Olivia Dinucci Interview, September 29, 2023
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- To start, do I have permission to record this interview?
- Yes.
- Perfect.
- Could you please tell me your name?
- Olivia.
- Olivia.
- And Olivia, how would you describe the community of Mount Pleasant
- today? Today or just like in general?
- In general.
- So when I think of Mount Pleasant,
- I think of the history of it and like how integral the Salvadorian
- community was and is to it, even though it's a very gentrified
- neighborhood now.
- And the resistance and struggle of
- the 1990s shooting and the uprisings here, and how that still
- is living and is part of the present for folks who have that
- history.
- But I see it too as very localized
- and hasn't been bought and sold out by big developers yet.
- And I hope that that is maintained, even though it is a
- very gentrified area.
- And in what ways would you
- describe Mount Pleasant in the past?
- I am not from DC, so I can't speak to lived experience of it, so I
- guess I wouldn't know.
- That's fair, where are you from?
- I'm originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
- And what brought you to DC? I do a lot of international to
- local solidarity activism work centered around anti-militarism
- and anti-imperialism.
- So for me, Salvadorian, US-backed
- violence in Salvador is very, something that the US public is
- not as familiar with.
- And I think that when I walk the
- streets of Mount Pleasant, I'm reminded of that struggle and of
- the legacy and history and resistance, but also how the
- people have built community around that.
- So I've lived and worked abroad, and I've been in DC a couple of
- years, but I've been back and forth from it.
- And I'm very proud to say that I live here, I'm a resident of DC,
- and a lot of people outside of DC think of it as a transient city,
- or just not a localized place, and I really push back on that,
- because historically it was predominanly black, and Chocolate
- City was its nickname and name and how much that has shifted because
- of like gentrification.
- When you have friends or family
- come and visit you in DC, where's one place that take you?
- Ercilia's.
- So the reason why I was excited to
- do this is Ercilia's the pupusas spot in Mount Pleasant, the pink
- building on the corner.
- I love it there.
- For me, I travel a lot and my last meal when I leave is either
- Salvadorian at Ercilia's or an Ethiopian platter.
- For me, I love bringing folks there and knowing people by name
- in there.
- They know what I want already when
- I'm there just like yeah it's it's a it's a really just comfort food
- and also just a place that is still surviving and like serves
- the people.
- And would you say that's your
- favorite place in DC or is there somewhere else that you would name
- your favorite place in DC? Ah, favorite is hard.
- I have a lot of favorites.
- So for me, my favorite pupusas are
- definitely Ercelia's.
- Yeah.
- And how would you like to see the DC community, like the greater
- community, change for the better in the future?
- I don't know if I would say change.
- I would say for the greater community of DC, especially people
- who aren't from DC, to look into the history and the realities of
- DC and to be more aware of how we take up space or how we are
- contributing to a community.
- There's amazing mutual aid
- initiatives that happen here.
- So I think rather than change,
- it's more like respect and pay homage and to embrace the local
- and the community, especially in Mount Pleasant and I live in Adams
- Morgan, like the history of activism and community-based care
- models that like we should be building off of instead of like
- moving away from.
- And, in what ways do you feel like
- you have become part of the community?
- Is there a certain place maybe, or a certain group of people that
- would just really make you feel a part of the community?
- So I started a group house like 10 minutes from here in Adams Morgan.
- And we do a lot of community-based events, cultural events, political
- education events.
- And for me, I like to connect
- people because I'm super outgoing.
- For me, I find people that I'm
- like, whoa, we connect, and then I want to connect them with other
- people that are cool, that I think that will connect with them.
- And so for me, I have just leaned into a lot of social justice
- activism worlds, creatives, artists, and the people who make
- food and bring their culture and heritage through that.
- I also play basketball, that's what I'm coming from now, and
- bringing that in, and reclaiming public spaces is a big thing for
- me, because the more a city gets developed, the less public spaces
- there are.
- And for me, this concept of
- cracking down on crime, or revitalizing a community just
- means taking away public spaces, and the opposite needs to happen
- in order to like really like move forward.
- So yeah, there's a lot of amazing communities that I like love,
- love, love, like, binding together and just like, exposing to the
- world or like, to the community at large.
- Right, perfect.
- And is there anything that you
- want to touch on that I haven't asked you about?
- I guess like, I think just, I've heard a lot of times people like
- having a bittersweet feeling of DC and like I would say like Really
- connect with the local like it's a yes We are in the belly of the
- beast the heart of the Empire like which is a national international
- thing but like to really like deep dive into local they don't make
- you feel connected and like again it won't dismiss like the
- communities that are here and that have been displaced and how we can
- be in solidarity with that while living here.
- Perfect.
- Well that's all the questions I
- have.
- Thank you