The neighborhood of Mount Pleasant in Washington, DC is urban America's future encapsulated in 50 city blocks. A multicultural blend of some 15,000 whites, Latinos, African Americans, and Asians, Mount Pleasant models the mixture of races and ethnicities that will constitute the typical 21st century American city. Poor Latinos and African Americans live adjacent to gentrified streets of middle-class whites and blacks. Korean, Vietnamese, and Cambodian shopkeepers serve recent immigrants from Central America, longer-term Latino and black residents from the Caribbean, and native Washingtonians.
But while the cultures exist side by side, there is little mixing. The social circles are to a large extent ethnically defined, and in the case of Latinos and some Asians, separated by language as well. As two nights of violence in Mount Pleasant this spring indicated, the cultural stew simmers much closer to the boiling point than most people were aware.
The Mount Pleasant riots began the evening of May 5 when a rookie black police officer, paired with another rookie, shot a Latino man she was arresting for public drinking. The rumor spread on the streets of a police "execution," and that the man who was shot -- Salvadoran immigrant Daniel Enrique Gomez, 30 -- was handcuffed at the time. The police maintain that Gomez had on only one cuff, lunged at the arresting officer with a knife, and was shot in self-defense.
For many Latinos, the shooting of Gomez was the spark that unleashed a torrent of accumulated resentment. While much of the anger was directed at the police force, which many Latinos feel is insensitive if not oppressive to the Spanish-speaking underclass, the roots of the frustration that erupted into Sunday's riots are much broader. "Yes, there are questions regarding abuse by the authorities," said Minor Sinclair, of the Ecumenical Program on Central America and the Caribbean, "but the real issue is the social injustice of an exploited, undocumented, Spanish-speaking population and the social disinvestment in this city's poor neighborhoods, black and Hispanic."
Almost 80 percent of the Latino population in Washington comes from El Salvador, and most of them have immigrated since the war there began 10 years ago. "Many people have come here as a direct result of U.S. foreign policy in the region," Susana Cepeda, director of a Latino umbrella organization in the neighborhood, told Sojourners. "If people support that foreign policy, then they have to take responsibility for the consequences."
For recent arrivals in this country, much of the anger expressed in the riots comes from dreams dashed and expectations unmet. Many have fled the violence in their home country, expecting to find jobs, decent housing, and a part of the American Dream. Many of them, however, speak little English and lack the skills needed in urban society -- and during the current recession, with construction and other industries on the wane, such jobs are virtually nonexistent. "With no jobs out there, people get very frustrated, and a lot of them have carried anger for a long time," Jorge Duarte, a staff member for a Mount Pleasant-based workers' cooperative, told Sojourners.
The rapidly growing Latino population in Washington is grossly under-represented in the city's power structure. While Latinos constitute more than 10 percent of the capital's population -- a precise count is difficult because many undocumented immigrants prefer invisibility -- they make up only 2 percent of city employees, less than 3 percent of the police force (all but two of them under the rank of captain), and only 1 percent of the city's registered voters. The result is a community that politicians -- drawn to power, money, and votes -- can and have easily ignored.
WHILE SUNDAY'S RIOT was a spontaneous expression of pent-up rage, primarily rooted in Latinos' experience of long-standing police abuse, the second night's unrest was seen by many as a planned act of violence, a "made-for-TV riot." "A lot of people came from outside the neighborhood on Monday, drawn by the TV cameras," said Ken Fealing, vice chair of the Mount Pleasant neighborhood commission. "Many of them seemed to have some terrorist or guerrilla experience in Central America -- some of them have received training by U.S. soldiers, and some of them were rebels in their own country."
A bright spot in the midst of the violence was the role played by neighborhood churches. Priests and others from area churches attempted to organize a nonviolent march on the second night and were a visible peacemaking presence throughout the days of unrest. The Shrine of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, with longtime involvement in the Latino community, became an ecumenical center of prayer, healing, and reconciliation. Father Don Lippert, Sacred Heart's associate pastor for Hispanic ministry, explained his steadfast and sometimes risky presence on the streets in the midst of the rioting. "The church belongs with the people," Lippert said.
Many of those who took part in Monday's violence were not Latino; the majority of those arrested in the riots were African Americans. "I was surprised [on the second night of the rioting] when I went to the streets, I saw very few Hispanics taking part in the looting," Duarte said. "I saw mostly blacks, speaking English." The multicultural nature of the riot led some observers to suggest that the underlying causes had as much to do with class as race.
For some Latinos, American racial politics is a new phenomenon. "Some people have said things to me like, 'How could you stand being arrested by a woman not the same color you are?'" Duarte said. "Many of these people have never lived in places where they had so much contact with people of color -- there are very few blacks in El Salvador."
