On a Saturday morning on Mount Pleasant Street NW, the griddles start early. Cheese and refried beans hiss inside discs of corn masa, and the smell of pupusas drifts out of half a dozen doorways at once. Men gather on the corner of Mount Pleasant and Kenyon, the spot everyone calls La Esquina, trading news from Intipuca and waiting on day work. A few blocks of two-story storefronts hold money-transfer counters, a shoe-repair shop, bakeries, and restaurants whose menus run from horchata to fried yuca. This narrow commercial strip is the heart of one of the largest Salvadoran communities in the United States, and most of its story was written in the last sixty years.
Mount Pleasant: The Place
Mount Pleasant sits in Northwest DC, tucked between Rock Creek Park to the west and 16th Street NW to the east, north of Adams Morgan and west of Columbia Heights. Its housing stock is mostly early-1900s brick row houses with front porches, plus apartment buildings clustered along 16th Street and the commercial spine of Mount Pleasant Street. The neighborhood has no Metro stop of its own, but the Columbia Heights station on the Green and Yellow lines is a short walk east. Together with Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights, it forms the corridor that became the center of Latino DC.
How Mount Pleasant Became Salvadoran DC
Before the Salvadorans
Mount Pleasant began as a streetcar suburb for middle-class government clerks, and for decades it was a mixed white and Black neighborhood of porches and corner stores. The corner-store landmark that mattered most came in 1962, when Francisca Marrero Dilone and Felix Dilone opened Casa Dilone, the city’s first bodega, on Mount Pleasant Street. She had come from Puerto Rico and he from the Dominican Republic in the 1940s, and they raised six children above the shop. The store stocked plantains, masa, and goods from across Latin America and the Caribbean, and it quickly became the social center for the city’s Spanish speakers.
The other anchor was older still and entirely European. Heller’s Bakery had run on the street since the 1920s, taken over around 1930 by the German immigrant brothers August and Ludwig Heller, who had learned the trade near Frankfurt. By 1940 it stood at 3221 Mount Pleasant Street, selling pies, cakes, and homemade ice cream to a neighborhood that did not yet eat pupusas. The bakery and the bodega sat on the same blocks, a German past and a Latin future briefly sharing one street.
The Salvadorans Arrive
The first Salvadorans came not as refugees but as workers, and many came from one small town. In the late 1960s, more than a decade before the war, a young man from Intipuca in the eastern department of La Union made his way to Washington and sent word home that you could earn a living washing dishes and cleaning houses. His neighbors followed, then their neighbors, until Washington became the default destination for Intipuca and the town earned the nickname “Little DC.”
That early migration had a quieter source too. Through the 1960s and 1970s, diplomats and international-agency staff in Washington hired domestic workers from Latin America, and American families who had been posted to El Salvador brought their housekeepers and nannies north with them. Many of the first arrivals were Salvadoran women, sponsored to keep working as maids and child-minders. They settled where the rents were cheap and the Spanish-speaking stores already stood, on and around Mount Pleasant Street.
Mount Pleasant at Its Peak
Then came the war. From 1980 to 1992, a US-backed military government fought leftist guerrillas in a conflict that displaced roughly a fifth of El Salvador’s population. About a million Central Americans reached the United States during the 1980s, and the corridor of Mount Pleasant, Adams Morgan, and Columbia Heights filled with Salvadorans fleeing the violence. Their arrival reshaped a part of Northwest DC that would, a few years later, also draw the city’s Ethiopian community along U Street, another exile population finding its footing in the same decade. For people arriving in those years, landing in DC very often meant landing on Mount Pleasant Street one way or another. If you did not live there, someone told you to go, with the promise that you would feel better once you did.
