Traveling along State Highway 159 heading south to New Mexico, one passes through San Luis, locally acclaimed as the “Oldest Town in Colorado,” founded in 1851. At one of the main intersections in this small community is a mural—somewhat faded but still evocative of the community’s history and value system.² Its themes represent local perceptions of the area’s legacy: the era of nomadic Indian tribes, a dynamic foreshortened view of the upper portion of the crucifix suspended in clouds from which Spanish conquistadors emerge, an allegorical rendering of the largesse of Mother Earth, and other panels depicting settlers, hunters,...

When Spanish Mexican colonists invoked the warrior saint Santiago at the 1599 siege of Acoma Pueblo, slaughter ensued.¹ Two and a half centuries later, the Utes in the settlement of southern Colorado opposed their descendants. The miraculous intervention of San Acacio, a crucified warrior, led not to bloodshed but rather to an 1853 armistice. The fierce Santiago’s sword, shield, and warhorse gave way to the compassionate San Acacio’s cross and crown of thorns as Nuevo Mexicanos became indigenous to the Upper Río Grande.

In the bloody siege at the natural citadel of Acoma Pueblo in January 1599, Don Vicente de...

Traditional Río Grande Chicano/Hispano¹ music and dance in Colorado and New Mexico are influenced by many cultures of the world. Indigenous peoples, European settlers, and recent Mexican and Latino immigrants have all created a unique expression in music and dance among Río Grande peoples. This chapter provides insight into the many influences in the traditions, old and new, that we hear and see. More important, it presents common themes of culture transmission through many generations. The music and dance of Hispano populations of Colorado and New Mexico have developed over the past 600-plus years. The evolution begins and moves through...

Chinese sex slaves flee cruel bondage to marry their childhood sweethearts and live happily ever after in Fairplay, Colorado.* That is the gist of “A Chinese Romance,” a news report in The Daily Denver Tribune, June 1, 1874, about the escape of a pair of sisters who had been forced into prostitution in Denver’s Chinatown.² In many ways, the account is typical of the yellow journalism periodically published about the Chinese in America during the second half of the nineteenth century—sensationalistic, replete with violence between two Chinese clans and the intervention of local law enforcement agents. What makes this...

This chapter is the culmination of field research work cataloguing religious church architecture in southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley. The building survey fieldwork reinforced the evidence of historical Hispanic roots in Colorado. What began as a cataloguing of small churches, or capillas, became a history of Hispanic migration settlement patterns, a history of the built environment, and a definition of physical spaces before the intervention of North Americans after the Mexican-American War. As Hispanics migrated north from Santa Fe and Taos in the early 1800s and 1900s, establishing settlements in Colorado, every small village built and established placitas (villages arranged...

The history of African Americans in the Dearfield, Colorado, area is intimately linked to early–nineteenth-century westward expeditions that cut through today’s Weld County, Colorado. Dearfield was one of approximately fifteen all–Black communities planned for the state and was its most famous. The roots of settlements similar to Dearfield began during the Revolutionary War era when American Blacks hoped to build communities for themselves and their families—places where they could avoid racism and the accompanying segregation. The migration initiatives that led Blacks to Colorado lead to the history of the Dearfield community.

In 1820 President James Monroe sent...

This chapter provides a historical overview of Mexican American gangs and gang enforcement in Denver, Colorado. The contemporary fascination with gangs in Denver has continued to generate media and public appeal, but little is reported about their origination. Looking to the past allows an opportunity to analyze decision making by public officials and how they responded to a perceived minority group threat. To carry out the research for this chapter, I gathered an extensive number of newspaper clippings and primary documents. In addition, I conducted five years of ethnographic research (2001–2006) to report on the gang experience for my...

During the second decade of the twentieth century, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL)¹ experienced extraordinary growth in its promotion of chartered chapters and divisions in local communities in nearly every region of the United States.² In the Rocky Mountain region of the West, a small yet distinguishable number of citizen-activists in Colorado Springs and Denver participated in this effort. Garveyites who resided on St. Vrain Street in Colorado Springs, who were also members of the Peoples Methodist Episcopal Church, and those on Welton Street in the Five Points Neighborhood of Denver engaged with the movement...

Immediately prior to World War II, the University of Colorado (CU) began a campaign against racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination that predated the normally cited beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. This movement connected with minority students on campus, but its primary force was drawn from White progressives. Faculty, such as history chair Carl Eckhardt, and student groups, such as the American Student Union (ASU), played important roles in the struggle. By initiating this antidiscrimination movement, the university administration shifted from a detached stance to an active role in off-campus social problems.

The beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in...

In April 1942, Joe Sano wrote a letter to his wife, Miya, who was being held at Tanforan Assembly Center in San Francisco with his elderly mother. Like 120,000 other Japanese Americans, the Sanos had been forcibly evicted from their home by Executive Order 9066 and imprisoned behind barbed wires. However, Joe had been secretly whisked away by Naval Intelligence officers and was only now allowed to explain his whereabouts to his wife. He had been brought to Boulder, Colorado, to teach the Japanese language to naval officers and was settling into his new environment. Joe promised Miya that when...

