D.C. History / Activism

The 1970s: Latinos assert presence and political clout

By hola | Published September 9, 2013 | No Comments

While Latinos of Salvadoran extraction make up the largest part of Washington, D.C.’s Hispanic population today, the city already had a Hispanic political base by the 1980s, when the Central Americans began arriving in large numbers.

Many of the city’s earliest community leaders hailed from Puerto Rico. One of Washington’s most beloved figures of this era is the late Carlos M. Rosario, a Puerto Rican teacher and World War II veteran. Rosario moved to Washington in the early 1950s and established the Program of English Instruction for Latin Americans (PEILA) in 1970. He is widely remembered as a dogged fighter for improving the health, education and welfare of his fellow Hispanics. But beyond the city’s political arena, Rosario also attended to more basic needs of his fellow Latin Americans such as helping people find jobs, according to historians and District residents who recall that era.

By the mid-1970s, the D.C. Latinos community was already beginning to flex some political power. With passage of the District of Columbia Latino Community Development Act, which took effect on September 29, 1976, the Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs (OLA) opened, charged with improving the quality of life of D.C. Latinos. New funding flowed new Latino health, education, housing, and economic development initiatives.

Roland Roebuck moved to Washington in 1974. Having grown up in Puerto Rico, he quickly felt at home in the small Hispanic community–at that time comprised largely of Caribbean people from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and Cuba.

“There was an atmosphere of collaboration,” he recalls. “Since all of us spoke Spanish that created a sense of solidarity… You could survive in the Latino community without speaking English,” he says, because there were so many stores, community centers, churches and other institutions where Spanish was spoken.

Politics took on  more pan-hemispheric dimensions as  Spanish-speaking refugees arrived fleeing civil war and political repression back home. Newcomers from Chile, Argentina and eventually El Salvador and other parts of Latin America moved into neighborhoods such as Adams Morgan and Mount Pleasant. Protest marches and street theater became popular with activists.

“We became aware of their plight and used to march with them,” Roebuck says. “The Avilés brothers and the Medranos were using theater to create awareness of the repression in their home countries,” says Roebuck, referring to poet and performer, Quique Avilés, and longtime community leader, Pedro Avilés, and Rebecca and Hugo Medrano, founders of GALA Hispanic Theatre.

In Washington, its large African-American population and majority-minority status made for a welcoming atmosphere, recalls Roebuck, a Vietnam veteran who came to Washington to attend college, became a community leader and eventually worked in D.C. government. But Hispanic leaders led by Carlos Rosario were often at odds with then Mayor Walter Washington, who was the District’s top political leader from 1967 to 1979 and served as its first home-rule mayor for the last five years he was in office.

Things changed after Marion Barry took office in 1979, Roebuck says.  Many Hispanics took jobs in city government and funding and services increased, he says. By the 1980s, Salvadorans and other Central Americans, escaping civil wars, joined D.C.’s diverse Latino community, growing rapidly to represent the majority of D.C.’s Latinos and changing the character of the city’s Hispanic population once again. But tensions between the city’s African American and Latino communities continued, as well as racial tensions inside the Hispanic community, he says.

– Gustavo Romaña

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