While our geographic focus extends throughout Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, all valley roads ultimately lead to Aspen. There is the physical road, Highway 82, which is the main path to Aspen, connecting that city with Snowmass, Woody Creek, and the “down valley” communities of Basalt, Carbondale, Glenwood Springs, Rifle, and Parachute. There is also the so-called road of influence, politics, opportunity, and money that leads to Aspen, the Pitkin County seat where affluence and glitter outweigh anything you can find down valley. Aspen, it seems, offers something for everyone: work for immigrants, inspiration and funding for environmentalists and intellectuals, and a playground for the rich. And so it is there we begin our story.
Aspen sits high in the Rocky Mountains and is a mecca for skiers, hikers, nature enthusiasts, environmentalists, classical music lovers, and economic, political, and cultural elites from around the world. Jane Fonda, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Don Henley, Don Johnson, Barbie Benton, Melanie Griffith, Kevin Costner, John Kerry, Ross Perot, and Jesse Jackson are known to vacation, exercise, own homes, or raise money in Aspen.1 Aspen’s sister cities are Chamonix, France; Davos, Switzerland; and Garmisch Partenkirchen, Germany.2 The average price of a home here was around $4 million in 2007,3 and locals attend free seminars at the Aspen Institute on “how to pay no estate tax to the IRS.”4
Aspen’s year-round residential population is just under 6,000, but in July and August the number of people in town can reach nearly 30,000, when the various summer festivals are held. While skiing may be what Aspen is most famous for, the summer season rivals the popularity of its winter activities.
The town of Aspen from above. Photo by L. S. Park
Student musicians playing in downtown Aspen. Photo by L. S. Park
The Aspen/Snowmass Food and Wine Classic is a major extravaganza sponsored every year by Food and Wine magazine (Snowmass is the closest town north of Aspen). The event promotes intensive consumption and opulent lifestyles. But for years the main summer attraction has been the Aspen Music Festival. This gathering features numerous musicians playing in orchestras, quartets, and other combinations, and allows tourists and locals a chance to enjoy classical music in a relaxed, bucolic atmosphere.
People travel from around the world to attend this event and the festival’s organizers create slick brochures and websites to market it. The 2002 publicity captured many of the issues we highlight in this book. The theme for that year was “Voices of Expatriates”:
For centuries artists have left their native countries to seek creative homes—places that nurtured them and, more importantly, their work. The stories are many: Composers as varied as Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, Gustav Mahler, Serge Rachmaninoff, Bela Bartok, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky all worked far from their homelands. . . . This summer, the Festival goes on its own journey of discovery to explore the sometimes aching, sometimes exultant voices of these expatriate artists. . . . This summer . . . journey to a place where music surrounds you. Discover a deeper understanding of an art form you love. Experience the soul of the music expressed in all its bare beauty. Return home changed, quietly but profoundly. Come be refreshed, come be connected, come be changed. In Aspen, classical music pours out like sunshine. It lives and breathes like the nature that surrounds it—filling the mountain air with the sounds of five full orchestras, countless chamber combinations, 1,000 musicians, and up to eight performances a day, all in one quiet little mountain town. This organic combination of music and nature stems from the Festival’s belief that it is the unhurried beauty of nature that allows for the creative growth of musicians—and ultimately then of music itself. Artists from all over the world come to Aspen to take a break from their everyday lives and rejuvenate, collaborate, experiment and experience the joy of really connecting with music again.5
Aspen is a place where expatriate musicians are welcomed. And Aspen is a place where people from around the world are beckoned for relaxation, rejuvenation, and the enjoyment of nature’s beauty. That is, unless you happen to be an immigrant laborer whose very purpose is to make possible and facilitate that rendezvous with Mother Earth for the rest of Aspen’s visitors.
On any given day one can walk the streets of Aspen and see purebred dogs adorned with bejeweled collars drinking water from bowls provided by cafés, and people inside such establishments casually drinking coffee and juice. The Anglo workers are in front and Latinos are back in the kitchen. People fresh from their plastic surgeon’s offices stroll the promenades wearing clothes from high-end boutiques, while a snow-capped mountain towers in the background. This is a great getaway, if you can afford it.
In May 2009 we walked, drove, and biked through Aspen’s neighborhoods and marveled at the size of the homes there, including new homes under construction, which appeared to be oblivious to the recent devastations in the housing market and our nationwide and global recession. As always, there were numerous Latino men doing landscaping and remodeling work in the community. We observed Latinas walking from house to house, as they finished one domestic service job and moved to the next. On the grounds of the Aspen Institute and the Aspen Meadows, the same pattern prevailed: Latino men landscaping, Latinas cleaned the guest rooms. Both Latino men and women worked in the dining service operations at the institute’s restaurant.
As we strolled through downtown Aspen, we saw tourists and residents mingling, shopping, and eating. On Hyman Avenue, people streamed in and out of the Wheeler Opera House, which sits opposite a row of upscale restaurants. On Mill Street, just a block from the historic Hotel Jerome, a blonde woman in casual clothes jumped into the drivers’ seat of a pickup truck with a sign on the door that read “Nordic Gardens Landscape Services.” Two Latino men climbed into the back, apparently heading out to a job with their boss.
Across from the Pitkin County Library we saw the county sheriff’s office on the corner of Main Street and Galena, flanked by Aspen law enforcement’s vehicles of choice: Toyota Highlander hybrid fuel SUVs. Situated between the sheriff’s offices and the library, there is an open area and brick walkway for tourists to take in the mountain views, high above the Roaring Fork River. The middle of this spot is punctuated by a public art piece “El Conquistador,” a shiny, silver-colored, metal sculpture of a conquistador on horseback, a celebration of the Spanish conquest of the New World.
Shoppers have their choice of various upscale businesses like Dior, Bulgari, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Prada, as well as a host of furriers, jewelers, art galleries, and sports shops selling gear for whitewater rafting, skiing, and snowboarding. Roots, the Canadian clothing line with a prominent shop along Galena Street, is clearly for the young and hip demographic. A display sign outside the door features a photograph of a fashion model in a verdant background with the caption “It’s sexy being green.” On the same block, we see three Latino men fixing the roof and gutter on top of an espresso and wine bar as white patrons relax below them with laptops and lattés. We take it all in while sitting on a public bench made from recycled materials.
