Stand at the corner of New Hampshire Avenue and University Boulevard on a Saturday morning and you can hear El Salvador. It comes through car windows in cumbia and reggaeton, off the griddles of the pupuserias, in the Spanish of the women carrying grocery bags from Mega Mart. The Salvadorans in Langley Park, Maryland, have made this unincorporated patch of Prince George’s County one of the most densely Salvadoran places in the United States, a suburb so tied to a single Central American country that people back home call it the fifteenth province.
The Place
Langley Park sits just inside the Capital Beltway, straddling the line between Prince George’s and Montgomery counties about seven miles north of the White House. It is not a town in the legal sense. It is an unincorporated community, a census-designated place of roughly twenty thousand people packed into garden apartments and brick ranchers along two busy state highways.
The geography is plain and the commerce is loud. Strip malls and bus shelters line the avenues, their signs in Spanish, their parking lots full of taquerias, money-transfer shops and grocers. This is the heart of what local planners call the International Corridor, and within it Langley Park is the Salvadoran capital.
How It Became Salvadoran
An estate, then a postwar suburb
The land began as an estate. In 1923 the McCormick-Goodhart family assembled some 540 acres here, and the following year they built an eighteen-thousand-square-foot Georgian Revival mansion designed by the Washington architect George Oakley Totten Jr.
The estate did not last. During and immediately after the Second World War the acreage was subdivided and developed as a planned community of garden apartments and single-family homes. By 1955 Langley Park was described as the fastest-growing trade area in metropolitan Washington, a magnet for young couples with families.
The first Langley Park was white, middle class and largely Jewish, a comfortable inside-the-Beltway suburb of the Eisenhower years. It would have been hard, then, to imagine pupusa griddles along University Boulevard. The change came slowly, then all at once.
The numbers tip
The Spanish-speaking share of Langley Park was small but rising through the 1970s. Census figures put it at 6.1 per cent in 1970 and 13.4 per cent in 1980. The garden apartments, cheaper than newer suburbs and close to service jobs in the District, were drawing Central American newcomers.
Then the floodgate opened. El Salvador descended into civil war from 1980 to 1992, and hundreds of thousands fled north. By 1990 Langley Park was about 40 per cent Hispanic. The transformation that had taken decades elsewhere happened here in a single generation.
The fifteenth province
By the 2000 census, 21.48 per cent of Langley Park residents identified as Salvadoran, the largest share of Salvadoran Americans of any place in the country. The neighbourhood had become so Salvadoran that, back in El Salvador, people spoke of it as the fifteenth province of a country that officially has fourteen.
The concentration only deepened. By 2020 the census counted 20,126 residents and a Hispanic or Latino population of 83.4 per cent, with foreign-born residents making up well over 60 per cent. Langley Park today holds one of the highest per-square-mile concentrations of Salvadorans anywhere in the United States.
The wider region carried the weight too. The Washington and Baltimore metro area became home to one of the largest Salvadoran communities in the nation, with tens of thousands of Salvadoran immigrants settling in neighbouring Montgomery and Prince George’s counties and across the Potomac in Fairfax. Langley Park, dense and affordable and right on the bus lines, became its symbolic centre. The pattern echoed the Salvadoran enclaves that grew in Mount Pleasant in Washington, DC and far to the north in Brentwood, New York.
An institution moves into the mansion
The clearest sign of the shift came when the old estate house changed hands. CASA, Maryland’s largest advocacy organisation for Latinos and immigrants, redeveloped the historic McCormick-Goodhart Mansion into a multicultural community centre, opening it in 2010 as a roughly thirty-million-dollar hub of English classes, job training, legal aid and citizenship help.
The symbolism was hard to miss. The mansion built for a Gilded Age family now served the Salvadoran and Central American workers who had remade the suburb around it. The same building that once anchored a white middle-class enclave became the front door of immigrant Langley Park.
The Landmarks
CASA Multicultural Center, 8151 15th Avenue, Hyattsville. The restored McCormick-Goodhart Mansion is now the spiritual and practical centre of immigrant Langley Park. Inside the 1924 Georgian Revival house, newcomers take English and vocational classes and get help with paperwork that can decide whether a family stays. It is the rare landmark that is both a piece of preserved history and a working lifeline.
Takoma Langley Crossroads Transit Center, 7900 New Hampshire Avenue. Opened in December 2016, this is the largest bus-only transfer point in the entire Washington region, moving more than twelve thousand riders a day. WMATA Metrobus, Montgomery County Ride On and Prince George’s County buses all converge under its long canopy. For a community where many work shift jobs across the metro, it is the daily artery.
Langley Park Shopping Center, 7900 to 8050 New Hampshire Avenue. Sitting at the northwest corner of New Hampshire Avenue and University Boulevard, the strip is the commercial spine of the neighbourhood. Its storefronts hold grocers, restaurants, salons and the remittance agencies that wire money home to El Salvador every payday.
Mega Mart Latino Supermarket. Latin American shoppers fill its aisles for masa, plantains, queso and the curtido that tops a proper pupusa. The store opened in 2003 under the name PanAm before rebranding as Mega Mart and expanding to several Maryland locations. It is the kind of grocer that stocks a whole pantry from home.
