Md. Street's Soul Hasn't Strayed Far From Roots

"It was nice," he said.

But the street had changed a lot, and Rice realized he now knew few of his neighbors.

His father, who was a service manager at a car dealership, had died in 1993. He stayed on after his mother's death in 2003 and said it's been quiet in the house since then. "But it was quiet when she was here," he said. "We got along really good, because she didn't need me and I didn't need her, but we liked each other."

For him, the house, which was paid off years ago, has been the same, comfortable place he knew as a child.

"I don't like change," he said, sitting one recent evening in his dining room. "This is the furniture that I grew up with. I've always eaten off this dining room table. . . . It was very easy for me to stay here and not want for a whole lot more."

Perhaps, he said, it was too easy: "This was a comfort level that I never had to fight my way out of. . . . I don't know what it says for me still being here."

Diversity Moves In

Mauricio and Ana Salinas found Mason Street one day while looking for a safer place to raise their children. They felt that their old neighborhood, elsewhere in Montgomery, was dangerous. Mason Street looked quiet and secure.

They visited the street at night to make sure. They came by during the day. They came by at all hours. It was always clean and quiet and seemed perfect.

They became the first Latinos on Mason Street when they moved in with their two sons, Edwin, then 12, and David, then 8, in the summer of 1989.

They were among the tens of thousands of immigrant families who had begun transforming the demographic landscapes of inner suburbs around Washington and across the country.

Mason Street met them with chilly stares.

"When [the neighbors] saw us moving in, they looked at us like, 'Oh, man, something wrong is going to happen here,' " Mauricio said.