As president of ENLACE, D.C.’s first known Latino LGBTQ advocacy group, in the 1980s, Letitia “Leti” Gomez knew she was part of something historic. So she began saving all sorts of memorabilia: newspaper clippings, meeting agendas, fliers for dance parties — including a “Dance for the Dead” — and a pricing sheet for a beach trip.

Now, her collection, made up of nearly 500 primary source documents, is part of the Rainbow History Project at the DC History Center.

“I didn’t know where it was going to go, Gomez says. “I just thought it was important to save.”

Those materials have also been turned into a digital archival collection that American University and Rainbow History Project made available for public viewing this week for Hispanic Heritage Month and LGBTQ History Month. (American University holds the license to WAMU, which owns DCist.)

ENLACE was founded in 1987, just months before that year’s March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. It was the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. ENLACE started largely as a response to the epidemic, but it quickly evolved into something more, Gomez says.

“There was just a need to organize, make ourselves more visible,” Gomez says. “To fight the discrimination that we were experiencing in the Latino community, and in the white gay and lesbian community.”

One of the group’s most important resources was a bilingual hotline that gave members of the LGBTQ+ community someone to reach out to, she says.

“Then, as there probably is now, there were people who were so closeted and still fearful of what it would mean for them to come out,” she says.

While the group disbanded in the mid-’90s — due in part to a lack of planning on who would succeed the group’s young volunteers, according to Gomez — ENLACE helped open the doors for more Latinx LGBTQ+ organizing in the D.C. area.

The history of those young volunteers has been preserved in digital form thanks, in part, to American University graduate Emma Busch, who spent her senior year scanning and organizing the hundreds of documents. She found it exciting to realize just how far word of ENLACE spread beyond D.C. Among the materials was a blurb a gay man from New Mexico sent ENLACE about himself, asking the group to publish it and help him find a partner.

In another letter, a student at Smith College requests an interview with ENLACE members for a paper on gay and lesbian Latinos and Latinas. There was overseas interest in the group too — LGBTQ Latinos in Uruguay and Puerto Rico sent letters to show solidarity.

“It really had an impact,” Busch says. “That was really beautiful to see, especially when it’s in handwriting.”

The other upside for Busch, who is not a D.C. native, was she got to know the city where she was attending college even better. In the documents, she read about events at bars in Adams Morgan and other places she had been before, not knowing they were gathering spaces for Latino LGBTQ folks.

“To learn about this underside of this history … really changed my perspective of how I moved through the city, and that was really interesting,” Busch says.

Busch hopes the project will challenge what some people elsewhere think of D.C. — that it’s mainly politicians and “the Supreme Court and the Capitol building.” She also hopes it will challenge people’s understanding of queer history, which can often be “whitewashed,” she says.

Vincent Slatt, director of archiving for the Rainbow History Project, says the collection demonstrates the power of activism, as well as the diversity of D.C.’s LGBTQ+ community beyond cisgender white men.

“It’s really serving to record for future researchers and future generations what our communities have looked like,” Slatt says.

The ENLACE archive is just one addition to a slowly diversifying record, he says. Recently, they also collected dozens of copies of gay Black men’s publications from the 1980s to 2000s that document the advocacy of Black LGBTQ people in the city.

And in terms of the history of D.C.’s Latinx LGBTQ community, ENLACE is just one piece of that.

“There are a lot more stories out there. There’s a lot more information,” Slatt says. ‘We desperately want all of that.”