There is a Sunday gathering that has been happening in Malcolm X Park in Washington, D.C. for years. Cuban rumberos, Afro-Colombian dancers, Dominican activists, West African drummers, and second-generation young people who carry two or more cultural identities in their bodies show up, make music, and remind the neighborhood that the lines between African and Latino are not as clean as textbooks suggest.
For many people watching from the outside, it looks like two communities coming together. For those in the middle of it, it has always been one.
The rise of Afro-Latino culture in the DMV is not a recent trend. It is the slow and overdue visibility of something that has existed in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia for decades, rooted in one of the most consequential and underreported chapters of the African diaspora. As the region’s demographics shift, its cultural landscape evolves, and a new generation of Afro-Latino artists, activists, and community builders claims space, the story is finally getting the attention it deserves.
The Deep History That Makes This Story Possible
Before understanding what Afro-Latino culture looks like in the DMV today, it helps to understand where it comes from historically, because the story starts long before the first Salvadoran family settled in Columbia Heights or the first Dominican community took root in Northeast D.C.
Afro-Latino identity has deep roots in colonial Latin America, where it can often exist alongside a person’s Hispanic, racial, or national origin identities. The life experiences of Afro-Latinos are shaped by race, skin tone, and other factors in ways that differ from other Hispanics.
The reason those roots run so deep is mathematics. In Latin America’s colonial period, about 15 times as many African slaves were taken to Spanish and Portuguese colonies than to the United States. About 130 million people of African descent live in Latin America today, making up roughly a quarter of the region’s total population, according to recent estimates from the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America at Princeton University.
Only 4.4 percent of Africans forced into slavery in the Americas came to the United States. The rest went to Latin America and the Caribbean and forever changed the demographics of the region. That staggering number explains why so many people from El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, and Mexico carry African DNA, African cultural memory, African spiritual traditions, and African aesthetic sensibilities, even when those countries spent centuries trying to erase that inheritance.
Music, dance, religion, and language all bear the influence of African heritage. In Cuba, the rhythms of Afro-Cuban music such as rumba and son reflect African traditions. Brazil’s samba and capoeira are direct results of African cultural resistance. Many Latin American countries promoted ideologies of mestizaje, or racial mixing, which while celebrating a diverse heritage, often sought to erase Black identity in favor of a more Europeanized national identity.
That erasure is precisely what makes visibility so urgent, and why the work happening in the DMV today matters so much.
The Numbers Behind the DMV’s Afro-Latino Community
The Washington region is home to one of the largest and most diverse Latino communities in the United States. The region’s nearly one million Latinos have settled primarily in Washington’s Maryland and Virginia suburbs, with the counties holding the largest Latino populations being Montgomery and Prince George’s in Maryland and Alexandria and Fairfax in Northern Virginia.
As of 2024, the most common birthplace for foreign-born residents of Washington D.C. was El Salvador, the natal country of 11,551 District residents, followed by Ethiopia with 7,807. That data point alone captures something remarkable: the two largest foreign-born populations in D.C. are a Central American country with deep African roots, and an East African nation, living side by side in a majority-Black city.
Nationally, in 2020 there were about 6 million Afro-Latino adults in the United States, making up about 2 percent of the U.S. adult population and 12 percent of the adult Latino population. About one-in-seven Afro-Latinos, or an estimated 800,000 adults, do not identify as Hispanic.
A Pew Research Center survey of Latino adults found that one-quarter of all U.S. Latinos self-identify as Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean, or of African descent with roots in Latin America. Those who identify as Afro-Latino are more concentrated on the East Coast and in the South than other Latinos, with 65 percent of Afro-Latinos living in these regions.
The DMV sits directly at that concentration point. Washington D.C.’s history as Chocolate City, the presence of Howard University, the large West African immigrant communities in Prince George’s and Montgomery counties, and the long-established Latin American communities across the region have created a unique environment where Afro-Latino identity does not have to be explained or defended. It simply exists, and increasingly, it is being celebrated.
The Man Who Has Been Documenting D.C.’s Afro-Latino Story
No conversation about Afro-Latino culture in Washington D.C. is complete without mentioning Manuel Mendez.
Mendez is originally from the Dominican Republic and moved to Washington, D.C. at the age of nine. After graduating from Bell Multicultural High School, he received his bachelor’s degree in African Studies and Communication at Antioch College. As the Chair of the DC AfroLatino Caucus, Mendez’s goal is to unite Black and Brown people of the Washington metropolitan area.
Mendez grew up always knowing his Black and Latino identity, but even in Washington, DC, a city affectionately called the Chocolate City for its historically large Black population, he spent a lot of time educating others.