The street rearranged itself around them. New bodegas opened, Los Primos and El Progreso among them, run by relatives and paisanos of the families already there. Restaurants that began by billing themselves as “Salvadoran-Mexican,” a hedge to draw curious outsiders, gradually put pupusas at the center of the menu. Churches and basements became lifelines. El Comite, the Salvadoran refugee committee, ran legal aid and job placement out of church space, and in 1981 lawyers Patricia Perillies and the Salvadoran refugee Joaquin Dominguez Parada founded CARECEN, the Central American Refugee Center, to fight deportations and help people file asylum paperwork. At the height of the sanctuary movement in the mid-1980s, more than 150 congregations openly sheltered undocumented Salvadoran and Guatemalan families in defiance of federal law.
The Change
On the evening of May 5, 1991, after a Cinco de Mayo celebration, two police officers approached a group of men drinking near 17th and Lamont Streets. Police said 30-year-old Daniel Enrique Gomez, a Salvadoran day laborer, drew a knife; Officer Angela Jewell shot him in the chest. He survived, gravely wounded, but Latino witnesses insisted he had already been handcuffed, and the rumor that police had cuffed a bleeding man and left him in the street raced through the neighborhood.
What followed were the worst nights of unrest DC had seen since 1968. Crowds filled the streets for two nights, police cruisers and city buses burned, and stores were looted along the corridor. Mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew across a four-square-mile area covering Mount Pleasant, Adams Morgan, and Columbia Heights. By the time it lifted, roughly 50 people were injured, most of them police, and about 230 had been arrested, most for breaking the curfew. The disturbances exposed a decade of distrust between a mostly white and Black police force and a Spanish-speaking community that felt watched and unheard.
The Landmarks of Mount Pleasant
Casa Dilone, Mount Pleasant Street NW. The Dilone family’s 1962 bodega was DC’s first, and for decades it was the unofficial town square for the city’s Latino arrivals. They lived above the store and ran it until 1998, by which time the Salvadoran families who shopped there had remade the whole street. Two cousins of the Dilones opened Los Primos nearby in the mid-1970s, the name a nod to the family tie.
Heller’s Bakery, 3221 Mount Pleasant Street NW. Founded in 1928 and run for generations by a German baking family, Heller’s was a neighborhood fixture for more than eighty years until high rent forced it to close in 2014. Its painted sign still rises over the street, a reminder of the Mount Pleasant that came before the pupuserias. The mural on its south wall still reads “est. 1928.”
Ercilia’s Restaurant, 3070 Mount Pleasant Street NW. Named for Ercilia, a Salvadoran woman remembered as a pillar of the community, this unassuming pupuseria has outlasted wave after wave of change on the street. As coffee bars and boutiques arrived around it, the family kept griddling, and regulars came to treat it as proof that the old Mount Pleasant had not been entirely priced out. It remains one of the corridor’s go-to kitchens for Salvadoran food.
Don Juan Restaurant, 1660 Lamont Street NW. A late-night fixture serving pupusas alongside Mexican plates, Don Juan has long been a community gathering place just off the main strip. A 2019 scare that it might close brought an outcry from neighbors before it stayed open. Its corner, near where the 1991 unrest began, sits at the center of the neighborhood’s Salvadoran memory.
CARECEN, in the corridor near 16th Street. The Central American Refugee Center, founded in 1981 and later known as the Latino Resource and Justice Center, grew out of the war years to defend Salvadorans facing deportation. Its first workers negotiated bond reductions, showed up in courtrooms, and printed know-your-rights pamphlets in Spanish. More than four decades on, it still serves the area’s immigrants.
Lamont Park and La Esquina, Mount Pleasant and Kenyon Streets NW. The small triangle of green near the top of the street and the corner beside it form the social heart of Salvadoran Mount Pleasant. Men gather there to find day work and trade news from home, and the spot has been documented as a home away from home for Washingtonians with roots in El Salvador and Guatemala. It was near here, at Lamont Street, that the events of May 1991 began.
Where the Mount Pleasant Salvadorans Came From
An unusually large share of DC’s Salvadorans trace their roots to a handful of towns in the country’s east, above all Intipuca in the department of La Union. The pipeline that began with one migrant in the late 1960s ran so deep that thousands of Intipuca natives now live in and around Washington, and the town back home built a park honoring its emigrants. The neighboring town of Chirilagua sent so many people that a stretch of Arlington across the river took its name.
