La Gente: Hispano History and Life in Colorado [Paperback]

Vincent C. De Baca (Author, Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0870815385 | ISBN-13: 978-0870815386 | Edition: First edition

Informative and provocative, La Gente: Hispano History and Life in Colorado collects eleven essays by a cross-section of Colorado scholars and writers. The book opens with an examination of Spanish-Mexican exploration, conquest, and settlement of the Colorado region. Moving from exploration to biographical sketches, the book profiles the enigmatic Teresita Sandoval, cofounder of Pueblo; provides the turn-of-the-century memoir of vaquero Elfido Lopez; and offers a bilingual version of the autobiography of Pablo Cabeza de Baca, who recalls the values of his youth and his days at Denver's Sacred Heart College, the precursor of Regis University.

Several essays address the employment patterns of the early part of this century, when desperate native-born Hispanos and Mexican immigrants competed by the thousands for jobs at mining and agricultural corporations throughout Colorado. Four essays study particular expressions of this conflict, including the infamous Ludlow coal strike of 19131914; Colorado's sugar beet industry, where Mexican immigrants faced constant discrimination; the growth of the state's sugar industry, the collapse of which devastated Mexicans (the preferred labor force in the field); and a New Dealera experiment in which laid-off miners were trained to weave Ro Grandestyle blankets, in the process revitalizing a dying folk art.

Finally, four essays encompass the recent political and cultural rebirth of Hispanos, including a study of the origins of the Crusade for Justice, Denver's leading Chicano rights organization of the 1960s, which--based on declassified FBI documents--proves that government agencies tried to suppress the Crusade and its popular leader, Corky Gonzales. In addition, authors look at the Westside Coalition's efforts to help that Denver community take control of its own affairs; profile mental health professional Diana Velazquez and the synthesis of Indian and Spanish folk medicine known as curanderismo; and analyze Hispano land use in southern Colorado, citing San Luis as an example of a community struggling to preserve its communal self-sufficiency and the environment in the face of development by outside contractors and businesses.

Contributors include Vincent C. de Baca, Deborah Mora-Espinosa, Richard Louden, M. Edmund Vallejo, Jos Aguayo, Tanya W. Kulkosky, Katie Davis Gardner, Ernesto Vigil, George Rivera, Jr., Aileen F. Lucero, the late Richard Castro, poet and columnist Ramon Del Castillo, and Devon G. Pea.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

The great-grandson of Pablo Cabeza de Baca, Vincent C. de Baca received his doctorate in Latin American history from the University of California at San Diego. He has published articles and critical reviews on the Mexican Revolution, Chicano history, and New Mexico history. Dr. C. de Baca has presented papers to the American Historical Association on the subject of Tijuana vice activity, and, recently, he spoke about his family history at the Cuarto Centennial New Mexico Genealogical Conference. He is a tenured assistant professor of history at Metropolitan State College of Denver.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Colorado Historical Society; First edition edition (December 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870815385
• ISBN-13: 978-0870815386
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,067,610 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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5.0 out of 5 stars Excerpt of review by Dr. Doug Monroy, May 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: La Gente: Hispano History and Life in Colorado (Paperback)

It may appear odd that there has been no synthetc history of Hispanics in Colorado, a state with a large Spanish-surnamed population and a Spanish name. Part of the reason for this is that there are actually two Hispanic Colorados. One is in the southern part of the state, a place ecologically and culturally more a part of northern New Mexico than the mountain West. When the Colorado Territory was formed in 1859, surveyors simply drew a rectangle around Denver forming the future state from Kansas, Utah and New Mexico territories. As a consequence those New Mexicans, whose roots date back to eighteenth-century Spanish days and who had been settling the San Luis Valley since the early 1850s, found themselves part of Colorado. Then, as irrigation facilitated the rise of the sugar beet industry around Fort Collins and the South Platte Valley, more and more Mexicans migrated from the interior of Mexico to find jobs there. Beginning as a trickle around the turn of the century, thousands came to Colorado during World War I and the 1920s. While the New Mexican Coloradans who were displaced from ththeir lands often mingled with these recent arrivals in the agricultural fields, and mines and factories of Trinidad, Walsenburg and Pueblo, they understood themselve to be different from the new arrivals from Mexico. Indeed, the "Spanish Americans," as they increasingly called themselves, experienced little prejudice in Colorado until the larger numbers of Indo-Hispano Mexicans began to threaten the lily-white future of places like Denver and Fort Collins. By the 1920s, often barred from restaurants and hotels, the Spanish Americans, quite like German Jews disliking the more rustic Russian Jews and "lace Irish" recoiling at "shanty Irish," increasingly distanced themselves from their southern brethren whom they often blamed for bringing segregation and discrimination. (...)These issues of ongoing mestizaje, or mixing, of cultural dynamism, and the diversity of experiences, spiritualities and political perspectives should be central to future chronicles of Colorado Hispanics. While it may be that the Boulder/Aspen/Broncos lifestyles are associated with the glamour of our state, it is actually the hidden histories of Hispanics, workers, cow punchers, farm wives, community activists and all the rest of those concealed in history that give Colorado its special, and most meaningful past. -Doug Monroy, Professor of History and Director of the Hulbert Center for Southwestern Studies