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Ana Patricia Rodríguez, "Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area" (University of Arizona Press, 2025)
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Mary Reynolds
Hi.
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
I'm here to pick up my son, Milo. There's no Milo here who picked up my son from school.
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Commercial Narrator
Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection.
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Sponsor Voice 1
You don't understand. It was just the fighters.
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
So this was all planned. What are you going to do? I will do whatever it takes to.
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Mary Reynolds
Get my son back.
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Commercial Narrator
I honestly didn't see this coming.
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
These nice people killing each other.
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Commercial Narrator
All her fault. A new series, streaming now only on Peacock. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Mary Reynolds
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Mary Reynolds, and I am publicity manager for the University of Arizona Press. Today I'm thrilled to talk with Ana Patricia Rodriguez, author of the book Avocado Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. metro area, published by the University of Arizona Press in November 2025. In Avocado Dreams, the author draws from her own experience as a Salvadoran transplant in D.C. through a careful reading of the creative works of local writers, creating performers, artists, and artivists, Rodriguez demonstrates how the people have remade themselves in relation to the cultural, ethnoracial, and sociolinguistic diversity of the area. Ana Patricia Rodriguez, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
Oh, thank you, Mary. I'm really happy to be here.
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Mary Reynolds
Ana Patricia, please tell me a little bit about yourself.
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
Yes. So my name is Ana Patricia Rodriguez, and I'm really glad that you prefaced my introduction by saying that I'm a transplant to Washington, D.C. i actually grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and my parents immigrated there in 1969. I was five years old. So I'm what they call a 1.5 immigrant who came as a child and grew up in this country. And I did all my schooling in California in the Bay Area, and when I interviewed for jobs fresh out of grad school, I had the good fortune of being hired by the University of Maryland. So I've been a professor at the University of Maryland College park, since 1998. And I say fortunate because I came to find that the Washington D.C. area is home to a large number, one of the highest concentrations in one area of Salvadoran immigrants. And so a great part of my research since arriving here has been focused on Central American and Salvadoran culture production in the area.
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Mary Reynolds
Thank you. So let's get to the book. What first inspired you to write Avocado Dreams? Was there a particular moment, story or encounter that led you to explore the Salvadoran migration and identity in this way?
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
Yes. So I mentioned that, you know, one of the big draws to coming to work in this area was finding out that the largest Latinx Latin population is Central American, primarily Salvadoran. So from the get go, when I arrived here, I, you know, started connecting with the community and working with the community and learning about its history of migrating to this area. I was very familiar with Latino migration and communities in California, of course, right. The Southwest and put in. I was also familiar with Salvadoran migration and Central American migration to California and the Bay Area. But before coming here, I was like every everybody else, you know, with the question, what Salvadorans in D.C. and lo and behold, I started, you know, like just, you know, keeping my eyes open and learning that yes, the largest population is Salvadoran in Washington D.C. so I felt like, you know, I had come home to a second home. And I. My focus of my research was already Central Americans in the US But I started zeroing in and focusing on Salvadoran culture and Salvadoran, particularly literary production in the area. And so I was doing my research and what I started to notice was that, you know, the research was actually right in front of me with living people that I could interview, that I could work with, who were, you know, some poets who were out here performing. You know, I'll be mentioning Kiki Aviles, who's been a great instrument, inspiration. But you asked me what was my biggest inspiration. It was probably seeing that research come alive and in particular learning about the women who had migrated to the area, who were the kind of the, what they call the pioneeras, the pioneers of this migration. And D.C. has a particular migration to the area which is that, as you might know, right, the big industry here is government. So the classic story of almost any foreign born population in the area is that a lot of people came to work in businesses or, well, the business of embassies and agencies, who ambassadors came and other people in high profile jobs and they ended up bringing their either domestic helpers and so forth. So that brought in a Large population of workers. And also people came in great numbers during the Civil War, 1980s, 1970s, and the migration just continued to increase. So we have that large population of Salvadorans. So it was interesting to me to see the research again come alive and to meet people whose story was that. And so I was inspired by the community to, you know, delve deeper, to, you know, really, you know, engage in learning their stories, collecting oral histories, and then following the production of artists in the region and becoming involved with the artistic production as well. What I call in the book, and a lot of people call artivists telling their stories. So we did a lot of work, you know, working with the community. But if there's one story that really brought it home for me was actually a lived experience. I had sitting in a small park in the Latino barrio of Anas Morgan and Mount Pleasant. I was sitting there talking on the phone, actually, and an older woman came by, walking in a cage in a little cart, her parakeets. And so she sat next to me, and we started, you know, just chatting. And it turned out that she was the embodiment of the stories that I had been reading in the research. These women who came to work at embassies and stayed on and now, you know, were retiring, but whose stories had yet to be told. So that's, you know, kind of the work that I do.
