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Our Story | Nuestra Historia

Hola Cultura is a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. established
to celebrate Latino/a culture in all of its grandeur and diversity.​

Hola Cultura es una organización sin fines de lucro en Washington, D.C. establecido
para celebrar Latino / a cultura en toda su grandeza y diversidad.

Hola Cultura serves as a bridge between the area’s Latino and non-Latinx communities, covering topics bilingually that affect D.C. residents’ everyday lives — from arts and humanities to the coronavirus pandemic. The organization got its start in 2011 as an innovative series of artistic mini-documentaries featuring D.C.’s Latino arts, humanities and creative class. It’s the brainchild of Alberto Roblest, an award-winning artist, author and educator. Since those early days, we’ve kept on growing—publishing more than 1,000 articles, interviews and other media with the help of our talented interns and volunteer contributors. Together, we’re building an online archive.

2012

Hola Cultura embarked on two exciting ventures. The first of Alberto Roblest’s series of mini-documentaries, also known as “webumentaries,” premiered at the now-defunct Art + Media House in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood. This became the first of Hola Cultura’s online videos celebrating the many contributions to D.C.’s vibrant Latino culture. Around the same time, Roblest and Christine MacDonald, an investigative reporter, launched the Hola Cultura website.

2013

Hola Cultura launched its summer internship program to carry out a special research project each year.  This program provides college and high school students with opportunities to hone real-world skills and publish their best work on the Hola Cultura website. That year, interns interviewed community members for a D.C. Latino History Special Issue. It was our first look at how Latinos came to settle in the Washington D.C. Area.

2014

Hola Cultura achieved a major milestone, its 501(c)3 nonprofit tax-exempt designation from the U.S. government. This allows us to operate as an independent nonprofit.

That summer, students investigated the fascinating but little-known history of local Latino muralism—discovering a Latino artist who authored the District’s oldest remaining street mural.

2015

That summer, Hola Cultura chronicled the last half-century of a Latino presence in the District. The special issue published at the end included interviews, photos, and videos. Interns also used online software to map the presence of Latinos in D.C. neighborhoods using U.S. Census data dating back as far as 1970. The organization also launched a documentary screening series in partnership with the American Libraries Association and hosted its first sold-out TamalFest D.C. This culinary festival attracted hundreds of people who came out to sample tamales made by local cooks representing six different Latin American cuisines.

2016

The 2nd TamalFest D.C. built on the success of the first festival, serving more than 400 people and showcasing the talents of a dozen chefs as well as D.C. artists and craftspeople. Hola Cultura worked with dozens of interns and volunteers throughout the year. We held our first crowdsourcing campaign, raising thousands from the community to support TamalFest.

2017

Hola Cultura launched a new oral history initiative. We interviewed dozens of local residents who speak one of the hundreds of mother tongues indigenous to Latin America.

2018

Summer interns experimented with ways to take the organization’s local investigations off the page and bring them to life. This launched the first of Hola Cultura’s guided tours of D.C.’s historically Latino neighborhoods. That year the D.C. Historical Society commissioned an Adams Morgan Latino History Tour for its D.C. History Conference attendees.

2019

By 2019, summer interns and the Hola Cultura staff had created five distinct guided tours. We had led more than a dozen free tours for the community and others commissioned by area universities and community organizations. That year, we debuted our latest tour, a guided bus tour of the District’s Latino street murals in July at the Murals Festival, produced in partnership with the Art Museum of the Americas and the D.C. Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs.

2020

In January, Hola Cultura launched the Storytelling Program for Experiential Learning (SPEL) to assist its young contributors with academic and professional development, while expanding its free services for the community. By March, the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to take our programs online and reinvent how we work. Recognizing that our audience stretches far beyond D.C., Hola Cultura opened a few SPEL positions to candidates from around the country. These teenagers and young adults met weekly online and produced 20 original online stories, about a third of the total story production that year. This complemented the Spanish-language articles published every Monday for our Spanish-dominant readership.

2021

As SPEL took off, Hola Cultura created a new oral history project and made its first foray into investigative reporting. We expanded our reach through a new partnership with the Washington City Paper. In total, SPEL produced nearly half of 2021’s memorable stories published in English and Spanish. Our weekly literary posts in Spanish featured work by Spanish-language writers, artists and humanists for our growing readership.

2022

We launched our first two podcasts. “The Climate Divide” expanded on the reporting from our investigative series on D.C.’s heat islands and environmental justice. It was promoted locally through partnerships with WAMU 88.5, NPR’s Consider This podcast, and WTOP Radio. The original series, co-published in 2021 with the Washington City Paper, earned an honorable mention in the 2022 Institute for Nonprofit News Awards. “Undocu-Life: No Longer Dreaming” brought to life the interviews from our 2021 D.C. Dreamers and Doers oral history project with additional reporting on immigration.

2023

The 1-hour special Hola Cultura coproduced with WAMU 88.5 won regional recognition for its reporting on the health risks associated with exposure to extreme summertime heat, as well as how and why D.C.’s low-income neighborhoods of color tend to be so much hotter than the District’s wealthier precincts. The program won Best News Documentary in the large market radio division of the Edward R. Murrow Awards from the Radio Television Digital News Association for Region 12, which consists of Delaware, Maryland and Washington, D.C.