The DC AfroLatino Caucus came out of an initiative in 2016 that started in the Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs. The biggest challenge was the lack of visibility and recognition of the Afro-Latinx community. One of the starting initiatives was to document the contributions of Afro-Latinos through panel discussion and oral history. The work was also urgent because their elders were getting older and their contributions needed to be documented for a new generation. Among those figures was Néstor L. Hernández, a native Washington photographer of Afro-Cuban descent, and Providencia Paredes, who served as a personal assistant to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and is believed to be one of the first Afro-Latinos to work in the late President’s circle.
Documentarian and D.C. Afro-Latino Caucus chair Manny Mendez is one of the activists pushing back against erasure by working to bring visibility to the historical and contemporary contributions of the community, including the fight to ceremonially dedicate a block of Quarry Road NW to Casilda Luna, a prominent elder and pioneer community activist whose voice paved the way for the next generation of Latinx activists by helping establish organizations like the Latin American Youth Center, Vida Senior Center, and the annual DC Latino Festival.
As Mendez has explained, there is a rich history of Afro-Latinidad setting the foundation for the Latino community in DC that had their greatest impact in the 1970s. Most of the oldest Latino-serving organizations that are here today exist thanks to the contributions of Afro-Latinos who came to DC and became part of the change to have their voices heard.
His work reminds the community of something important: Afro-Latino culture in the DMV is not a new arrival. It built the foundation.
Where Africa and Latin America Actually Meet in the DMV
The cultural convergence between African diaspora and Latin American communities in the DMV happens in spaces that most people walk past without fully registering what they are seeing.
It happens at Malcolm X Park on Sunday afternoons, where Cuban rumberos and West African drummers share the same green space and the rhythms remind you that the Atlantic slave trade created cousins on both sides of an ocean. The community of artists, musicians, dancers, and cultural practitioners that gather on Sundays at Malcolm X Park has become a living archive of Afro-Latinidad in the district.
It happens at the annual DC Afro Latino Fest, which the Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs organized for its third consecutive year in August 2024. The DC Afro Latino Fest celebrated and highlighted the diversity of the Latino Community in the District of Columbia through cultural performances, community engagement, and live music.
It happens at the Afro Latino Festival in Silver Spring, Maryland, which drew family audiences to Veterans Place in the summer of 2024 with food, music, and arts representing the full breadth of the Afro-Latino experience in the DMV. For Montgomery County’s large community of Hondurans, Salvadorans, Dominicans, and Colombians who also carry African heritage, this kind of event is not just entertainment. It is recognition.
It also happens in the nightlife, where Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latino crossover events increasingly fill D.C. venues. Events mixing Afrobeats, reggaeton, salsa, amapiano, and bachata under one roof reflect something real: a generation that does not feel the need to choose between African and Latin sounds because those sounds were always the same family.
The Music: How Afrobeats and Latin Genres Are Officially Merging
Nowhere is the convergence of African and Latin American culture more visible right now than in the music.
Afrobeats has gone from Lagos to Lima. The genre and its artists have found a wide audience with Latin American listeners, boosted by prominent collaborations between Latin and African musicians. The instruments and rhythms of Afrobeats are the foundation of Latin genres like salsa, reggaeton, and samba, and now younger Latin American listeners are reconnecting with this history through Latin-Afrobeats tracks that resonate with their cultural heritage while mixing modern sounds and lyrics.
Puerto Rican superstar Ozuna released an EP called “Afro” and teamed up with Davido, with a standout track called “Eva Longoria” brilliantly demonstrating the seamless blending of Latin Pop and Afrobeats. In 2020, Mr. Eazi and J Balvin joined forces to create a viral sensation that encapsulated the spirit of the year with infectious rhythms. Burna Boy also integrated Colombian singer J Balvin into his “Love Damini” album on a track called “Rollercoaster.”
These collaborations are not random. They reflect a growing awareness in both industries that African and Latin American musical traditions share the same root system, a root that runs through the holds of slave ships that docked in Havana and Cartagena and Santo Domingo as surely as they docked in Charleston and Savannah.
In the DMV, that musical convergence plays out live. DJs who blend Afrobeats with reggaeton and salsa are not novelties. They are responding to a community that has always lived at that intersection and now has the cultural permission to say so out loud.
Identity at the Intersection: The Complexity of Being Both
For Afro-Latinos in the DMV, the identity itself can be a daily negotiation.
Afro-Latino identity is a distinct one that can often exist alongside a person’s Hispanic, racial, or national origin identity. The life experiences of Afro-Latinos are shaped by race, skin tone, and other factors in ways that differ from other Hispanics. Higher shares of Afro-Latinos identified as white alone or white in combination with another race, volunteered that their race was Hispanic, or identified as mixed race, reflecting the complexity of identity and race among Latinos.