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Mary Reynolds
Did she bring her parakeets from El Salvador or did she get them in.
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
Washington, D.C. i think she got them from D.C. but, you know, like, in the moment I was sitting there, right, and it struck me, oh, she's walking her parakeets through the neighborhood.
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Mary Reynolds
That. That is quite a visual I have in my mind with that. So how do you approach connecting the different modes of storytelling to capture the transnational lives of salvadorans in the D.C. area and beyond?
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
Yes. So, you know, my training is in literary studies. There is a lot of research, a lot of great research that focuses on the sociological, the anthropological, the migration of, you know, just about any group, Latin, a another to the United States. You know, I had read a lot of work by people like Terry Reepack, who focuses on DC Cecilia Menhivad, who has great work on migration, and also Sarah Mahler and other people. And they draw a lot from ethnographic work. But being a person that works on literature, I was also seeing at that time an outpouring, a surge in Latino literature and within that, the Salvadoran and Central American stories that were being published. So I, you know, early on, I felt like, you know, there is A lot to be told, not just by sociological research, but also by. In the literary text, of course. And so then I, you know, I started doing a lot of work writing on the poetry, the testimonials. Testimonials, oral tradition, oral histories by Salvadorans. And so my research is really mixed because I draw from that original sociological migration research, but also from oral tradition, oral history, and then also from the literary texts that, you know, I kind of combine and try to draw out larger stories.
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Mary Reynolds
Thank you. Well, let's get into the specifics of one of those literary texts. In your discussion of Kike Aviles, you write about how he reimagines Washington, D.C. as another city of El Salvador. How does his poetry challenge traditional ideas of nationhood and belongings? And what does this say about the Salvadoran presence in the District?
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
So that quote comes from a poem called El Salvador at a Glance, and it is the story of transnational migration. And he starts the poem by enumerating the cities, the Salvadoran cities. And so, of course, you know, he mentions San Salvador, the capital, and some other cities in San Salvador, San Miguel. And then down the line, he mentions Los Angeles and mentions Washington, dc. And so Kikiaviles has spent a lifetime of working with other artists and representing Salvadorans in Washington, dc. So he's been telling throughout his poetry that greater story of the Salvadoran, Central American, and Latino migration to the D.C. area. But in that particular poem, it's almost an ode to Salvadoran migration here, because what he says is, we're part of a larger network, the larger migration of Salvadorans, D.C. is only one point in this migration or diaspora. So some scholars have called this just migration throughout the World of Salvadoran Department 15. And Department 15 is a term that is used to describe not a province or a state of El Salvador. There's actually 14 states in El Salvador, but the 15th is the diaspora, everybody who's dispersed everywhere. So when Kika talks about the different cities, including, including Washington, D.C. louisiana, Houston, New York, he puts us on the map of being part of a larger nationhood of Salvadorans that don't necessarily live within the country itself, within the geopolitical borders. So we can be, you know, Salvadoran and live outside of El Salvador.
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Mary Reynolds
So sticking with Aviles for a moment, he describes Salvadorans as, quote, last call, ripe avocados, unquote. How do you interpret this image and what does it reveal about the visibility or invisibility of Salvadoran communities in DC's cultural landscape?
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
So that is a quote from another poem where he describes the barrios of Washington D.C. where immigrants, foreign born people who've arrived to the area share space, for example, with long standing historic African American communities. Now, Washington D.C. is very diverse. Washington D.C. is, you know, socioeconomically very diverse as well. Right. So there are, there is a lot of disenfranch, disenfranchisement in the city, right. Especially with the ways of gentrification that have been ongoing in the city. So when, when he calls Salvadorans last ripe or last ripe or last call ripe avocados, he's talking about communities that are highly invisibilized, highly marginalized. And if we think in the current moment with the immigration, the ICE raids and everything. So we're talking about the same communities that have experienced a long history of persecution in their countries, but also in the United States. So what Kike does throughout his work is to bring visibility not only to the communities, but to the issues that they experience. So to be a last call, right avocado, you can visualize that avocado that, you know, nobody wants, right? Because it's already past its, its date. And yet, you know, it's, it's probably a very delicious avocado. So he, what he's doing is elevating, you know, communities that have completely been marginalized and overlooked and invisibilized.
- [15:01]
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Mary Reynolds
So, sticking with the avocado metaphor, in the short story called Juana's Dreams, Mario Ben Castro gives us a woman whose longing for El Salvador becomes centered around the avocado, a simple but deeply charged symbol. As you just described. How does Juana's relationship to the avocado reflect the emotional and cultural challenges of living in a diaspora?
