The answer is due in great part to institutions like Haydee’s Restaurant on the neighborhood’s main commercial strip, Mt Pleasant Street . Owners Haydee and Mario Venegas understand what makes a good restaurant and a good business, but they also understand what makes community. Communities need restaurants that nourish both the stomach and the soul. Haydee offered both traditional food and music that made us feel at home, made us feel part of the neighborhood. In so doing, Haydee also revitalized the strip, created a welcoming cultural environment, trained many young immigrants in the restaurant business, and contributed to the musicians’ economy and to keeping alive our music traditions. However, for ten years Haydee was prohibited from featuring live music by a "voluntary" agreement she signed just to stay in business. Hear Mt. Pleasant recognizes Haydee’s, and the role of other restaurants, in sustaining the vitality of our neighborhood but Hear Mt. Pleasant also recognizes that Haydee is also a 19-year resident of Mt. Pleasant and has the right to equal voice in the decisions made within the law that concern her business and her neighborhood. She, like the other restaurateurs, is not an interloper but a responsible member of the community.

She wants to resume live music, saying "Ten years is enough, time to go back to the live music my customers want. "

Olivia Cadaval is a long-time Mount Pleasant resident and an anthropologists who’s devoted many year’s to studying the history and culture of DC’s Latino Community.

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