A headline—“Aspen is a Fashion Show”—in the Aspen Times newspaper one winter day summed up much of what that city means to a lot of people.6 In another publication, the author Hal Clifford writes:
In the pantheon of North American ski resorts, Aspen reigns near the pinnacle. It offers four ski areas, unparalleled dining and nightlife, year-round performing arts and what the hoity-toity like to call “world-class shopping.” For some, shopping is Aspen . . . Bulgari, Ralph Lauren, Chanel, Christian Dior, Fendi7
George Stranahan, an Aspen-area philanthropist and progressive social activist, described his adopted hometown this way:
It’s a cute town, a fabulous area for fishing, climbing . . . pure physical attraction. . . . It’s pretty good if that’s what you like. Aspen is a façade like Disneyworld. It’s solid, but it is a façade. . . . It’s not a reality, it’s an entertainment industry.8
One evening we spoke with a bartender at a favorite watering hole in downtown Aspen. Nearing closing time on a slow night, she relayed some of her more memorable moments as a seasonal worker.9 She told us stories about teenagers and preteens from wealthy families coming into the bar running up tabs of several hundred dollars, carrying $4,000 Prada purses, and bragging about how they paid for these accessories with their own personal Platinum Visa cards. According to the bartender, the employees at the bar are basically told “don’t even check their IDs, it’s fine.”10 She recalled an episode when there was a party on the second floor of the bar. A “Fortune 500 guy” was hosting the event, at which the guests ran up a bill of over $10,000 on alcohol. When she gave him the bill, he gave her a credit card. She asked him for his ID and he reportedly “had a fit” and said, “Do you have any idea who I am? I could buy this bar, this whole building right now, if I wanted to!” She remarked to us, “The wealthy people in Aspen are so wealthy that they look down on the movie stars. The wealthy people here often ask if the Hollywood stars want their autographs! Goldie Hawn, Barbie Benton, and others have wealth that is trivial compared to some of these folks.”
A newspaper advertisement from Coates, Reid, and Waldron realtors who sell luxury estates in the area featured a $1 million discount on a home with an original price tag of $10,990,000. A red slash runs through the price, followed by the new much lower price of $9,990,000: “Located in the prestigious and gated Starwood Subdivision, this 8 bedroom/8 bath estate boasts almost 13,000 square feet of luxury living space, dramatic views of all four ski areas, indoor swimming pool and outdoor tennis court.”11 Another home, selling for $7.5 million boasts “over 39 private acres” of land in a “small, private, and prestigious subdivision just minutes from Snowmass Village and downtown Aspen.”12 The emphasis on privacy, exclusive access to mountain vistas, and open space are reflections of environmental privilege.
The following comes from an advertisement for yet another private facility in Aspen called the Maroon Creek Club:
There are Privileges. And then there are Privileges. There is a lot of talk about private club membership. We don’t believe that sharing a condominium and being one of more than 200 other visitors with the same “privileges” is all that private and exclusive. So if you’re looking for privacy, exclusivity and membership privileges, you owe it to yourself to check out Maroon Creek Club’s New Lodging Program. With two new ways to call Aspen home. . . . Ahhh, the real privileges of membership in Aspen’s most exclusive private golf and tennis club: 32 winter memberships from $140,000, 16 Gold memberships from $475,000. You owe it to yourself to arrange a private tour.13
Privilege is apparently a highly competitive, multilayered sport. For most people, a private, exclusive club in Aspen is simply redundant.
Another advertisement printed in many of the area’s publications is for Aspen Aviation, Inc., a private “on-demand” air charter company. The text reads: “Imagine flying on your schedule, in your own private aircraft, with no airline hassles, and no lost luggage. Experience our outstanding service, with our Aspen-based aircraft and crews, at rates more affordable than you may imagine.”14 And if you cannot afford a private jet, then there are plenty of other airlines that can get you to Aspen. SkyWest Magazine—Sky-West airlines’ official in-flight publication—featured an article on Aspen that offers an alluring vision for anyone needing a getaway to enjoy the beauty of the Colorado Rockies. The article calls Aspen “Mother Nature’s playground”:
Here the outdoor life is the life. . . . Of course, not everything about Aspen is so active. It’s also possible to spend leisurely hours at a pampering spa, run your toes through the grass in one of many downtown pocket parks, listen to impromptu concerts on downtown street corners or watch children revel in the dancing waters of the Hyman Avenue fountain. . . . Aspen on a shoestring: Whether you’re craving wide-open adventure or community culture, some of the best things about Aspen are free. Hike through the Maroon Bells–Snowmass Wilderness, fly-fish the Roaring Fork River, or stroll downtown for window-shopping and people-watching. Other complimentary benefits to Aspen life include wine and cheese receptions at the Aspen Art Museum, lawn seating for Aspen Music Festival concerts, Thursday night concerts on Fanny Hill in Snowmass and guided nature walks atop Aspen Mountain.15
The display of wealth and conspicuous consumption in Aspen is legendary.
In 2004, the Aspen Valley Hospital announced that it would begin offering discounts on cosmetic surgery procedures in order to drum up business.16 Dr. Dennis Cirillo has a cosmetic surgery practice on Main Street in Aspen, specializing in “facelifts, eye work and breast enhancements.” According to Cirillo, facelifts are the most common procedures requested. He noted that many of his clients have second homes in Aspen or visit regularly for recreation and rejuvenation. His office routinely provides patients with tickets to the ballet, theater, or symphony to make the recovery process more enjoyable. Many of his patients come to him so that they can relax, get a facelift, see a show, and return home looking “refreshed.”17 And, of course, skiing is part of everyday life during the winter season. As one Aspenite told us “I have skis here sitting in my office, it’s very culturally acceptable to run out over your lunch hour and take a couple of runs.”18
Even the homes in the trailer parks sell for $300,000 and up, and professionals like doctors, architects, and lawyers are among the residents there.19 A critical Aspenite tells us, “It’s the Twilight Zone up here when you start looking at real estate. It’s just incomprehensible. There’s no way that a person who is reliant on the income from a job could ever purchase here.”20 One Aspen City Council member told us, “Unfortunately . . . it is a resort community. And it is not unlike a community like Beverly Hills . . . or even Manhattan, where people who work there can’t afford to live there.”21 A writer put it this way: “Aspen may be the only ski town that has become a verb. To Aspenize, in the eyes of those who live elsewhere, is to destroy a nice little ski town with conspicuous wealth, development, and self-indulgence.”22
The philanthropist George Stranahan responded to our question “Is there affordable housing in this town?” with “Hell, no. No. You can’t be a line cook at maybe twelve dollars an hour and find a renters program. It’s not going to work very well.”23
Despite the fact that 95 percent of the city’s population is white, and despite the eagerness of Terry Paulson and others to restrict Aspen’s population, you don’t have to be white to live in Aspen, or to own a second, third, or fourth home there.24 Enough wealth and fame can buy you access, as proved by David Robinson, a former San Antonio Spurs star. Robinson, who is African American and wealthy, has a second home in Aspen. Consider the case of Saudi Prince Bandar, who obtained permission from the city council to build a 56,000-square-foot home he calls Hala (which he says is the Arabic word for “welcome”). Bandar gave donations of $820,000 to various charities in Aspen just before his proposal came before the council. In some people’s view, this was nothing less than a bribe. But Dick Butera, a realtor, developer, and co-owner of Aspen’s landmark Hotel Jerome, declared that Bandar’s “palace” (as some called the house) would have a positive economic ripple effect, which would trickle down to the common person, including children (in the form of school taxes) and construction workers (jobs from building the house) and via the funding boost to local charities.25 The resulting structure is larger than the White House, with fifteen bedrooms, sixteen bathrooms, a private barbershop and beauty salon, and enough space to host a party for 450 revelers and a staff of twelve servants.26
Like many of Aspen’s wealthiest denizens, this is just one of multiple homes Bandar owns around the world, which means he is rarely in town. The ecological footprint involved in building and maintaining such a structure for someone who rarely visits Aspen might give one pause, considering that the same city council that allowed a special exception for Hala condemned working-class immigrants as the real ecological threat. When, in 2007, Bandar decided to sell the house for $135 million—the most expensive single-family residential property on the market in the United States that year—the message was clear: “non-billionaires need not apply.”27 This means that even Aspen’s traditional Hollywood-star set is increasingly finding it difficult to purchase or maintain a residence in the area.
