Jesús Colón is considered the founder of the Nuyorican movement, a cultural movement involving New York City writers, musicians, and artists of Puerto Rican descent. After moving to New York in 1917, Colón was forced to work various unskilled jobs to make ends meet. In a series of vignettes in his 1961 book A Puerto Rican in New York, and Other Sketches, he describes his experiences doing such mundane things as finding work and housing, giving the reader a sense of what it was like to be Black and Puerto Rican in New York. In the chapter excerpted here, he describes the difficulty he had finding lodging in what he sarcastically calls the “Capital of the world’s greatest democracy,” Washington, D.C.