The Forgotten Latino Community: Racial Formation and the Struggle for Political Representation in Washington, D.C., 1970-1993

Abstract

“The Forgotten Latino Community: Racial Formation and the Struggle for Political Representation in Washington, D.C., 1970–1993” is a political history of the nation’s capital that analyzes the racial complexities of urban politics by interrogating the relationship between Latino activism and the Black municipal leadership. Urban politics informed and shaped Latino identity formation in the District, creating moments of opportunity for Latinos to articulate and mobilize community over the thirty-year period. The dissertation asks: What did Latino political mobilization and community formation look like in a Black-majority city with a Black political class emerging to dominate city politics? The choices made by heads of Latino organizations, spearheaded by high-profile Puerto Ricans, and internal leadership dynamics prompted the strategic assertion of a unified Latino community. Puerto Rican leaders, who had established networks with Black politicians, mobilized this type of Latino identity to inform political strategies. In contrast to D.C.’s Black majority, which gained a measure of political representation and power with the expansion of home rule in 1973, the city’s Latino population had less visibility in both the city and federal governments due to the heterogenous nature of the group and census undercounting. Early on, Puerto Rican residents emerged as the multinational community’s primary interlocutors with the Black-majority government due to their citizenship status, ability to speak English, and familiarity with the municipal bureaucracy. These leaders focused on asserting the growing Latino population’s visibility by challenging census undercounts, engaging in political campaigns, and pushing for an equitable share of city funding. Politics created moments of opportunity for Puerto Rican leaders to articulate a unified Latino community, joined by a shared language and culture. They strategically pushed this narrative to better petition the local and federal government. In reality, the District’s Latinos were an amalgamated population consisting of mixed nationalities, citizenship statuses, classes, and races. However, the makeup of the Latino population changed with the ramping-up of civil wars in Central America and U.S. foreign policy, causing new immigration and refugee patterns in the 1980s. Salvadoran migration to the District produced new challenges for an already strapped Latino community and Black politicians. By 1990, Salvadorans became the largest Latino group in the city. The material condition of Salvadorans in the District exemplified the persistent needs and cyclical nature of demands of the Latino community. While Puerto Rican leaders had initially focused on issues such as language inclusion, funding for social services, and government jobs, by the mid-1980s Salvadoran activism centered issues of immigration enforcement and police harassment. On May 5, 1991, the police shooting of a handcuffed Salvadoran man inflamed already tense race relations between the Latino community and the majority-Black city government. The Mount Pleasant Uprising of 1991 was the climax of multiple converging problems and dynamics in the Latino communities: the persistence of unmet needs, perceptions of invisibility, police brutality, and multiracial tensions.