Many other Aspen area elites have equally extravagant approaches to home, hearth, and the ecosystem. Most elite jet-setters with homes in the area spend little time there, but often want their multimillion-dollar domiciles ready for them whenever they arrive. One Snowmass property manager told a journalist that his job was to look after vacation homes while their absentee owners were out of town. Most of the properties he managed were empty forty-five weeks of the year, “[y]et they had to stay heated so the pipes wouldn’t freeze and their swimming pools, as a rule, were heated continuously—not drained—so they’d be ready for use when the owners arrived.”28 Gerhard Andlinger is an Aspen resident. He is also a multimillionaire financier who violated land-use codes when—in the process of constructing his home—he “dug and hauled away an entire hillside” and “built a trench through habitat without the necessary permits.” He thought this was perfectly reasonable for what he calls his “cabin”—a 7,500-square-foot luxury home that sits on a 157-acre lot. The county objected when he moved more than 10,000 cubic yards of dirt, which he termed an “agricultural improvement” that would allow him to more easily “keep an eye on his horses.”29 Yet the city and county still hold firm in their view that population control is the real key to ecological sustainability.
To the average Aspenite, though, excesses like Andlinger’s seem ordinary. One local mother we spoke to described her child’s future school in town:
They’re in the process of building a $41 million high school . . . and I’m pretty confident that the schools are going to be probably better. For a couple of reasons. One is, they have a lot of money . . . every kid in the new high school will be furnished with a brand new laptop computer. . . . The city is also building a $3 million . . . ice rink facility . . . that was donated by a group of wealthy individuals here [and it will be] right in front of the high school . . . it will be a community center that will have an Olympic-sized hockey rink and pool and so on.30
At the same time, Aspen’s reputation for environmentalism and new-age spirituality is highly regarded.31 As the director of the Aspen Valley Community Foundation told us, “We have a ton of environmental nonprofits in this small area.”32 With a penchant for Eastern philosophies (and their Westernized derivatives), this area is a veritable theme park for people seeking spiritual rejuvenation through outdoor activities and access to motivational speakers, gurus, and spa treatments. In 2004, Snowmass hosted the Snowmass Wellness Experience. They welcomed a visit from the yoga guru Bikram Choudhury and the best-selling author and “spiritual savant” Deepak Chopra, which allowed locals to revel in the “mind-body-spirit connection for which the ‘Aspen Idea’ is so justifiably famous.”33 The session also featured speakers on Feng Shui and Ayurvedic healing.
Running through so much of the story that Aspen tells eagerly about itself is the Aspen Logic. The marriage of capital growth and environmentalism has been a hallmark of this area for years, far ahead of current initiatives by large corporations such as Walmart. Auden Schendler, director of environmental affairs at the Aspen Skiing Company—known to Aspenites as “SkiCo”’—is a staunch believer and practitioner of the Aspen Logic. He boasts, “We don’t just have one green building; we have a green development policy and many green buildings. We don’t just buy renewable energy; we’re currently exploring a new goal of 25 percent renewable power, and now we’re making clean power on the hill with our hydroelectric station on Snowmass.”34 And SkiCo has the awards to prove it.35 Consistent with the feel-good spirit of the Aspen Logic, Aspen’s airport and post office are both outfitted with solar panels.
The Aspen Logic is a match made in heaven for “green consumers” who wish to maintain their high-status lifestyle while supporting environmental causes. Aspen Magazine published a story about locals who have been bitten by the scooter bug:
But how green our town is extends beyond organic produce to the trend of environmentally friendly scooters. . . . Not only are they the most stylish way to get around in the summer, they also make parking in our congested downtown considerably easier. In the summertime, Aspen proves that Rome isn’t the only place where scooters rule. “My Italjet gets a kabillion miles to the gallon. I never fill it up,” says Maria DeGraeve, manager of the Aspen Bulgari store and avid scooter rider. “And it’s a lot more ecologically friendly than my SUV.” Valerie Alexander, who works for Bluegreen, says riding the vintage Vespa takes her to another place. “I feel like I should be in Europe, heading to lunch with the girls, scarf blowing in the wind, and a baguette in my backpack—except I’m in Aspen.”36
The references to Rome and Europe are consistent with a long and conscious history of constructing U.S. ski towns as faux-Bavarian or Alpine villages of the Rockies. The father of modern Aspen, Walter Paepcke, lovingly referred to the town as an American Salzburg. After World War II, ski resort promoters deliberately marketed these developments as European ski resorts within the American West, thus securing environmental privileges by making invisible those people of color who worked or lived in these places.37 It is also interesting that Ms. DeGraeve is self-congratulatory about her scooter usage, yet unconcerned that she still owns and drives an SUV. The article continues:
Part-time Aspenite Celeste Fenichel chose her scooter’s color to match her turquoise jewelry. She spends most of the year in London—where she drives luxury SUVs—with her husband and two sons. But while Fenichel is in Aspen during the summer, she can often be seen riding her Vespa to her tennis matches at the Maroon Creek Club.38
The breeziness of the article’s prose is endemic to the plethora of promotional journalism written about Aspen. This story, like so many others, revels in a self-congratulatory air that is as bright and shiny as Aspen’s own crisp mountain air. The message is clear: in Aspen, you can have it all. You can take pride in riding a scooter but still drive an SUV. Environmental responsibility and conspicuous consumption are entirely compatible.