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
Yeah, and I have to say too, that this particular story, Juana's Dreams by Pen Castro, was probably the centerpiece and the story that really made me think of that image as, you know, really representing the condition of Salvadorans in this area. Juana represents that migration that I spoke about earlier of the women led migration to D.C. who came to work in domestic jobs in hotels and childcare and so forth. That has been highly visibilized in the case of Juana. The character comes from El Salvador during the war, spends her whole life working in the United states and Washington D.C. raising her kids. Um, by the time the story opens, her, her kids have moved away, her husband has left her, she's by herself and, and yet, right, she's, she's very connected to her country. She, she lives every year, works hard throughout the year in order to return every August to spend time during the festivals. And on one such occasion, she returns home, her sister, it's her birthday, prepares a lunch, and the avocados are the centerpiece. So in that moment, the avocados become identified, or she becomes identified with the avocados, and she invests a lot of, you know, energy, a lot of value to the avocados. They became to become, to symbolize her own, you know, status, nature and life, her own, her own dreams. But as we know, and we just talked about, you know, the ripe avocados, they're very fragile as well. So she gathers or gathers some avocados and actually smuggles them back into the United States, the seeds and plants them in, in the Virginia summer, which is. Well, first she plot up, puts them in a pot and takes care of them, talks to them and they're really thriving. But then come summer, she plants them outside and they die. And so the way that I read that story is that, you know, here's a woman who has lived all her life with a dream to thrive, to take care of her kids, to, you know, the so called American dream, right? But the American dream often does not yield for some of us. Right. So at the end, you know, it. It's the death of the avocados. It's the death of the dream. It's the death of, you know, her connections to her country. So after they die, she calls her sister and she tells her, I'm sorry, I will not be coming back next year. So it's a really. It's a really touching story because I think it is the story of a lot of immigrants, Right, that spent all their life, you know, working really hard. And perhaps at the end, you know, the, you know, some aspect of the American dream might come true, but, you know, not necessarily.
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Mary Reynolds
Thank you. You touched on this a bit. But Juana's story really feels like the heart, as you said of your book, Avocado Dreams, which is a meditation on hope, loss, and the effort to replant your roots elsewhere. How does her experience, Juana's experience capture the larger metaphor of avocado dreams that threads throughout your book?
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
Yes. So something that I didn't mention, the. The book is divided into four chapters using Salvadoran language terms that we use to identify ourselves. It starts with avocado, aguacatero, which is where this. The analysis of this story is. And auacatero is a very interesting term because it's often used in El Salvador and by, you know, communities outside to identify kind of our Salvador ness, our, you know, what makes a Salvadoran, what makes us native, what makes us typical. And so I think that the story ultimately also is a meditation on what it is to be Salvadoran inside the country and outside the country. And that, you know, outside of the country, different elements also start to become part of, you know, this mixed identity that, you know, we build along the way. Some people have called it mestizaje, some people have called it other things. And to be a huacatero is to be of the land, El Salvador, to be identified. But also there's an element of fiction, of inventing, an element of nostalgia. So oftentimes we have to create our notion of what the country is, and oftentimes it's an illusion. And so the translation of the title of that story in English, it's Juana's Dreams, but in Spanish, the title is Juana's Illusiones. So for her, El Salvador is an illusion of what she kept her, you know, thriving and going while she was, you know, away.
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Mary Reynolds
Yeah, especially if you're fleeing from a war torn country and then you forget all of the violence and heartbreak that you're fleeing. Then you create a illusion like you said Juana's illusiones.
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
It's.
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Mary Reynolds
Yeah. Which translates in somewhat times to avocado dreams. So in the epilogue of your book, you describe Entre Mundos between worlds and home stories as student centered and student creative archives that give voice to Latinx and Salvadoran diasporic life in the D.C. area. What first inspired you to bring digital storytelling into your classroom? And how did it change the way your students understood migration and belonging?
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
Yeah, thanks for that question. I started working on digital story early on, like in around 2010. And actually I took some workshops at the Story center in Berkeley where they train. And the focus is on story story making as opposed to focusing on the digital part. I wanted to find ways that we could tell our stories drawing from personal archives and of course families have a lot of pictures. So I wanted to find a way that we could use those photos that we have in our albums, the sounds that, you know, we could capture and put into video birds. There was a time when I would go to El Salvador and I would record sounds because they were just sounds I could not hear here in the United States. The sound of the ocean, the sounds of parakeets flying at five o' clock in San Salvador. So I was, you know, trying to find a way of how you can combine all that to tell a story in a very short, in a very short amount of time. Because digital storytelling is traditionally three to five minutes, using very basic elements, especially for those of us that really don't have all the knowledge or the skills to, you know, make movies. Right. So, so I, you know, I was trained a little bit in that and I was able to, you know, get my university to buy some software, etc. And with the help of our tech people, we started training the students on how to use the different elements, bring them in. And also for me, the main objective, how to tell a story, how to write using very concise language, but complementing it with images and with sounds. And so we were able, at this point, we were able to. Well, we have been able to generate and produce about. To this. To this moment. To this. Yeah, to at the present moment, about almost 100 short little videos. And a lot of them are focused on students stories, their family stories here in the Washington D.C. area, places, parts of history. I leave it open to them. And so it's been a really productive exercise. And also a lot of us who work in Central American studies know that early on in Central American studies, there was a lot of discussion around the invisibility of Central Americans and salvadorans in the U.S. so for me, early on, it was a way also to visualize, through visual media, the stories of, you know, these migrants.