According to a May 2022 Pew Research survey, Afro-Latinos in the United States were about three times more likely than other Latino adults to report being unfairly stopped by police. Being Black and Latino in America means navigating discrimination from multiple directions: racism from white society, anti-Blackness from within some Latino communities, and erasure from within Black American spaces that do not always recognize the Spanish-speaking branch of the diaspora.
The presence of Afro-Latinos in the United States belies the notion that Blacks and Latinos are two distinct categories or cultures. Afro-Latinos are uniquely situated to bridge the widening social divide between Latinos and African Americans, while at the same time their experiences reveal pervasive racism among Latinos and ethnocentrism among African Americans.
The DMV, with its historic Black political power, its large West African immigrant community, and its deeply rooted Latin American communities, is actually one of the best cities in America for Afro-Latinos to inhabit that intersection without having to choose sides. The city has a long tradition of not making Black identity choose between its many expressions.
Many Caribbean Hispanics have African ancestry and may choose to identify as African American or Afro-Latino, such as Cuban American and DC native Laz Alonso, in contrast to other cities such as Miami.
The Food: Where Fufu Meets Pupusas
Culture lives in the stomach before it lives anywhere else, and the food crossover between African and Latin American cuisines in the DMV is one of the most underreported stories in the region’s food scene.
Plantains appear on both African and Latin American tables. Cassava, called yuca in Spanish and yuca or eba in various African traditions, shows up in dishes from El Salvador, Nigeria, Cameroon, and the Dominican Republic. Rice cooked in tomato-based stews is a staple from West Africa to the Caribbean. Goat stew, slow-cooked with aromatics and served over starch, is claimed by Nigerian grandmothers and Dominican abuelas alike.
In Silver Spring, Wheaton, and Hyattsville, African grocery stores and Latin American markets often sit within blocks of each other, and the shared ingredients they stock are a quiet argument that the food traditions share a common ancestry. When an Afro-Colombian family in Langley Park buys plantains from the same Nigerian market that their West African neighbors use for egusi and stockfish, no one is surprised. They already knew they were related.
The restaurant scene is beginning to reflect this crossover too. Afro-Caribbean cooking, which blends African culinary traditions with Latin seasoning and Caribbean technique, has found a growing audience in D.C. that crosses both communities. These kitchens are not fusion restaurants in the trendy sense. They are cooking the way their grandmothers cooked, which was always already a blend.
The Second Generation Is Claiming the Intersection Loudly
Perhaps the most powerful force driving the rise of Afro-Latino culture in the DMV is the second generation.
Young people born in Maryland and Virginia to Salvadoran, Dominican, Honduran, and Colombian parents are growing up alongside the children of Nigerian, Ghanaian, Ethiopian, and Cameroonian immigrants in the same Prince George’s County and Montgomery County schools. They are listening to the same music, eating at each other’s houses, and increasingly identifying with both sides of their heritage rather than choosing.
For many of them, the question of whether they are Black or Latino has a simple answer: both, always, and they are not interested in defending that to anyone.
Social media has been a critical vehicle for this generational reclamation. TikTok and Instagram have given Afro-Latino creators from the DMV and across the country a platform to document their food, their music, their family histories, and their bilingual, bicultural, multiply-Black lives in ways that resonant deeply with audiences who have never seen themselves represented this fully before.
There has been a growing movement among Afro-Latinos in recent decades to reclaim and celebrate their heritage. Activists and scholars have worked to highlight the historical and contemporary challenges faced by Afro-Latino communities, with organizations pushing for increased recognition, rights, and visibility for Afro-descendant populations.
In the DMV, that reclamation is not an academic exercise. It is happening at cookouts in Bowie and festivals in Silver Spring and Sunday drumming circles in Adams Morgan and in the comment sections of Instagram posts where young Afro-Dominican and Afro-Salvadoran kids in PG County are finally telling their full story.
What This Means for the Broader African Diaspora in the DMV
For the African immigrant community in Maryland and Virginia, the growing visibility of Afro-Latino culture is not a separate story. It is an extension of the same diaspora conversation.
When a Nigerian family in Hyattsville and a Dominican family in Langley Park discover they both make oxtail on Sundays, that is not a coincidence. It is a reminder that the Atlantic slave trade scattered people from the same communities across two continents and dozens of countries, and that the descendants of those people found each other again in the DMV.
The cultural work happening here, from Manuel Mendez’s oral history projects to the DC Afro Latino Fest to the Afrobeats nights that blend into reggaeton at midnight, is the work of repair. It is putting back together something that was violently separated and arguing, through music and food and dance and community, that the separation was always artificial.
Africa did not stop at the shores of West Africa. It crossed the Atlantic twice: once in chains, and once by choice. Both crossings landed in the DMV. And in 2026, that community is finally introducing itself on its own terms.