"Yep, they are closing," says a customer standing outside.
"Why they closing?" Cassie asks. "They selling to a white woman?"
Mattie McLain, co-owner of Carrie's Foodmart and Deli, talks to Domingo Salazar, who has come to buy cigarettes. Miss Mattie is closing out, having rented the store to a woman from Central America.
(Juana Arias -- The Washington Post)
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No, the customer answers, "a Spanish lady."
"We're going to miss Miss Mattie," says Antwanette Washington, 15.
Change has come again to Columbia Heights, once a busy commercial district, then broken by the 1968 riots that left so many buildings burned. Now, according to the Development Corporation of Columbia Heights, Latino people own 75 percent of the businesses, white people are buying up half-million-dollar condos and black people who hung on after the riots are sitting on gold mines of equity.
Building owners are paying renters $10,000 to get out and make way for more condos. Just the other day a notice went out upping the ante at one building: $15,000. Crime is down and things are being cleaned up. A couple of weeks ago, the Tivoli Theatre, once segregated, reopened to house the GALA Hispanic Theatre.
You remember the Clifton Terrace projects, which they said were responsible for 27 percent of the crime in Columbia Heights? The street in front was the scene of murder after murder. Detectives called it "the canyon," so bad that taxis wouldn't go there. Crack cocaine turned people into ghosts, mortal crews ruled, guns popped day and night. Well, did you hear? They renovated Clifton Terrace, turned it into condos, dividing it up according to social class: "market-rate, moderate-income and low-income."
Columbia Heights, north of U Street, is a neighborhood where long-promised change has arrived -- bringing questions of whether cultural differences might bring conflict, whether old-timers might resent newcomers. Whether the prophecy long held by black people, that they would be pushed out by the very change they advocated, would be fulfilled.
Or: Whether one neighbor might understand another, connect across life stories, memories and language. Whether you could learn a little Spanish, like "Hola, que tal?" and I could learn a little English, like "I want a pack of Newports." Whether you could let me try some of that yucas and I can give you a serving of greens. Whether you could understand what it is like to leave six children behind in El Salvador for so long they forget to call you mamá. And I could tell you about my daughter, bless her heart, who practically had a football team -- seven children -- by a man with no job. Whether you could teach me to make a pupusa and I could teach you to smoke some ribs.
The Pupuseria
Descend one step. Open the door and land in El Salvador, in Gloria's Pupuseria.
Her hands are wet as they press the flour into pupusas. Pat, pat, pat. Dip into the oil. Scoop up some pork. More flour. Pat, pat, pat.
This den with seven tables used to be a soul food joint before the owner, a black man, rented it to Gloria Umana, who is sitting at a table, reading her prayer book. In El Salvador she baked bread, then traveled to the coast to exchange it for fish, which she brought back to her home town to sell. When she left Salvador, guided by "coyotes," she was 35. It was easier then to cross the border. "You didn't have to suffer so much. You didn't have to run."
Gloria came to Washington a "mojado," as in "one who comes without papers," in 1979. Seven years later, she brought three of her children mojados, followed by three who came legally. Now she has no worry about telling the story of how she came illegally. She flashes a smile. "Amnesty," she says, given by President Reagan. That's why she votes Republican.
On a table in the corner a prayer candle burns. Beside it is a television, showing a Spanish talk show, "Mi Madre, Mi Esclava," "My Mother, My Slave." The show has all the elements of Jerry Springer, with shouting and crying.
In Washington, Gloria found work at an Italian restaurant, where she learned to run a restaurant, but not to speak English. "I was working too hard," she says in Spanish. She started a side business, selling etole, a corn drink, and orchata, a milk-and-cinnamon drink, out of her car trunk.
Then one night a police officer gave her a $50 ticket. "He said the next ticket would be $500 and the next would be $1,000," Gloria says. "He said, 'It's better to find you a small carryout.' It was like a blessing that it happened to me."
She found the tiny den, now painted yellow.
In the kitchen, a sculptured mound of flour becomes a pancake filled with meat. She leans against the counter, places the pupusa on a tray. She dips her hands in the oil, scoops out more flour.
The door opens and two teenage girls walk through. They are giggling. They count eight quarters between them and order una pupusa con carne. One girl is black, the other is Latina: Shanell Washington and Quendi Lemus, both in the eighth grade at Lincoln Middle. They've been friends since first grade.
Shanell: "We just started chillin'."