Pupuseria El Comalito. The family-run pupuseria expanded into Langley Park in 2008 and built its name on pupusas, the thick stuffed griddle cakes filled with beans, cheese or pork and served with pickled cabbage. Like many of the area’s eateries it weathered the pandemic and stayed, a small business that doubles as a community kitchen.
Pupuseria La Familiar, 7982 New Hampshire Avenue. Just up the avenue, La Familiar turns out pupusas and other traditional Salvadoran plates for the steady foot traffic off the bus stops. It is one of a dense cluster of pupuserias that make this stretch of road a destination for anyone in the metro craving the real thing.
Catholic Community of Langley Park. Tied to St. Camillus in neighbouring Silver Spring, the Langley Park Catholic mission has served the area’s Salvadoran faithful for decades with Mass in Spanish, and its lay leaders have stepped into public life, organising around immigration and the long-debated Purple Line. Faith here is also organisation.
Where They Came From
The Salvadorans of Langley Park did not arrive from everywhere in El Salvador. Many trace back to the country’s east, to the departments of San Miguel and La Unión, and to specific towns whose names recur in Washington’s Salvadoran story.
Chief among them is Intipucá, a small town near the coast in La Unión. Its first migrants left for Washington in 1967, more than a decade before the civil war, after word filtered back that a person could make a decent living washing dishes and cleaning houses in the American capital. Thousands followed, until roughly as many people of Intipucá descent lived around Washington as remained in the town itself.
That early thread, joined to the mass flight of the war years from San Miguel, Chirilagua and across the east, is the backbone of Salvadoran Langley Park. It is chain migration in its purest form: one family establishes a foothold, sends word and money home, and a whole region reorganises itself across two countries. The same chains stretched west to the Salvadoran heart of MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, but in the Washington metro, Langley Park became the destination of choice.
Langley Park Today
Walk Langley Park now and it reads as unmistakably Central American. The pupuserias still run hot, the soccer talk is constant, the grocery aisles carry the food of home, and the bus shelters fill before dawn with people heading to jobs across the District and its suburbs. The fifteenth province is still very much itself.
It is also a community under strain. Salvadorans here have lived for years with the uncertainty of immigration policy, from Temporary Protected Status to the deportation fights that ripple through Maryland’s Salvadoran families, and that anxiety is part of daily life. CASA and the Catholic mission do constant work precisely because the legal ground keeps shifting.
Change is coming to the streets, too. The Purple Line light rail, long delayed, is set to bring stations to the New Hampshire Avenue and University Boulevard junction, threading rail through the heart of the corridor. Residents and advocates have watched warily, knowing that new transit can lift a neighbourhood and price out the very people who built it. For now, though, Langley Park remains what it became across a single hard generation: the place in America where El Salvador is closest to home. Maryland’s wider immigrant map, from the Ethiopians of Silver Spring to the Cameroonians of Gaithersburg, runs straight through this corner of Prince George’s County.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Salvadorans in Langley Park, Maryland?
The Salvadorans in Langley Park, Maryland, settled there because of cheap garden apartments, proximity to service jobs in Washington, and decades of chain migration from eastern El Salvador. Immigration accelerated sharply during El Salvador’s civil war from 1980 to 1992, turning a former white middle-class suburb into a Central American hub.
Why is Langley Park called the fifteenth province of El Salvador?
El Salvador officially has fourteen departments, often called provinces. Langley Park became so densely Salvadoran, with the highest concentration of Salvadorans of any place in the United States by 2000, that people in El Salvador began calling it the fifteenth province.
What is the population of Langley Park and how many are Hispanic?
The 2020 census counted 20,126 residents in Langley Park, of whom about 83.4 per cent were Hispanic or Latino. More than 60 per cent of residents were foreign-born, the great majority from Latin America and especially El Salvador.
Where in El Salvador did Langley Park’s Salvadorans come from?
Many came from the eastern departments of San Miguel and La Unión. The town of Intipucá in La Unión is especially famous: its first migrants reached Washington in 1967, and chain migration eventually linked the town so tightly to the capital that roughly as many of its people live near Washington as remain at home.
Where can you find Salvadoran food in Langley Park?
The Salvadorans in Langley Park, Maryland, have filled the New Hampshire Avenue and University Boulevard corridor with pupuserias. Spots such as Pupuseria El Comalito and Pupuseria La Familiar at 7982 New Hampshire Avenue serve pupusas with curtido, and Latino grocers like Mega Mart stock the ingredients to cook them at home.
What is the CASA Multicultural Center in Langley Park?
It is a community centre run by CASA, Maryland’s largest Latino and immigrant advocacy organisation, housed in the restored 1924 McCormick-Goodhart Mansion and opened in 2010. It offers English classes, job training, legal aid and citizenship help to the area’s immigrant families.
If your family’s story passed through Langley Park, or any of the places Salvadorans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a coastal town in La Union to the pupuserias of New Hampshire Avenue, to wherever you are now.