On December 27, 2020, legislation passed calling for the Smithsonian to establish the National Museum of the American Latino. The new museum will be the cornerstone for visitors to learn how Latinos have contributed and continue to contribute to US art, history, culture, and science. The Smithsonian’s Latino DC History Project, one of the museum’s early initiatives, tells the story and honors the memories of the people who helped build-up the Latino community in the nation’s capital.

THE INTERNATIONAL CITY - The early history of DC's Latino community is connected to the growing numbers of embassies and international organizations established in the nation’s capital in the early 1900s. Appearing by the 1920s, Latin American embassies provided spaces and entertainment for the burgeoning Latino community. The Mexican Cultural Institute, which functions as an exhibit, lecture, and performance space, is one of the city’s most dynamic cultural venues today.

DC’s Latino community, then centered around Adams Morgan, became politically visible in the late ‘60s. Activists advocated for better access to education and services for residents. One of the legacies of this early activism is the Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School; teaching English, civic engagement, and work skills, at no charge, to DC residents from around the world. Community leaders Carlos Rosario and Sonia Gutiérrez with Rep. Walter E. Fauntroy at the Latino Festival

During the ‘60s, DC’s Latino community numbered under 20,000 residents. Its residential and commercial hubs were the adjoining neighborhoods of Adams Morgan, Mount Pleasant, and Columbia Heights. DC public parks, including Lamont Plaza, were community venues of summer concerts and other free public programs, following the devastating riots that shook the city after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination.

The Latino community was a mix of immigrants and exiles from across Latin America, as well as US Latinos and Puerto Ricans who had moved to DC for government work. During the ‘60s, activists and cultural workers laid the foundations for the Latino non-profit organizations that would develop in the following decades. At the same time, some Latino families began moving into inner suburbs like Silver Spring and Arlington, seeking better educational and housing options. Outreach in Kalorama Park

Becoming politically visible in the late ‘60s, a coalition of different Latinos and Latinas began to demand fair access to education, healthcare, and housing. They also sought new avenues for cultural expression and exchange, including festivals and parades, murals, concerts, and street theater. ENLACE was DC’s first Latino LGBT organization. It operated between 1987-1994, connecting immigrant community issues like language access with LGBT rights and AIDS activism. Gathering at Malcolm X Park

DC is a crossroads for community-builders and change agents from around the US and across the world. Beginning in the late ‘60s, Mexican-American and Puerto Rican activists (two groups with US citizenship and access to government jobs) came together with immigrants and exiles from across Latin America to rally around issues like education, health care, housing, and legal services, often with the support of African American neighbors, or allies in the white hippie and punk communities.

In 1983 Salvadoran immigrants and US advocates founded La Clínica del Pueblo. Originally, it provided healthcare to thousands of Central Americans in the DC area. Even though they were fleeing war, Salvadorans and Guatemalans were not recognized as refugees. This limited their access to legal status, services, and support. Over the years, La Clínica has grown from a weekly clinic to a multi-site organization, ever guided by the conviction that health is a human right.

Salvadoran educators, community organizers, and artists have also contributed to the civic-empowerment of DC’s Latino community. After 1980, Salvadoran children fleeing their country’s civil war began filling DC classrooms. With tensions between Central American and African American students running high, two friends from the Duke Ellington Performing Arts High School, Quique Avilés and Michelle Banks, founded Latinegro Theater Collective to build unity and understanding between local youth.

DC’s oldest surviving Latino mural was painted in the mid-1970s by brothers Caco and Renato Salazar. The mural critiques the greed of real estate speculators and highlights the plight of working-class immigrants. While the iconic mural was restored in 2015, the expensive Adams Morgan neighborhood where it is located is no longer a hub of the Latino community.

Immigrant and native-born Salvadorans are about 35% of the Latino population in DC and its MD and VA suburbs. Small numbers of Salvadorans were already living in DC by the ‘60s, but the Civil War in El Salvador (1980-1992) drove many to DC in search of safety and opportunity. They have played an important role in the growth of the local economy as small business owners and workers in construction, restaurants, and the service industry.

