Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area

For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the region, contributing their labor, ingenuity, and culture to the making of a thriving but highly neglected and overlooked community.

In Avocado Dreams, Ana Patricia Rodríguez draws from her own positionality as a Salvadoran transplant to examine the construction of the unique Salvadoran cultural imaginary made in the greater D.C. area. Through a careful reading of the creative works of local writers, performers, artists, and artivists, Rodríguez demonstrates how the people have remade themselves in relation to the cultural, ethnoracial, and sociolinguistic diversity of the area. She discusses how Salvadoran people have developed unique, intergenerational Salvadoreñidades, manifested in particular speech and symbolic acts, ethnoracial embodiments, and local identity formations in relation to the diverse communities, most notably Black Washingtonians, who co-inhabit the region.

This timely and relevant work not only enriches our understanding of Salvadoran diasporic experiences but also contributes significantly to broader discussions on migration, identity, and cultural production in the United States.

Ana Patricia Rodríguez is an associate professor of U.S. Latina/o and Central American literatures at the University of Maryland, College Park, and past president of the Latino/a Studies Association (2017-2019).