Ana Patricia Rodríguez at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C.

Date: Saturday, February 7, 2026

Time: 6 p.m., EST

Where: Politics and Prose at Union Market, 1324 4th Street NE, Washington, D.C.

Salvadorans make up thirty-two percent of the Washington D.C.’s Hispanic population, and one Salvadoran writer described the American Capital City as “another city in El Salvador.” Ana Patricia Rodríguez will read from her new book, Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area at Politics and Prose at Union Market on February 7, 2026. Rodríguez is an associate professor of U.S. Latina/o and Central American literatures at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is past president of the Latina/o Studies Association (2017–2019). This book launch celebration is free and open to the public.

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.