The civil war widened the map. After 1980, families came from across El Salvador, from the capital and the countryside alike, but the eastern departments remained the backbone of the DC community. They chose Washington over the larger Salvadoran settlements in Los Angeles for a simple reason: the chain was already here, anchored on Mount Pleasant Street, and a cousin or a neighbor could meet you at the bus and point you toward a job and a room.
Mount Pleasant Today
The corridor is still unmistakably Salvadoran, and pupusas are sold on nearly every block of Mount Pleasant Street. Ercilia’s and Don Juan still fill at lunch, money-transfer counters still wire remittances east, and Fiesta DC, the festival that began as a Mount Pleasant block party in the 1970s, now draws hundreds of thousands and attempts a record-setting pupusa on the National Mall each fall. The 1991 unrest left a lasting mark on the city: bilingual officers, Spanish-speaking 911 operators, a 1993 federal civil-rights report, and a community that learned to organize.
That community has also been pushed outward. Rising rents have moved many Salvadoran families to the Maryland suburbs, to Langley Park and Wheaton, where a newer generation of pupuserias now lines the strip malls. It is the same suburban drift that carried other DMV refugee communities outward, much as the Vietnamese built Eden Center in Falls Church after their own war. Tens of thousands of Salvadorans in the DC area still live under Temporary Protected Status, the program first extended after the 2001 earthquakes, a status that grants the right to work but no path to permanent residency and remains subject to the politics of the moment.
No Salvadoran has yet been elected to the DC Council, though candidates of Salvadoran descent now run for the Ward 1 seat that covers Mount Pleasant, and the second generation has moved into the Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs and the city’s civic life. The street that a town in La Union helped build is changing again, but its griddles are still hot, and the morning smell of corn and cheese still says, to anyone who knows it, that you have arrived.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Salvadorans settle in Mount Pleasant?
Salvadorans settled in Mount Pleasant because the corridor of Mount Pleasant, Adams Morgan, and Columbia Heights already had cheap rents and Spanish-speaking stores when the first arrivals came in the 1960s and 1970s. Casa Dilone, the city’s first bodega, anchored the area, and chain migration from towns like Intipuca made the street the default landing spot. By the civil-war years, the Salvadorans in Mount Pleasant formed the core of Latino DC.
Is Mount Pleasant still a Salvadoran neighborhood today?
Yes, though it is changing. Pupuserias and money-transfer shops still line Mount Pleasant Street, and longtime restaurants like Ercilia’s and Don Juan remain open. But rising rents have pushed many Salvadoran families to Maryland suburbs such as Langley Park and Wheaton, so the community now stretches well beyond the original corridor.
What are the most famous landmarks of Salvadoran Mount Pleasant?
The best-known sites include Casa Dilone, the 1962 bodega that started it all, and Ercilia’s Restaurant at 3070 Mount Pleasant Street NW, a beloved old-line pupuseria. La Esquina at Mount Pleasant and Kenyon Streets serves as the community’s gathering corner, and CARECEN, founded in 1981, has defended the area’s immigrants for over forty years.
Where did the Mount Pleasant Salvadorans come from?
Most trace their roots to eastern El Salvador, above all the town of Intipuca in the department of La Union, which sent so many people to DC that it is nicknamed “Little DC.” The nearby town of Chirilagua was another major source. After 1980, civil-war refugees came from across the country, but the eastern towns remained the community’s backbone.
When did Salvadorans first arrive in Mount Pleasant?
The first Salvadorans came in the late 1960s and 1970s, many as domestic workers brought north by diplomats and American families, and the earliest chain migrants from Intipuca. The much larger wave arrived during the civil war from 1980 to 1992, when the Salvadorans in Mount Pleasant grew into one of the largest such communities in the United States.
If your family’s story passed through a corner store on Mount Pleasant Street, a basement legal-aid office, or a long bus ride from a town in La Union, the details are worth saving while the people who lived them are still here to tell it.