The unexamined environmental privilege is what makes Aspen so attractive to its elite residents. A casual sampling of Aspen area bumper stickers (generally on old Volvos as well as SUVs and other second or third cars) revealed a range of political themes:
“If you’re NOT an environmentalist you’re totally insane.”
“Be Green: Help the Earth Live.”
“NATIVE” [with the Colorado Rocky Mountains as the background].39
“No Vacancy” [with the Colorado Rocky Mountains as the background].
“What schools need is moment of science” [as opposed to the Religious Right’s “moment of silence”]
“Replenish the Earth: Prevent Excess Births.”
The owners of each of these bumper-stickered vehicles likely view themselves as politically progressive. Each sticker embraces a message that is antiwar or peace loving, in favor of smart growth, slow growth, no growth, and ecological sustainability. Yet they also seek to maintain environmental privileges by excluding others from these places and reflect an unexamined refusal to sacrifice political power or material wealth.
Regarding Aspen’s claim to ecological purity, George Stranahan is more critical. He stated, “there’s a little gray haze over Aspen in the summer. We are one pollutin’ son of a bitch. Everybody who comes up here, everyone gets a rental car. I guess the [ecological] impact is the tourism.”40 Recent reports of the environmental toll on land and waterways associated with mountain climbing, hiking, snowmaking, fishing, backpacking, snowmobiling, snowshoeing, skiing, and other off-road recreational activities in Colorado’s mountains would certainly support Stranahan’s contention.41 Even “nature loving” activities have negative environmental impacts.
Stranahan was also clear as to the state of class inequality in town:
The economic diversity in Aspen is . . . there’s no poverty in Aspen. The rest of the world is looking at this huge divide between 5 percent of the people who have 90 percent of the money and 95 percent of the people who have nothing. When in Aspen, you’re not going to see the people at the bottom. So we don’t have an economic diversity, we’re a very stratified class structure.42
Regarding Aspen’s racial demography (or lack thereof), city council member Tony Hershey had this to say:
Aspen is a very wealthy community, frankly it’s a very white community, just because David Robinson from the [San Antonio] Spurs had a house here doesn’t make us integrated, you know. It’s frankly, unusual to see a black person. There was a comedian that I went to see the other night, and he’s staying at the St. Regis [Hotel]. And he said “I was in the hotel room when the maid came in, and she was white, and I went like ‘Who are you?,’ and she’s like ‘Who are you?!’” Joking because, there’s no black people here. . . . We had a crime wave two summers ago. . . . And it turns out there were two young high school Aspen kids. And these were serious crimes, armed robbery of a supermarket and stuff, and immediately it was like “Oh those Mexicans were involved.” And it was sort of a wake-up call for some people because, hey, they weren’t Mexicans, they were Aspen . . . white kids. But, it was an unfortunate thing, there’s been some crime and some people point their finger at the poor people.43
Aspen is a mountain town where many people live a larger-than-life existence, where liberals and progressives flock to enjoy themselves and express their love of nature and New-Age fads, and where the ugliness of capitalism and racism is expressed and exposed from time to time.
The separation of Aspen and “down valley” towns is both real and an artifact. It is real in that Aspen is the pinnacle of wealth and glitter in the Roaring Fork Valley. It is an artifact because the valley is, to a degree, a single community that represents great social diversity. As one resident told us, “The valley is a very, very small community and, in some respects, is one community although it is comprised of a series of small towns starting at the upper valley in Aspen and then you move down.”44
The Roaring Fork Valley, situated in western Colorado, is bisected by an eighty-mile corridor defined by the Roaring Fork River and its tributaries, including the Crystal and Frying Pan Rivers. The valley is surrounded by mountains on all sides, in particular the Elk Mountains, Aspen Mountain and the Maroon Bells, which are southwest of Aspen, and Mount Sopris, which stands on the northwest edge of the region. Aspen sits at the highest point in the valley, at approximately 8,000 feet above sea level. The city literally looks out over the valley. As you leave Aspen on Highway 82, you head northwest—down valley. You first hit Snowmass, Woody Creek, Basalt, Carbondale, Glenwood Springs, and then Rifle and Parachute going west on Highway 70. This stretch along the Roaring Fork River has developed around mining and tourism since the 1880s. The names of many towns reflect Colorado’s role as a major mining hotspot and a key site in the violent exploitation and settlement of the American West. Some towns and communities are named after minerals (Basalt, Marble, Leadville, Carbondale, Gypsum, Silt, Redstone) or weapons (Gunbarrel and Rifle).
As you leave Aspen’s cultivated downtown heading north on Highway 82, you come to Snowmass, where life looks essentially the same as Aspen but with a few less designer shops. The town of Woody Creek is nearby and easy to miss since it is unincorporated and quite small. The town has a legendary bar—the Woody Creek Tavern. Woody Creek is famous for its superstar residents like Don Henley, Don Johnson, the late Hunter S. Thompson, and more recently, Nancy Pelosi. Farther down 82 you hit Basalt, a town of less than 3,000 residents, a high cost of living, and a great location for trout fishing and mountain biking. This is also the town that passed a pro-immigration resolution in response to Aspen’s nativist resolution. In February 2001 the Basalt city council’s resolution acknowledged the positive contributions of immigrants; promoted equal rights for all workers (both documented and undocumented); sought amnesty for people in the country without papers; and called for the federal immigration process to be streamlined so that immigrants might move along the path to legal citizenship more easily. Jon Fox-Rubin, a Basalt City Council member, related:
To me it just really scapegoats immigrants when we white people driving around in our sport utility vehicles consuming the American lifestyle are phenomenally out of proportion with the Latinos that are living in our community. . . many of them are commuting on the bus or carpooling in relatively large numbers and living very efficiently. The single issue thinking behind the Aspen resolution was “my environment, my local backyard environment is worth more than the global environment.” So that was the impetus for our resolution.45
Down the road from Basalt, you come to Carbondale, perhaps the most relaxed town in the valley. There are 5,000 residents and a sizable immigrant and Latino population, great Mexican restaurants, a number of mobile home communities, and a large public park that the locals often use. Carbondale has become a bedroom community for many workers who spend their days in Aspen, and the average incomes are much less than those found farther up the valley. In the Bonanza trailer park, the average monthly salary of its mostly Latino immigrant residents was $2,000, which is a poverty wage in the Roaring Fork Valley. Just under half of the Bonanza residents earned less than $1,300 each month.