- [26:12]
Mary Reynolds
Thank you. Continuing with your digital storytelling process, you write how your students stories like the lifeline and another story called the traveling cheese capture, quote, the art of everyday we is placemaking, unquote. Would you share a story from one of these student projects that especially moved you?
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
So the. The two that you just mentioned, the lifeline, it. It's a story of. A story of a student. And actually, she was part Paraguayan and American, I think. And she. Every day that she left her. Her dorm room at a certain time, she would run into the person who cleaned her floor in the stairwell, talking to a relative that she later came to find out was her daughter in El Salvador. And so, you know, the students in that story reflects on how the cellular phone becomes a lifeline between this mother who's away and her daughters, how they connect, how they, you know, talk about everyday things. And so it made me reflect on, yes, you know, the use of technology and all this media that, you know, keeps people connected. Right. And it's been really an important element in. In the diaspora. In the other story, that story is very interesting because Salvadorans, we like cheese. Queso duro, queso, blandito, queso. And usually, you know, people bring back. Will bring back cheese. And so that story is a story by a student who was. Who was telling about her grandmother always returning with a suitcase of cheese. And so she was always bringing a little piece of home back to her family. And, you know, and it is a story that all of us, you know, kind of could identify with a lot of us Salvadorans, regardless, you know, where in the diaspora we live. And so the story document, the student documented and used personal photos of waiting for their grandparents at the airport, of the suitcase coming, you know, around the turnstile, and the cheese and the suitcase. So, you know, elements like that help you make place a transnational space, make it home the cheese. And there are a lot of stories like that. Another one that I. That I want to mention that is really continues to touch my heart. That one is titled Amora Lang Distance Love. And it's the story of a student I had a few years back, and she actually is a performer, a singer. So she wrote her own music. And she tells a story of her parents having met as children in their barrio in El Salvador. And, you know, they were young children, and because of the war, they were sent out or they, you know, her mother ended up in the D.C. area and her father as well, her future father, and they ended up meeting again at a church in the. In the Washington, D.C. metro area, and they ended up marrying. And so she tells her story, but for me, I mean, that was touching enough. But the most touching part was I got to meet her parents at her graduation at the end of that semester, and she was able to give this story as a gift to her parents. So usually students then, you know, show their worth to their parents. And, you know, I'm always hoping that they connect and they talk about, you know, their histories, their stories.
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Mary Reynolds
Wow, that's a beautiful story. And just so the personal stories are sometimes the most powerful, but they also express these universal truths. And that's why your book is so wonderful with the artists and the artivists who are professionally doing it. But then as well as your students who are dipping their foot and telling their personal stories, you close the book by highlighting art as a form of unforgetting, unsilencing, and prevailing. Looking back, how has working alongside your students and community members influenced your own sense of what it means to teach, write, and to remember collectively?
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Ana Patricia Rodriguez
Oh, that's a beautiful question. I think ultimately, that has become my driving force for the work that I do and for teaching. You know, you can read all we want, all the literature we want, but, you know, connecting with it, making it, you know, make a difference, is something that, you know, I think we. We often work at. But I think for the Salvadoran diaspora, since we are away from home, connecting is, you know, very important. Unforgetting. As Roberto Lovato, he's a writer, has a book called Unforgetting. In other words, you know, an active act of remembrance. Those things that we were supposed to forget, right? Like the war, like the separations, like the sacrifices, everything that, you know, we have to give up in order to migrate, in this case, to the United States. And at the end of the day, all of that is part of, you know, the story of prevailing despite all the hardships. I think that, you know, the larger narrative of Salvadorans is that despite everything we prevail, we've been just holding on and trying to, you know, keep on living despite, you know, civil wars, migration, separations, et cetera.
- [32:11]
Mary Reynolds
Thank you. For listeners who want to engage more with the Salvadoran community in the American capital city, you can, of course, read the book Avocado Dreams Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. metro area, published by the University of Press in 2025 this essential work reminds us that identity, like the avocado seed, is shaped by the soil it finds, the histories it carries, and the dreams it tries to root in unfamiliar ground. Ana Patricia, thank you so much for being with me today on the podcast.
- [32:46]
Ana Patricia Rodriguez
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.