The University of Arizona Press
November 24, 2025
The University of Arizona Press podcast features an interview with Ana Patricia Rodríguez, author of Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area. Rodríguez is an associate professor of U.S. Latina/o and Central American literatures at the University of Maryland, College Park. She calls herself a “1.5 immigrant” because she moved to the United States when she was a child. She is past president of the Latina/o Studies Association (2017–2019).
After analyzing the work of professional writers and artivists, Rodríguez concludes her book with the creative work of her students from digital storytelling projects. Asked about the inspiration to bring Entre Mundos / Between Worlds digital storytelling into her classroom, Rodríguez answered: “I wanted to find ways we could tell our stories based on personal archives. And of course, families have a lot of pictures. So I wanted to find a way to use those photos we have in our albums, as well as the sounds we could capture and put into video. I had recorded sounds in El Salvador that I couldn’t hear in the United States; sounds like the songs of birds, sounds of the ocean, the sounds of parakeets flying at five o’clock in San Salvador. So I wanted my students to learn how to combine these types of images and sounds to create a story in a short amount of time, because with digital storytelling, you only have three to five minutes.”
Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
About the book:
For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the region, contributing their labor, ingenuity, and culture to the making of a thriving but highly neglected and overlooked community.
In Avocado Dreams, Ana Patricia Rodríguez draws from her own positionality as a Salvadoran transplant to examine the construction of the unique Salvadoran cultural imaginary made in the greater D.C. area. Through a careful reading of the creative works of local writers, performers, artists, and artivists, Rodríguez demonstrates how the people have remade themselves in relation to the cultural, ethnoracial, and sociolinguistic diversity of the area. She discusses how Salvadoran people have developed unique, intergenerational Salvadoreñidades, manifested in particular speech and symbolic acts, ethnoracial embodiments, and local identity formations in relation to the diverse communities, most notably Black Washingtonians, who co-inhabit the region.