This town celebrates its growing artist community and has inspiring vistas with Mount Sopris towering above, just to the south—the area’s most imposing natural landmark. In many ways, much of Carbondale sees itself as the ecologically conscious town that Aspen wants to be. It is a place where restaurants serve dandelions with fresh-from-the-farm entrees, where few streetlights are allowed so as to reduce “light pollution” at night, and where low-flow toilets are the order of the day. The Stepstone Center for Social Justice director and Carbondale councilmember Scott Chaplin laughs as he describes the environmental perspective that is emblematic of his town:
In that sense, our town is a little bit ahead of Aspen in some ways, in that we haven’t sprayed pesticides in our parks for about eight years now. There’s a strong environmental ethic in this town. We’re talking about getting solar powered hot water in the swimming pool. We’ve made the dandelion the town flower because if you have dandelions, it’s a good sign that you’re not using chemicals. . . . I think there’s more of a feeling here in Carbondale that this is a community for people and the environment, and in Aspen it’s more like they don’t care so much about people, they just want the environment!46
The town of Carbondale is an important site in the immigration and environment debate. In many ways, it is where much of the opposition to Aspen’s nativist environmentalism has emerged. The Stepstone Center for Social Justice, Mountain Folks for Global Justice, and other pro-immigrant, environmental justice, and social justice groups are based there. Carbondale has a “crunchy granola” reputation that is more down to earth than Aspen. For example, while the Aspen Institute invites world dignitaries to discuss philosophy, the arts, and the benefits of economic globalization, Carbondale prefers hosting its annual Mountain Fair, which looks like a countercultural gathering from another era. As one local activist told us, “Carbondale is a bunch of old hippies. And has a pretty fierce western independence kind of thing like ‘what do you mean I can’t smoke pot in the park?’”47
Local organizers also regularly bring in speakers like the progressive author and activist Jim Hightower, who was cheered on by Carbondale’s strong, left-leaning community as he characterized president George W. Bush’s administration as a group of “kleptocrats” who were responsible for “stealing our democracy.”48 On a Monday evening when we were visiting Carbondale, a group of activists marched down Main street with a twelve-foot figure of George W. Bush with faux flames rising out of the back of his pant legs, while people chanted “liar, liar, pants on fire.” This was part of a national campaign dreamed up by Ben Cohen, co-founder of the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream corporation, as a tactic for raising public awareness of the “credibility gap” associated with the Bush regime’s foreign policy decisions. The protest went well and received local support, but it also resulted in a police citation for having the wrong kind of lights on the trailer carrying the Bush figure.49
Continuing down the valley, Glenwood Springs is the next stop. Glenwood sits at the confluence of the Colorado and the Roaring Fork rivers and is most famous for its hot springs and caverns. Tourists, athletes, and the infirm have enjoyed the hot springs for more than a century. This city of 9,000 people is a major destination for mountain bikers, anglers, and water sports enthusiasts. If you approach Glenwood from Interstate 70, you can see tourists white-water rafting and kayaking on the Colorado River. The smell of sulfur fills the air and is a bit jarring, but you quickly get used to it once you feel the warmth of the hot springs. Glenwood is also the home of the Colorado Mountain College, which serves many Latino and immigrant youth. In addition, Glenwood where La Unión, a progressive, monthly, bilingual newspaper is based. Luis Polar said he gave the paper that name because “I want this paper to reflect unity. Unity among cultures, unity among races, and unity among people.”50 Glenwood Springs has a strong and progressive social-services sector that works with immigrants and their families to find employment and to offer childcare and other needs. The connection to nature is no less serious here than anywhere else in the valley. For example, a hunter from Glenwood Springs was recently sentenced to 120 days in jail and a $27,500 fine after he illegally shot and killed a bighorn ram.51
Continuing west on Highway 70, you drive past Rifle (population 10,000) and reach the end of the Roaring Fork Valley in Parachute, Colorado (population 1,000). Both towns have Latino populations of about 20 percent; median and family incomes are fairly low in these communities, which are struggling to maintain a tax base. Since the mid-1990s, the town of Rifle has grown into a bedroom community where many immigrants from Mexico, Honduras, and other Latin American nations live when they are not working in Aspen, sixty miles up valley. Rifle was also the site of a violent anti-Latino migrant killing spree in 2001 (which we discuss later in this chapter).
The mobile home parks in the valley are often tucked away beyond or under a grove of trees, a way of making sure the working-class and immigrant populations living there are not too noticeable to the tourists or the local elites. In one park we saw in Glenwood Springs, the homes are lined up in two rows along a dirt road and are barely visible from highway 82. The homes are neatly kept, but there is not a lot of activity in the neighborhood because the residents are rarely home since they are at work all day. Looking out over Glenwood Springs from the campus of Colorado Mountain College—which sits atop a small mountain—you are struck by how well the mobile home communities and their immigrant residents are hidden from view.
In 2006 Tom Brokaw, the NBC correspondent, did a series of stories on immigration in the twenty-first century. One of his stops was the Roaring Fork Valley. Brokaw spoke with a construction-company owner who hired undocumented immigrant workers at $12–14 per hour. That’s not a bad wage, except for the high cost of living in the valley and that many of these workers must send money back home to family in Latin America.52 Many workers and employers we spoke with agreed that $14 per hour was the high end of the wage spectrum.
