WASHINGTON -- Jorge Moreira came to America looking for the promised land. Instead, he says, he has found only poverty and squalor.
Shirtless and barefoot, he sits in a dingy, one-bedroom apartment overlooking Mount Pleasant Street, cradling his sister's 6-month-old baby. Through the cracked, grimy window he can see the traffic of the Northwest Washington neighborhood that has been his home for 10 months, smell the corn bread and barbecued ribs from the restaurant below, and hear the children kicking a tennis ball.
An outsider could have mistaken it for a normal Wednesday morning. But for those trying to eke out a living in the Mount Pleasant and Adams-Morgan areas of Washington, the tension that day was almost tangible. It glinted in the stormy faces and gestures of the young men clustered on the corners, crackled in their jeers and shouts. Wherever one looked, it seemed, there were police officers.
It had been worse the night before, when a dusk-to-dawn curfew forced people to stay indoors. On Sunday and Monday nights it was intolerable: Gangs running through the streets smashing windows of stores and restaurants, hurling bottles and rocks at police, setting cars and buses on fire; police firing tear-gas salvos until the whole neighborhood seemed choked in clouds of stinging fumes.
It was shocking, yes. But nobody who actually lived there, or who had been watching the tremendous growth of the Hispanic community the past 10 years, seemed surprised by the fact that Washington's worst riots in more than two decades erupted there last week.
"This was just the tip of the iceberg," said Adams-Morgan activist Pedro Aviles. "These people were just ventilating frustrations that have been building for many years. People here are tired of being treated like second-class citizens."
He and other activists say the roots of the problem are many, ranging from bureaucratic indifference, police brutality and gross underrepresentation in government to a host of socioeconomic disadvantages, including educational backlogs and poverty in the native countries of the new wave of immigrants, and language and cultural barriers here.
Mr. Moreira sighed. His breath smelled of wine. He would normally have been working that time of day, he said. He worked as a gardener in Virginia for $5.50 an hour. But he was too afraid to go out -- afraid of getting caught up in more riots, afraid of the curfew, afraid of being blamed for all the trouble, afraid of a lot of things.
The 28-year-old Salvadoran national said he had never been educated -- he could not even write his name -- but he had at least been able to earn a living in El Salvador, better than here.
His sister, a single mother, works as a cleaner in a neighborhood restaurant for $3.50 an hour, he said. If it weren't for her income and occasional contributions from their two Salvadoran lodgers, they would not be able to survive, he said, gesturing at the sparse furnishings. Then, of course, there was also the need to send money each month to his "viejita," his aged, widowed mother, in El Salvador.
"The only thing I got now is a job cutting grass . . . and these three fingers," he said, holding up the blackened digits of his right hand, which he had injured on the spinning blade of a power mower a few days earlier. If he could find the money to get back home to El Salvador, he would, he said.
The riots began after a policewoman shot a Hispanic man during a scuffle that broke out when she tried to arrest him for drinking in public.
"How can you imagine a macho man being arrested by a woman?" was the incredulous comment from Alex Compagnet, the Chilean-born head of a Latino community self-help group in Washington called Salud.
"It is inconceivable, and it shows how important it is for every policeman and woman to be trained in the sensitivities of Latino culture," said Mr. Compagnet.
He said Hispanics in Adams-Morgan and Mount Pleasant had long felt discriminated against -- particularly by the police. He had personally reported the police beating of a handcuffed Hispanic about a year ago, but nothing was done about it, he said.
Government officials and community activists say that the Hispanic population of greater Washington -- including Montgomery and Prince George's counties in Maryland and Virginia's Fairfax County -- has mushroomed dramatically -- some say tripled -- in the last 10 years, and that it is continuing to grow rapidly.
Nobody seriously accepts the 1990 census, which found fewer than 40,000 Hispanics in the District. The number is between 70,000 and 85,000 -- 10 percent to 14 percent of the city's population -- officials and activists agree. But Hispanics account for only about 1 percent of the city government's work force.
Some 80 percent of the newcomers are Salvadoran -- an 'D important factor when considering the impact, or needs, of Washington's Hispanics, said Ana Sol Gutierrez, a member of Montgomery County's elected Board of Education.
"The biggest mistake that American companies and organizations, and even the government, make is to look at Hispanics as one homogeneous group," she said. "There is an enormous range of social and economic levels, not to speak of national identities, among Hispanics here."
Because of the Salvadoran civil war, with its massive economic and social disruption, many of the people who left that country were barely educated in their own language, let alone in English, she said.
Their situation was often aggravated by their ignorance of U.S. laws and customs. Many did not even know if they were legal or illegal residents.
The complexity of immigration laws and the fact that many Hispanic people entered the country illegally and worry about deportation contributes to their isolation from the rest of the community.
For these reasons, they tended to live closeted together as a social group -- seldom venturing outdoors or mingling with other groups -- and were exploited for cheap, sometimes unpaid, labor.
"It has created an underclass mentality and behavior which leads to the kind of situation that we saw in Washington," Ms. Gutierrez said.
Ms. Gutierrez said she is the only Hispanic elected official in the state of Maryland and, to her knowledge, the only Salvadoran in such a position anywhere in the United States.
The U.S.-educated daughter of a Harvard-schooled diplomat says she has not personally had to bear the brunt of racial, ethnic or social prejudice. But she is intensely aware of the discrimination against Hispanics in the United States, she said.
The discrimination also exists among Hispanic people themselves -- between the generally poorer new wave of immigrants and those who are firmly established in the United States, she said.
"I think there is going to be an increasingly difficult struggle," Ms. Gutierrez said. "I do not believe that such a range of diversity has ever existed in the United States before.
"The key to resolving the problem is better education," she said. "Easier access to jobs and housing would be a help. But education is paramount."
Mr. Compagnet, of Salud, said the problems were aggravated by a lack of leadership within the Spanish-speaking population.
Official representatives of the Hispanic people have been mostly Cubans and Puerto Ricans, who came during earlier influxes and who, he said, have little in common with the new generation.
"The Cubans here are from the bourgeoisie who fled Castro in the 1950s and '60s," he said. "They have nothing in common with the people coming in now. And as for the Puerto Ricans, they were already familiar with English and American culture when they got here. It was much easier for them."
He cited as an example Jose Ruiz, executive director of Gov. William Donald Schaefer's Commission on Hispanic Affairs, a Puerto Rican by birth. The fact that Mr. Ruiz was of the older immigrant generation and was based in Baltimore meant that he was not in touch with the Southern Maryland and D.C. Hispanic communities, Mr. Compagnet said.
But Mr. Ruiz said the commission had reacted swiftly to alleviate tensions in Montgomery and Prince George's counties. While there are differences between Hispanics, he admitted, they should work to overcome them.
"Latinos are Latinos," he said. "We must stick together, regardless of where we come from."
He said the commission estimated there were about 200,000 Hispanics in Maryland -- 115,000 of them in Montgomery and Prince George's counties. The 1990 census lists 125,000 in Maryland -- up from an official figure of 65,000 in 1980.
"There are some serious needs out there," he acknowledged -- housing, education, adult literacy, job training, drug and alcohol treatment.
Financial cutbacks, however, have made it more difficult to meet those needs. "The federal money has dried up; it's gone, finished," he said.
Hispanic people also have had to compete with other minorities for funds, he said. "We get hit with a double whammy," he said. "We're not only a minority, but we've also got language and cultural differences to bridge."