This chapter is about race, politics, and war in Colorado. Its principal source material is the series of columns written by Earl W. Mann, the third African American to serve in the Colorado State Legislature, following his election to that body in the fall of 1942.² These columns—almost 300 in all³—appeared weekly, with an occasional republication, in The Colorado Statesman between September 1, 1939, and September 2, 1945. The Colorado Statesman is one of Denver’s oldest Black newspapers, founded in 1894 by Joseph D.D. Rivers with the assistance of Edwin H. Hackley. The columns, more illustrative than exhaustive...

This chapter explores how women of mestiza ancestry experienced the education system in Huerfano County, Colorado, between the years 1920 and 1945.¹ In addition to gaining an understanding of education, other goals of the study were to document the existence of people in the area and to challenge generalized stereotypes about mestiza/o peoples by exploring layers of identity. Documenting the participants’ voices is significant, as I learned during research efforts when I discovered that the communities in question are largely absent from the state’s published history and from legal documentation in the state archives.

Huerfano County is an area of...

The twentieth century has often been called the American century, and U.S. dominance and prominence undoubtedly grew during that century. The industrial transformation of the United States as it began to displace Native Americans from their lands and tie the nation together with railroads undoubtedly created an industrial giant. But along with the captains of industry came the crew. The people who worked daily in those factories and fields provided the blood and sweat essential for the development of a country. Those immigrants began to come in larger and larger numbers throughout the late nineteenth century because of the need...

It is a busy Friday night at Señor Manuel’s Mexican restaurant in Colorado Springs. The delicious smells, spicy dishes, and colorful ambiente are served along with the musical sounds of a well-known Chicana solo singer performing popular Mexican and New Mexican songs while accompanying herself on guitar. This local singer is an indigenous trovadora (troubadour) named Michelle Lobato, and her amazing story reflects Colorado’s enduring Chicana musical legacy. Colorado’s troubadour singers are legendary, dating back to the region’s dynamic Spanish colonial period, turbulent Mexican era, and U.S. territorial days. In the early twentieth century, infamous trovadores were typically male, and...

I was born in Trinidad, Colorado, in the 1950s, a decade when American society’s zealous homogeneous policies began to take hold all over the country. These policies took place within the context of the greatest prosperity Americans had enjoyed, with the end of World War II, when the United States rose to the top of the world. By the 1950s, along with prosperity came the oppressive societal definition of who is an American. As an Apache woman, my journey toward self-identity begins within this climate. ¹

The definition of an American included the ideal physical appearance of having blue eyes...

This chapter chronicles the accounts of three individuals involved in the process of institutionalizing curanderismo in Colorado’s community mental health system. Curanderismo is “a holistic approach to physical, psychosocial, and spiritual conditions used . . . by contemporary Chicanos despite the predominance of ‘modern medical science’ ” (Lucero 1981:1). Curanderos/as traditionally practice “underground,” outside of mainstream health and mental health systems. The implementation of curanderismo at Centro de las Familias, a unique specialty team later transformed into a specialty clinic under the auspices of Southwest Denver Community Mental Health Center, was an unprecedented introduction of a curandera into a publicly...

This is a story about the end of the “Indian” mascot at Adams State College (ASC) in Alamosa, Colorado, and what it reveals about race, materiality, and coalition politics. It is a story of struggle, pain, loss, and, finally, victory. It is a story about a small college that had an “Indian” as its mascot and how a coalition of students protested that “Indian.” The students who protested the “Indian” at Adams State encountered racism during their struggle. Some mascot supporters went so far as to physically threaten coalition members with violence and to vandalize their property. Some coalition members...

This study draws on the work of Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire as a conceptual framework for Chicano Movement Poetry in Colorado, particularly that of Abelardo Barrientos Delgado, affectionately known to many as “Lalo.” A principal objective is to engage Delgado’s poetry, the historical specificity of the word, and a particular political and cultural practice within the context of and in dialogue with Freire’s work in critical pedagogy.

Delgado (1931–2004) achieved recognition for his contribution to Chicano Movement Poetry in many forms, particularly as a recipient of the Tonatiuh-Quinto Sol Award for literature in 1977 and as Denver’s first Poet...

The project described in this chapter began during the 2000 spring semester in a class titled Chicana Feminist Thought. As a teacher, I was primarily concerned with deploying pedagogical practices and interrogating epistemological perspectives from a critical Chicana standpoint. I was not particularly interested in educational research per se but rather in using radical educational approaches to understand the noteworthy and significant herstory of Chicanas who attended the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder from 1968–2000.

As put forth by Alejandra Elenes, I attempted to teach and engage the class as an “activist insurgent educator who interrogates social theory...

Francisco “Kiko” Eugenio Martínez, armed with his knowledge of the legal system and of the complex social, political, and economic conditions of Chicano and Mexicano communities, committed his professional and personal life to a struggle for justice for the community from which he came. Kiko’s political convictions would result in a battle to defend his beliefs, his family, and ultimately his life. The 1960s and 1970s were turbulent years in the United States. Historically marginalized peoples were mobilizing massive political and social movements. The Chicana/o, American Indian, and Black Liberation movements were increasingly frustrated by failed attempts at peaceful negotiation...

When one thinks of Colorado, African Americans and other folks of African descent are usually not the first cultural group to come to mind. African Americans constitute less than 5 percent of Colorado’s total population and only about 10 percent of the population of Denver, Colorado’s state capital and largest city. However, one would be remiss to overlook African Americans, not simply in Colorado but in the North American West in general.² African Americans, in fact, have made countless seminal contributions to the history and culture of the North American West and to Colorado and the Denver metropolitan area in...