. Key information was sometimes difficult to find, and combining data from numerous sources required special care and long hours of work to ensure the resulting maps were accurate. These were just some of the complications interns faced.
To grasp the overall impact of the project and the significance of the GIS maps, it is helpful to understand how they were made, and the challenges involved in making them.
The maps were part of a larger project focused on the neighborhoods of Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, and Mount Pleasant. The project combined oral histories, in-depth research on the area’s history, and a thorough look at Washington, D.C.’s affordable housing programs, to produce an informative and meaningful description of the changes in the Latino population living in the area from 1970 to 2010.
Some of the maps Hola Cultura interns created for our Fall 2015 Special Issue.
Despite the obstacles, the Geographic Information System (GIS) maps are one of the project’s greatest achievements. By using U.S. Census data collected over a half-century, Hola Cultura’s GIS interns demonstrated how the neighborhood has transformed, offering close-ups on specific locations and sections of the tri-neighborhood area.
The maps were created by Hola Cultura interns Byron Antonio Marroquin, Elvis Herrera, and Nicholas John with the guidance of Professor Ronald Luna of the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographic Science. The team created over 100 maps, displaying things such as cultural spaces, the change in median rent prices, public housing areas, housing areas with expiring subsidy contracts, the change in the Latino population from the 1970’s to 2010, and the geographic concentration of Washington, D.C.’s five largest groups of Latinos by country of origin.
Since the project depended on statistics from a number of different sources, one of the fundamental challenges was finding reliable information that could be double-checked and validated. The maps reflecting changes in D.C.’s Latino population relied chiefly on information collected by the U.S. Census Bureau during its once-a-decade U.S. Census, as well as U.S. Census figures compiled and uploaded in easier to use online files by the National Historic GIS Database (NHGIS). To assemble maps measuring affordable housing data, the team used the National Housing Preservation Database. Cultural Spaces, which are establishments such as churches, restaurants, or businesses where immigrants express their ethnic identity and cultural citizenship and engage in cultural activities, were also important to document and map. To construct these maps the team relied on a database originally created by Dr. Luna. However, the data had to be updated and confirmed, and new cultural spaces were discovered and investigated by the team. This required the GIS team, with the assistance of Hola Cultura’s high school interns, to walk the streets of these three neighborhoods verifying and expanding the list of Latino cultural spaces.
Lack of consistent data forced the research team to change their expectations for some of the maps. Initially, the team wanted to map Latino settlement patterns using data at the block-group level, which contains multiple city blocks, and is one of the more precise geographic units of measurement for the U.S. census. Unfortunately, while block-group level data were available from the 1990, 2000, and 2010 census years, it was not available for 1970 or 1980. To maintain consistency across decades, the team ended up using larger geographic areas containing multiple block groups, known as tracts. However, this presented its own set of challenges, as the size and boundaries of census tracts can change from decade to decade. To resolve these differences, the team used a data analysis technique developed by Brown University that allowed them to translate previous census tract data so that it would match the boundaries of tracts from the 2010 census.
Hola Cultura initially wanted to add other variables to the maps, such as crime rates and health indicators like birth rates, death rates, and levels of obesity, to see how these factors changed. With more time and funding, these variables could be included, and the project could be expanded to the entire Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Expanding the geographic reach of the project would add valuable understanding to changing Latino settlement patterns and could further explain the role that affordable housing plays in shifting demographic patterns. For now, the team will continue to use the data they have collected to create more GIS maps and overlay multiple variables for comparison, many of which may be made available to the public on Hola Cultura’s website.
Hola Cultura’s GIS research team has created a detailed and educational set of maps, which show the changing demographic, cultural, and housing realities of the Adams Morgan, Mount Pleasant, and Columbia Heights neighborhoods. That they overcame significant obstacles and turned information gathered from different sources into a series of informative and clearly understandable maps is a testament to their hard work, dedication and skill. Their work is an excellent foundation, upon which future research can construct a more in-depth and far-reaching look at change in the tri-neighborhood area and the greater Washington, D.C. region.
—Ben Brokaw
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