Many African Americans expressed empathy for the Latinos who exploded in anger. "They [Latinos] are going through the same thing that the black community has been through, and is still going through," a 61-year-old Mount Pleasant resident said. "The police don't speak their language. They mistreat Spanish-speaking people just like they mistreat black people."
Others are concerned that preferential treatment not be given to one minority group over another. "Some sectors of the black community honestly feel that the mayor and the city government have been bending over backward to respond to [Latino] demands," Fealing said. "Some people are getting upset about that." For instance, the DC Latino Civil Rights Task Force created by the mayor immediately following the riots should not be directed exclusively toward the Latino community, according to Fealing, a member of the task force. "Low-wage blacks in the neighborhood have been victimized by the same kind of civil rights violations for a very long time."
DC Mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon voiced the concern that the conditions that led to the riots exist in other neighborhoods, saying that federal and local budget cutbacks have resulted in "levels of discontent throughout this city." Fealing said that if people in poor African-American neighborhoods in Washington perceive that the Latino population "gets their demands met as a result of violence, they just might say, 'Why shouldn't we riot to get attention to our concerns?'"
Some prominent city politicians have expressed anger at Latinos who were part of the violence. "If they [Latinos] don't appreciate our country, get out," DC City Council member H. R. Crawford said. Mayor Dixon responded that such sentiments are "counterproductive" and discouraged an emphasis on competition between African Americans and Latinos. "What happens is you end up being threatened by others who are fighting for the same crumbs," Dixon said. "And that ought not to be the focus. The focus ought to be for all of us to get a fair shake."
"The needs of the Latino community are not significantly different from those of the black community," asserted Washington-based organizer Walter McGill. "If you get to the root of each of these communities, the issue is economic opportunity -- especially for low-income Latinos and low-income African Americans."
FOR MANY WHITE residents of the neighborhood, the heart of the problem -- or at least its most visible and vexatious aspect -- is public drunkenness. "This community absolutely will not tolerate the neighborhood being taken over by groups of drinking men," Alice Kelly, chair of the Mount Pleasant Advisory Neighborhood Commission, told Sojourners. "We're talking about a true safety issue, not just people urinating in public. It's unsafe for women -- and men, too -- to walk on the street. They're subject to harassment and even physical abuse" because of all the drunkenness. "We cannot allow our community to be ruined like that."
Others, however, maintain that white middle-class gentrification of the last decade has exacerbated neighborhood tensions. "Harassment from the police department has always been a problem," James Starnes, a Mount Pleasant resident for all 24 of his years, told The Washington Post. "But when the whites started moving in, the police started getting on people. We used to sit in the park and drink and it wasn't a problem. Now it is."
Gentrification has affected more than attitudes about public drinking. Across the country, neighborhoods like Mount Pleasant have seen an influx of educated, mostly white, and comparably well-to-do people who have bought homes close-in to work and other amenities of contemporary cities' central core. For the displaced former residents, many of them lower income, the result is a tightening squeeze into substandard and increasingly crowded housing -- and often a simmering resentment toward their new neighbors.
The riots in Mount Pleasant are part of a heritage as old as our country and should have come as no surprise, in the eyes of historian John Hope Franklin. "We have to recognize the fact that we've always had multicultural conflict in this country. We've got a bad record on the matter of getting along. We created the romantic myth of the melting pot, but we've never had such a thing," Franklin, professor emeritus at Duke University, told Sojourners. "In the last 10 years, we've seen a rise of racism and multicultural hostility as a result of Ronald Reagan's policies and actions like Bush's vetoing the Civil Rights Act. Thanks to Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush, racism has been made respectable."
Some observers of the Mount Pleasant unrest have drawn lessons from the riots following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968. "Immediately after the riots, a great degree of attention was paid to the needs of those communities [where the riots took place]," McGill said. "After there no longer appeared to be a threat of mass destruction and violence, these needs faded to the back burner."
McGill expressed concern that a similar pattern could happen in the Latino community today. "If no attention is paid to strategies that will bring about real solutions instead of token gains, then five years down the road we'll see a few people visible in city government, a few business people in chambers of commerce -- but for people on the street, there will be no significant change."
For McGill, the rage expressed in Mount Pleasant could be just an omen of things ahead. "What I'm afraid of," McGill said, "is that unless real strategies are implemented -- not token programs, and not token leadership -- and unless they get the people who were there rallying people in the street to be part of the solution-making process, it's going to be a long, hot summer."
Jim Rice is editor of Sojourners.
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