Children count out pennies for chewing gum. An old Salvadoran woman wheels in a cart, selling homemade atol, a sweet hot drink. Someone leaves a shoe box in the shop to collect donations for a crippled Guatemalan boy. But outside, the gritty sidewalk pageant never changes. Grizzled vagrants slump against the walls, arguing or panhandling.
Young men hover around vendors' tables that blare competing salsa and merengue music.
Police in cruisers circle the block, constantly on the lookout for drunken fights and drug deals. In the early 1980s, a flood of refugees from the civil war in El Salvador began moving in, eventually pushing the District's Latino population from less than 5,000 to more than 70,000. The District's highest concentration of immigrants lives in Zip code 20009, followed closely by the adjacent Zip code 20010. These include the glitzy clubs, cafes and condominiums of Adams-Morgan but also the shabbier apartments, shops and eateries of Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant. Thousands of Latinos, and a lesser number of Asians and Africans, live above these storefronts.