In VA, Salvadorans refer to the neighborhood of Arlandria as Chirilagua, for a town in El Salvador. However, a new Mexican population now outnumbers Salvadorans. The DC area’s extremely diverse Latino community is frequently organized by social class, profession, politics, and nationality. Despite differences within the community, growing numbers of locally born or raised Latinos are developing a particularly DC sense of belonging and identity. Their story is still unfolding.

While the city was once the center of DC’s Latino community, now the suburbs, with their cheaper housing and better schools, are home to most of the region’s 800,000-1,000,000 Latinos. Formerly affordable neighborhoods across the city are now gentrified, with the effect of pushing many working class African American and Latino families eastward into suburban Prince George’s County in MD. The shelves at La Grande Supermarket stock Guatemalteca, Hondureña, and Salvadoreña crema.

Mexican-born Olivia Cadaval moved to the DC area in 1968 and began collaborating with local educators, artists, and cultural workers in the ‘70s. A pioneering scholar of DC Latino community history, she has worked as a curator at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival since 1988, bringing performers and traditional practitioners from Latin American and US Latino communities to the National Mall in the summer.

Organizations like the Library of Congress, the Organization of American States, the Smithsonian, local universities, and research and policy institutes have made DC a destination for Latino researchers and scholars. Planetary science professor Norma Small-Warren (Howard University) is a founding member of GRUFOLPAWA, a group that performs Panama’s folkloric music, dance, and carnival traditions. She is part of a small but active community of Panamanians who have called DC home since the ‘60s.

Chilean-born Francisco Aguilera worked at the Library of Congress from 1944-1969, where he was chief of the Hispanic Division and founder of the groundbreaking Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape. A translator and a poet, he also taught Latin American literature at George Washington and American Universities.

American Studies and Anthropology Professor Elaine A. Peña (George Washington University) collaborates with the Smithsonian on research projects about Latino local history and religion—including a study of DC’s oldest space for Afro-Cuban religious traditions. Born and raised in Laredo, TX, she is part of a growing stream of Mexican Americans who since World War II have come to the nation’s capital for work in government, activism, education, engineering, health, and other fields.

Los Angeles-native Mark Hugo López is a well-known expert on contemporary demographic, economic, and social trends among Latinos. He is the director of Race and Ethnicity Research at the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan, non-advocacy organization that compiles and analyzes much of the data that is used by journalists, academics, researchers, politicians, and the general public to understand Latino communities.

DC has a relatively new and small Latino population compared to cities like New York, Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles. However, because it is the nation's capital, high-profile organizations such as UnidosUS, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and the Pew Center for Hispanic Research have made DC their headquarters. Local scholars make up one of the many dynamic layers in the region’s socially, culturally, and ethnically diverse Latino community.

Some embassy staff settled locally, and embassies provided places for socializing and celebrating culture. Raised in Cuba, but living most of his life in DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood, José Gómez Sicre was an influential curator and art critic at what is today the Art Museum of the Americas. Reflecting the values of the US during the Cold War, he promoted a vision of Latin American art favoring abstraction over politically-engaged work. Sicre (l.) with Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco

International organizations like the Inter-American Development Bank or the Organization of American States attract professionals from across Latin America, some of whom establish roots locally. Established in 1902, the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) was one of the first international organizations in the nation’s capital. Its headquarters, built in 1965, is an architectural icon of DC’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood. PAHO has employed both Latin American and US Latino professionals.

The DC suburbs, especially Arlington County and Falls Church, VA are home to the highest concentration of Bolivians in the United States. Small numbers of Bolivians arrived there in the late ‘60s, mainly as political exiles, however most local Bolivians started their D.C. migration story in the ’80s—a period of hyperinflation that destabilized many Latin American economies.

In the Latino community different generations of immigrants reflect different political ideologies. Since no community is monolithic, the experiences and traditions of the Bolivian community are quite varied. This mask is 1 of 13 pieces that make up the outfit of a diablada dancer, an emblematic figure of the Bolivian carnival. Diablada dances and other Bolivian cultural traditions thrive in the region around Washington, DC—home to the oldest and largest Bolivian community in the US.