While it is impossible to know how many undocumented persons are in the region, there are estimates available. Michael Comfort, the deputy district director for the Immigration and Nationalization Service (INS) in the late 1990s, estimated that between 35,000 and 45,000 undocumented persons live in Colorado.53 The Pew Research Center estimates the undocumented immigrant population of Colorado to be 4.5 percent of the state’s workforce, but the number in the Roaring Fork Valley is likely much higher.54 Garfield County contains many of the Roaring Fork’s down-valley towns like Carbondale, Glenwood Springs, Rifle, and Parachute. The
Roaring Fork Valley mobile home park. Photo by L. S. Park
Latino population of the county is 17 percent of the county’s 55,000 residents. The government estimates that there are 6,700 undocumented persons in the county, or 8.2 percent.55 With Latinos making up nearly one-fifth of the county’s population, and undocumented persons constituting half of that number, immigrants are an important part of the region’s culture and economy. Aspen sheriff deputy Marie Munday underscored this point when she estimated that there are 20,000 Latinos (documented and undocumented) in the entire Roaring Fork Valley, which includes Garfield, Pitkin, and Summit counties.56
Jessica Dove, a local Anglo woman who works as an educational advocate for immigrant communities, described the ethnic and racial terrain of the valley:
If you’d like a general picture of the immigrant community, I can tell you that they come from all over. The vast majority is Mexican, of course, but there are also Salvadorans—they tend to be documented because there was an amnesty program a while ago. We also have a number of Argentines and Peruvians as well, both of which are very used to mountain living, having done so in their home countries. They come here to work during the ski season, and I suspect most find other work during the off-season. We also have a number of folks coming from Uruguay and Paraguay. The Ski Company has a real racket—they’ve been able to recruit folks from Argentina to be ski lift operators and ski instructors for as low as $8/hour. These are jobs that used to pay much more in the past. There is a small Asian community that works mostly in restaurants. Many of them are working toward legal status in the United States. . . . There are not very many African Americans . . . and in terms of Anglos, they are often second-homeowners and have personal staffs at their homes—nannies, cooks, gardeners, and cleaners, etc. These Anglos actually contribute a great deal to the local employment just by employing large staffs of immigrants to do their personal services. There is also a working business-class in the area as well, which is mostly white and not necessarily wealthy.57
Much of the present-day immigrant and second-generation Latino population in the Roaring Fork Valley traces its roots to the 1980s when businesses recruited temporary workers from south of the border to come north for employment in the booming tourist sector. Instead of returning after a few years, many of these migrants remained, brought their families (or created families here), found friends, and created a community.58
Since down-valley communities are more affordable than Aspen, this is where most of the immigrant population lives. And, as is the case in many other parts of the country, the environmental privileges of the wealthy exist alongside greater environmental risks affecting the poor and people of color. Jon Fox-Rubin explains the situation in Basalt:
Most of the affordable housing that we have is in the form of mobile homes, and they are in a floodplain. One of the key issues that we have is helping move those households out of the floodplain and into other affordable housing. And that price that they have there is very hard to beat. We’re looking at moving people out of harm’s way without moving them downstream or out of the community. A lot of them are working-class people that go to Aspen everyday . . . in a variety of service-related jobs. . . . A large fraction of the people are Latinos. We probably have about a hundred mobile homes. And then the low-end area is probably the most precarious . . . because that’s the north end of the flood plain.
The precarious nature of immigrant housing is indicative of their uncertain existence in the community. Their segregated, subpar living conditions fix the Latino immigrant community on the lowest rung of the social hierarchy. In addition, local zoning laws, even in politically progressive towns like Basalt, function as constant reminders lest they forget. Fox-Rubin observed:
We have regulations on how many unrelated people can live in a household. I think that it’s going to be an uphill battle because there’s a lot of education required. There aren’t any Latinos on our town council. There’s a lot of implicit—I guess you would call it—institutionalized racism issues that white communities have. We don’t realize that our policies are essentially unfair and have a racist component. (Interviewer: And you would say that that’s prominent in Basalt politics?) Yes.59
From Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast region to communities affected by hydroelectric power on nearly every continent to Roma settlements outside Central and Eastern European cities, marginal populations frequently face the environmental injustice of living in floodplains or in areas at risk of flooding from waterways and dams. This is a result of political and economic inequalities.60
Down-valley communities are an integral part of Aspen’s existence, providing immigrant labor, white-collar workers, housing, and new opportunities for growth and investment. Down valley activist and council member Scott Chaplin states, “There’s always been this Up Valley/Down Valley tension. They’re providing more of the funding for the bus system, so they think they’re doing us a favor. But we’re housing most of their workers, so we think we’re doing them a favor.”61 Affordable housing is nonexistent in Aspen, whereas other Roaring Fork communities are trying to implement housing programs for working people out of sheer necessity. The industries employing immigrants throughout the valley are largely in the service sector—hotels, restaurants, and grocery stores—and landscaping and construction. While the wages in Aspen are relatively high, even for lowend service work, they do not adequately compensate a worker for the high cost of living there. Alice Hubbard Laird—a city council member in Carbondale and a well-respected environmental advocate in the valley—stated that the Aspen “billionaires are pushing the millionaires out!”62
The various down valley communities are all grappling with their very different roles concerning a number of pressing and interrelated issues: housing, employment, and immigration. But the mainstay of public concern and conversation in the valley is growth and its impact on the environment and quality of life. And, of course, growth is inseparable from the politics of immigration, housing, and employment. From Aspen to Parachute, whether it is embraced or repelled, growth is the thing. The owner of an inn in Glenwood Springs told us:
It’s like everyone has a connection to the construction industry here in this town. My husband is in the industry, so that colors my perceptions of growth. My parents live in Glenwood Springs and my sister does too. My kid goes to school in Carbondale . . . and everyone has either a job in education, medical services, or construction here. There has been an ongoing proposal for a golf course over the hill here, and initially all the nearby residents were protesting it, but since we are in construction we understand why people want to build, so we’re of two minds on that.63
As much as Aspenites complain about overcrowded trails, ski slopes, and roads, the rest of the valley is facing growing pains and pleasures as well. The towns of Basalt and Carbondale are sites of rising local concerns and hopes over massive growth.64 This growth is not necessarily driven by international migration, but rather by commercial and residential development intended to serve affluent internal native-born migrants from other parts of the valley, state, and nation.65 And much of the development in Carbondale and Basalt is funded and controlled by Aspen-based businesses. One recently completed project is the River Valley Ranch, a golf-and-residential development in which the Aspen Skiing Company is a major investor. Another Aspen-based developer, Mark Kwiecienski, is building Ten Peaks Meadows, a residential development that “targets the upper-end niche in the down-valley market.” Sirous Saghtoleslami is yet another Aspen developer who is building Fox Run Meadows, “a project that includes 17 two-acre, single-family-home lots, seven lots of between 10 and 14 acres, and seven caretaker units.”66
The environmental ethic and growth imperative are often at odds down valley, but some creative efforts are underway in places like Basalt. As Jon Fox-Rubin told us:
[W]e have a pretty unique setup here. We’re bordered by some Division of Wildlife lands, some Forest Service land, some BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land, and several ranches. We have made some progress . . . on acquiring some key open-space parcels that are migration corridors for big game. . . . We have one very large ranch that was developed into a golf course, which is kind of a leading-edge environmental golf course. It has one of the lowest pesticide uses in the country, things called phyto-islands, which are diverse islands of native species that synergistically exist. So on one hand it’s an environmental success, and on the other hand it took out a tract of land that was open space that was deer habitat and, in the summer, hay and cattle ranches . . . the ranchers that owned that, they made a little bit of money but the developers made a heck of a lot of money.67
It appears that this project achieved the multiple goals of environmental conservation, expansion of golfing greens, and profit-making for developers. It is also likely that the project would have gone forward only if developers themselves had approved it.
