Let me know in the comments what you think of this video, and I'll see you in the next one.
I thought I was making a film but a diverse neighborhood. In some ways I was correct. In some ways I wasn't.
You'll have young families that babysit each other's kids.
You'll have Saturday morning lessons on how to fix your flat bike tire.
It's those kinds of things, and most of it's free, and it's just all in the spirit of neighborhood.
And I think that's what is particular to the Mount Pleasant community besides the incredible range of ethnic backgrounds that are represented here.
I usually did my grocery shopping, pharmacy, sort of daily shopping stuff.
My dentist is on Mount Pleasant Street. I got my hair cut. I still get my hair cut on Mount Pleasant Street.
The shoemaker. That's the great thing about Mount Pleasant Street is pretty much everything that you need is there.
And it's really rare in D.C. I don't think there's another street like that that has all your daily stuff, the hardware store.
And then I'd go to some of the restaurants.
People living there and everybody has different expectations of what they expect of Mount Pleasant,
so that there's a lot of crossing, a lot of working with each other, but there's also a lot of tension between some of these groups.
And some people have more power than other people, so that gets played out in strange ways.
It became much more gentrified and much whiter and a little less black.
When I got there in the 90s, I got there right after the riots, so it wasn't really quickly gentrifying,
but through the 90s it started, particularly after the Metro opened.
I think 2000 was really the time when things really started changing. Property values started exploding.
I guess it's changed, but it hasn't changed.
When I was first moving in here, I moved in after a lot of negative things had happened to Mount Pleasant.
There was the shotgun stalkers, there were the riots, and Mount Pleasant wasn't doing too well.
Certainly 1968 exposed, more than ever before, the racial tensions within the city.
The city was going through rapid turnover, and there were many things happening that were positive in the city,
but certainly in the black community along the 9th Street corridor, Georgia Avenue, Florida, at the intersection of Florida,
things were not going so well. Before that there had been disturbances,
but certainly 1968, not just nationally, but here in the nation's capital, there emerged this great conflict.
I remember Bill Clinton saying, as a student then, you could go up to a hilly tower and look out,
and you could see the smoke rising from over there, from the burning of buildings that were occurring.
In 1991, in a very different context, the shooting of a Latino youth by an African American policewoman
brought something else to the fore, and that was there was problems along what was called Adams Morgan,
and that flowed over into Mount Pleasant, because it was right on the border with it.
Both of those were part of a broader multicultural history in this city that had been there from the 19th century on,
certainly with African Americans, and then from the 1950s and 60s on with other groups, particularly the Latino group,
because Adams Morgan literally became a burial, and kind of a separate area there.
A very different one than the African American one, which was much more historic, over 200 years old, 100 plus years old.
The burial is a much different kind of ghetto area, because it's changing always, people come and go.
After 1991, I thought things became more harmonious and Mount Pleasant.
Now I'm not so sure about that either.
What happened, and you see, this is very tricky, where those agreements came up,
right after the so-called disturbances, so-called riots, which were, you know, that's another whole story.
And all of a sudden, small groups said, oh, you know, we're going to address this.
And part of the addressing this was putting controls on the local restaurants.
I mean, it was this way of all of a sudden saying, hey, you know, this is an element of our community that we don't like.
Not the restaurants per se, but where with these Latino clients,
that they would attract more Latinos to come here, and we bring in more Latinos because there's these great restaurants,
it's going to get out of control.
That's where it all started, with the agreements.
And then it just got very rigid, and it got very nasty.
Well, there's a curiosity here of a small park right next to my house, between my house and the adjacent apartment house.
There's an apartment house over there.
They've been good neighbors, 35 units, modest income, not an expensive place.
They've been good neighbors for all these years.
That little patch of land, which is actually a piece of Lamont Street that was never open, never paved,
was leased to the apartment house.
It was their front yard, and they had control over it.
They could use it, and there was a fine arrangement.