In the face of increasing concerns around growth, immigration, and environmental sustainability, the Roaring Fork Valley becomes an ever-more complex community—a patchwork of cultures linked by a common economy and a stunning ecology—in which its residents’ day-to-day lives could not be more different.
Aspen’s evolution as the ultimate elite retreat was possible only as a result of its parallel narrative: the evolution of an undesirable but essential workforce. The Latino immigrants who make tourism possible are the latest generation of laborers working in the relentless machinery of extractive industry. And today, in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley just as in the rest of America, these immigrants are embroiled in a love-hate relationship with the U.S. citizenry. Earlier we mentioned the double bind in which many immigrants find themselves, as providers of labor that is both sought after and despised, welcomed by much of the business community but condemned by nativists who see their influence as alien, suspect, and socially impure.
During the 1990s, most of the Mexican workers in the Roaring Fork Valley came from the northern state of Chihuahua, south of El Paso. In the early 2000s, many newcomers traveled from the southern coastal states of Guerrero, Nayarit, and Michoacan (to say nothing of those folks from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and other points farther south). These hometown differences matter greatly among many Mexicans, but for most U.S. residents they’re all “just Mexicans.”68
The numerous hurdles faced by migrants frame much of their lives. From our perspective in the United States, we often lose sight of the difficulties in their home countries that make the daunting and dangerous trip north seem necessary. But that decision is only the beginning. One means of understanding some of the enormous obstacles and hardships some immigrants face is to consider Mike Davis and Alessandra Moctezuma’s concept of multiple borders.69 In writing on the tensions between Mexican immigrants and nativist whites in Southern California, Davis and Moctezuma describe the “first border” as the official national boundary between the United States and Mexico.70 The “second border” is often a moving target, including those dragnets and detention centers that the Border Patrol and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, formerly the INS) set up at various checkpoints in the interior of the United States.71 This “second border” consists of those activities carried out by law enforcement agencies that track, detain, and deport immigrants within the States.
As if crossing the first border were not dangerous enough,72 along the second border ICE performs regular sweeps through communities, patrols the Interstate highway system, and conducts raids on businesses and homes throughout the interior. Profiling and stopping vans with immigrants traveling into the United States have become routine for ICE authorities. In May 2000, forty-seven undocumented persons were apprehended from three vans, which were traveling on Interstate 70 in Colorado near the Roaring Fork Valley.73 Local officials like Garfield County sheriff Tom Dalessandri stated, “This is an example of why we need INS agents in our area and why we need a facility placed here.”74 As we’ll see, the ensuing controversy over locating an INS/ICE facility in the valley was explosive and reflected the intensity on all sides of the immigration debate in the area.
The detention and deportation stories of immigrants are numerous, and they epitomize the terrible bind in which many of today’s newcomers find themselves. A Mexican woman living in a down-valley town reported that law enforcement officials stopped her for not wearing a seatbelt while driving. She was immediately detained and deported by immigration officials, who left her on a bridge between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. As a result, her three young children were forced to remain in the United States and live with a relative who had a record of domestic abuse.75 Rico Torres, a community advocate working for Catholic Charities (a social service organization in the Roaring Fork Valley) noted that he has spoken with about thirty clients who related stories about themselves or loved ones being deported for minor crimes. In January 2000, twenty-one undocumented persons were apprehended in a single traffic stop in the Valley.76 These actions produce major strains within communities and families that are already living from paycheck to paycheck.
Drug smuggling has, for years, been the primary rationale for border militarization and immigrant surveillance, and plays an important role in justifying the continued expansion of the size and power of the federal ICE agency. Virginia Kice, an ICE spokesperson, indicated that ICE’s main focus is on “trying to disrupt the criminal smuggling networks and lead investigations.”77 According to Kice, Colorado is an important site of illicit smuggling of migrant workers:
We found that Colorado is a huge over-ground smuggling state for undocumented persons (particularly along the I-70 corridor), and this led to the development of our Quick Response approach. What this means is we have an information system so that if a local sheriff suspects that someone is illegal, they can call it in to a Clearinghouse Law Enforcement Center in Vermont that we have and get all the information they need immediately—we’ll tell them if the person has a record of immigration law violations. It’s connected to all officers around the country. This is a “force multiplier,” a new technology. Human smuggling is a big focus . . . the volume is huge and the profits are huge as well. There has been a tenfold increase in the price of smuggling across the border in the last decade. This is a multibillion dollar industry.78
The connection to national security and the threat of attacks on civilians is also always present in these conversations. Kice cautioned us, “No matter what your politics are, one thing is true: the people who come here illegally, who sneak across the border, we don’t know who they are, so this is why we need Homeland Security.” The assumption is that anyone and everyone crossing the U.S. border could be a security risk. There is also an assumption that those who reside in the United States with citizenship are “known” and without risk. The repeated use of language such as “sneaking,” “illegal,” and “smuggling,” is common among those working to foster a perceived association between immigration and crime.79
We should note that ICE detention centers have become one of the fastest-growing segments of our national obsession with incarceration, with more than 65,000 immigrants being held against their will in private and public facilities in 2007.80 That same year, according to the Pew Research Center, Latinos became the largest ethnic/racial group in federal prisons, making up one-third of the inmate population, despite comprising only 13 percent of the U.S. population.81 This increase was due largely to tougher enforcement of immigration laws.
According to Davis and Moctezuma, there is also a “third border,” the boundary that regulates the daily interactions between communities, including Latinos with U.S. citizenship. This particular border consists of efforts by governments and individuals to regulate immigrants’ mobility and access through exclusion from certain public areas, neighborhoods, parks, pools, and other recreational facilities through legal or extralegal (i.e., violent) means. This includes the resolutions and ordinances of city councils from Escondido, California, to Hazelton, Pennsylvania, enacted to regulate and control Latino populations.