Then came the people who came in from the suburbs and said, we're going to change things.
We're going to change things to suit ourselves.
They wanted to put a playground there, and I have nothing against playgrounds.
But they never talked to anybody in the apartment house about doing it.
And a lot of those people weren't particularly community minded.
So I know one of your questions was, is it a community?
And I think it's changed in that sense in some ways, because you got this influx of people who didn't think of the place they live as being part of a community.
Lamont was sort of a refuge place where you come home, you have your friends from other places.
But being part of a geographically based community wasn't something important for them.
The people who moved in from outside,
because the people who move in from outside, the people who move in from suburbia,
are your middle class professionals, like me, who know how to access the political system.
They're the ones who tend to run for A and C.
They're the ones who know how to call up their council members and get things done.
They're the ones who are active, and they tend to take over.
The people of relatively modest, unsophisticated backgrounds don't know how to do that.
And they're at a great disadvantage.
And that's when I decided I had to do something.
And in about 2000, we went through this huge battle over the toddler park.
And it was in 2002 that I decided that the A and C needed a voice for the people who weren't wealthy homeowners.
I'm a reasonably prosperous homeowner.
I think I speak for the people who aren't.
I try very hard to speak for the people who aren't.
The A and C meetings are not enough.
Going to meetings is not a typical thing that's part of everybody's culture.
And then we go to meetings.
I grew up in Mexico where you don't speak and they're spoken to.
And then everybody speaks at the same time.
They go a little bit...
But meetings are not the way most people, especially if you're talking about more grassroots people,
a lot of Latinos that come to this city come from urban areas.
So they haven't even gone to the main city in their own country.
So here they're dumped into Washington, D.C.
And probably that's why the Puerto Ricans predominated in the festival and organizing in the community because they were citizens.
And they already knew how it worked.
They had the language.
That's the other thing.
You have the language.
So of course, and then if you have people that are retired, people that have higher incomes and have time to go to meetings,
they're the ones that start having the voice.
Have the same problem.
Who has time to volunteer for an advisory neighborhood commission job?
It's a lot of work.
It doesn't pay you anything.
It takes a lot of time.
Who can do it?
You have to find up with A&Cs which are dominated by white middle class professionals like me.
And it's very hard to get anybody else.
I mean, we work very hard at getting people from the minorities to run for A&C.
It's almost impossible because they just don't have the same kind of resources and flexibility that we have.
And yet this makes the A&Cs tend to favor the white middle class professionals.
There is also a kind of tension about people who rent as opposed to people who own.
Your person that you interviewed, and there's a lot of mixed feeling about people who come into the neighborhood and rent group houses or rent apartments in basements and in the apartment buildings.
What's going to happen to the apartment buildings when the Hispanic population disappears is an issue that's on the horizon, I think.
Whether these all get turned into condominiums or not, who's going to come and live in them.
And so, you know, that's a question also because who really is the stakeholder in the neighborhood?
I think the kinds of people that you're talking about, us versus them, I think that might be from some of the long term residents.
I feel on the border because I am a young person.
And, you know, I could be perceived as a cause of gentrification even though, you know, I have very humble means and I'm just living in this tiny studio apartment.
I may not look or be what the heritage of Mount Pleasant is used to.
Well, I don't know.
Well, I don't know.
Well, I don't know.
And I think these listservs are supposed to, you know, take the place of the backyard, over the backyard fence conversations among your friends and neighbors.
Take the listservs and we have a listserv on a website, we have a Yahoo group that sends out notices to everybody.
And then for a number of years before it got too busy for me, I was doing a sort of a moderated newsletter weekly or so, newsletter about the neighborhood.
And, you know, obviously they don't reach everybody, you know, you have to be able to either have access to either at work or at a library or at a cyber cafe or a computer if you can't afford one yourself and you have to be willing and knowledgeable to how to use it.
So that cuts out unfortunately certain people, certain segments of the population.
I do a newsletter which I hand deliver all over my district, 720 copies every month.
And this is my communication with everybody, not just, you know, the professional class folks, but everybody.
They got my newsletter, they know what's going on because I tell them what's going on.
They know they can call me, they can talk to me anytime.
Yeah, I spend a lot of time on foot in my neighborhood so people know me.
The other really big problem is that these are investment properties and oftentimes the landlords don't even live here.
The owners forget it, they're probably up in Pennsylvania.
So that's not a very healthy situation, you know, where you don't really have any caring or caring and just responsible landlords.
And again, the city does not have enough inspection people to go around.
Shelters for the homeless.
Where do you put shelters for the homeless?
Not in my backyard.
But you know, you've got them.
There's one on Irving Street, there's one on Park Road.
And they're certainly sources of trouble, no doubt about it.
And yet they've got to be someplace.
Do you shut them down and move them out in order to make your incoming population comfortable?
Apartment buildings started to get more crowded.
So where you might have had five people living in an apartment in 1992 and 2000, you might have had eight or nine people living in that same apartment.
There were also people who were renters who were sort of financially and sort of in terms of their life phase ready to buy a place and wanted to stay in Mount Pleasant but couldn't afford it.
So they moved generally east and bought a place.
And then there were people who were sort of in that same situation in other neighborhoods.
And Mount Pleasant was basically like the westernmost neighborhood that they could afford to live in.
Mount Pleasant is a community, a community that's like a family and like most families, there's a lot of dysfunctional parts to it.
There's a lot of amazing, warm, compassionate, generous parts to it.
But there's a lot of, you know, difference of opinion represented as well.
And one thing that I saw about Mount Pleasant right away once I moved here, that it wasn't immediately clear when I visited, was the strong community aspect.
And people use it differently.
And everybody has a different interpretation about it.
And they all, you know, memories.
That's a lot to do with memories I think now because they all remember what they want to remember in the way they want to remember it.
But of course they also always want to situate themselves at the heart of it.
Like when I would talk to Carlos Rosario.
Of course he told me this great story about, you know, taking over the government, you know, and lying on the floor and saying we shall overcome.
But this is again his way of writing history and of gaining the upper hand, gaining the power.
This is very much like Galey's book of, you know, who has control of the discourse and discourse brought into the language.
And, you know, the people that have control of the discourse are the ones that are creating the story.
People have this vested interest in creating themselves as, you know, like the core of the neighborhood.
And the way that they, one of the ways that they do that is by giving the neighborhood a certain identity.
So it's like you create this identity for the neighborhood.
Like in your quest to create yourself in some way, you leave in your wake this particular identity for the neighborhood.
But then that can take on a life of its own.
And people can pick that, you know, that story up and use it in all kinds of ways that are detrimental to the neighborhood without any thought of is this really accurate.
And in some cases it might be, but you can't just assume that it is something that really has to be investigated.
Go ahead.
Right in. Right in.
Oh, I was confused about that.
Well, I'm a sociolinguist.
So I was really interested in how people talked about the neighborhood and how people created an identity for the neighborhood.
And then sort of used that to play off of in terms of creating an identity for themselves as legitimate community members and identities for other people as sort of non-legitimate community members.
You know, so it was like what kind of place is Mount Pleasant, who's a real Mount Pleasant person, who's a fake Mount Pleasant person, and who should have the right to decide what should happen in the neighborhood.
So I was really interested in, you know, the relationship between those three parts.
And what I found is that, first of all, I think Mount Pleasant is very unique in that there's a very high proportion of people who feel like they are members of this community, who identify themselves as Mount Pleasant people.
So, yeah, I think that's it.
So, yeah, I think that's it.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
When I first started this thesis, I thought I was making a film about a thriving community.
And I did.
However, every rose has its thorns and Mount Pleasant is no exception.
There are serious problems facing the community that needs to be addressed, but almost everyone I met over the course of making this film was proud to be a Mount Pleasant person.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