Davis and Moctezuma discuss the way in which whites in San Marino, California, pushed their city council to introduce weekend user fees for nonresidents who seek access to the bucolic space of Lacy Park. This $12 charge limited working-class Latino families’ access, while local wealthy whites easily secured entry to this coveted space. Similarly, San Marino’s world-famous Huntington Library and Gardens is an ecological and architectural gem of Southern California. Recently, a new entry fee was introduced there (replacing the previous practice of a “suggested donation”), also aimed at restricting access to this space. Arcadia, California’s gorgeous Wilderness Park, was the site of another such struggle. As more Latinos began using the park, whites protested. A leader of the neighboring Highland Oaks Homeowner’s Association stated, “I’ve seen their graffiti. I’ve heard their ghetto blasters. I don’t want any riffraff coming into our city.” The mayor and city council agreed and renamed the park a “wilderness center” with public access limited to one eight-hour period on Fridays. This amounts to a privatization of public space, a corporatization of the commons. While the first and second borders are meant to exclude Latinos from the nation, the third border serves to produce racial segregation within the domestic interior. Davis and Moctezuma write, “This crabgrass apartheid, represented by blockaded streets and off-limits parks, should be as intolerable as Jim Crow drinking fountains or segregated schools were in the 1960s.”82 In our view, the third border reflects and facilitates environmental privilege, and is a core part of the complex of factors that produce environmental racism. Elites enjoy clean environments at the expense of the “commoners” who face pollution and low-wage jobs. And in Aspen, those commoners are blamed for polluting elites’ protected space, literally and symbolically.
The third-border strategy, as we have seen, is powerful because it is amorphous and can manifest itself in many ways. It seeks to control the bodies and livelihoods of the country’s immigrants, sometimes through blatant means and other times in much more subtle ways. One of today’s most common manifestations of the third border is the passage of laws and ordinances that restrict the number of occupants per household. Since many new immigrants are low-wage workers in high-cost areas, they often save money by housing many people into a single domicile. The message these laws send is clear: you are only as free as we say you are.83
Carbondale, Colorado was perhaps the last town in the Roaring Fork Valley to pass a maximum occupancy regulation. By the late 1990s, Aspen, Glenwood Springs, Snowmass, and Pitkin County all created rules limiting the number of unrelated adults living in a single-family dwelling. Carbondale’s mayor Randy Vanderhurst felt it was time to consider a similar ordinance in his town, due to the perception that certain social ills were highly concentrated in the Latino community and spilling over into Anglo areas:
If you look at the police blotter in Carbondale and the mid valley you’ll find a disproportionate number of Latino surnames connected to everything from DUI’s to drug dealing . . . I’m not saying because you live with ten other people that that forces you to go to a bar, have too many beers, then get in a car. But the stress when you live with that many people is probably greater than if you don’t.84
Subsequently, Carbondale passed an ordinance setting strict limits on the number of people who could occupy a single dwelling.
Criminalizing people of color and immigrants is nothing new. The use of a maximum occupancy ordinance, however, is a good example of the “new racism”—racist practices that are less overt in their targeting of people of color. There is nothing in most of these regulations that is specific or direct about the populations at which they are aimed. That way, it is difficult to argue that they are explicitly racist. But the intent and impact are racist, as evident in Vanderhurst’s quote.
More recently, however, the “old racism” reared its ugly head as towns across America boldly passed laws that explicitly made it a criminal act to hire or rent a home to undocumented persons. These laws strongly echo the restrictive covenants of a previous era, which forbade white residents from selling or renting their properties to African Americans and other undesirable elements in the suburbs and white urban neighborhoods.85 Even a federal law proposed in 2005 by House of Representatives member James Sensenbrenner adopted similar language. Most of these proposed laws have been challenged and many struck down as unconstitutional, but unlike the more subtle expressions of “new racism,” this racist anti-immigrant message remains increasingly bold and public.86 These kinds of policies are excellent examples of how racism directly impacts both the victims and perpetrators; whites themselves experience a restriction of sorts since they are prohibited from selling or renting to whomever they please.
An age-old method of enforcing borders and white environmental privilege is interpersonal and vigilante violence. From the Texas Rangers to the Ku Klux Klan and the Minuteman Project, organized violence against immigrants and people of color in the United States has a deep history that continues to this day. On the eve of Independence Day, July 3, 2001, Steven Michael Stagner—a white man—shot and killed Angelica Toscano, Juan Hernandez, Mel-qui-des Medrano, and Juan Carlos Medrano. They were Mexican immigrants living in the Roaring Fork Valley town of Rifle. The rampage also left three other people wounded. Stagner began his shooting spree at the City Market grocery store before moving on to the Bookcliffs RV Park, a community of mostly Latino workers and their families.
The Mexican consulate in Denver was incensed at this crime and issued a statement that the four persons killed in the incident were indeed Mexican nationals. The consulate demanded “expeditious clarification” of the crime.87 A series of public demonstrations followed, and while valley immigrants were fearful of continued violence, most of them would not be cowed by this hate crime.88 Stagner was charged with first-degree murder but later found not guilty by reason of insanity. The immigrant community was outraged. The court ruled that Stagner be confined indefinitely at the Colorado Mental Health Institute, but that decision fell far short of the justice many activists and residents had hoped for. Colorado has a law against “ethnic intimidation,” but that statute was not applied in this case.89
Shirley Otero, a Rifle resident, challenged the court’s decision and reasoning. In a meeting of concerned residents and the local police and prosecutor, she stated:
If he was insane, he would have randomly killed people. . . . But he didn’t. He walked around and scoured the area. There were statements he made close to the time of the shootings that it was time that Mexicans get what they deserve because they are here illegally and feeding off the system.90
Scott Chaplin remembered:
At the memorial . . . 2,000 people showed up and the governor showed up. There was a lot of beginning of healing and talking about the issues. We brought kids down from Rifle to talk on the radio station. When he [Stagner] was found innocent, people were upset about that and said it definitely wouldn’t have happened if he was Latino. There was one woman from Rifle who wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper who said “Michael [the shooter] was right. These Latinos are taking over our Valley. Too bad he didn’t shoot more.” That was a letter to the editor.91
Georgi Aibner, a former teacher and friend of the victims’ families, pledged to establish a memorial and scholarship to honor “los inocentes,” the innocent victims of this tragedy. The fact that this hate crime occurred on the July 4 weekend, a time when the idea of American nationhood is on display and defended righteously by the state and millions of patriotic citizens, cannot pass without remark. Independence Day is a celebration built on the claim that the U.S. armed forces are the major reason for “our” freedom. In other words, our citizenship and rights as Americans are secured through violence deemed acceptable for the greater good.92
These kinds of experiences contribute to understanding why and how even a rumor of ICE raids in the valley can send shock waves through the community. The social terrain around immigration changed dramatically after 9/11 and the experience for people in communities throughout the United States became more stressful than ever.
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the development of the Department of Homeland Security, there has been a marked rise in the level of caution and anxiety among immigrant communities, and a corresponding increase in the day-to-day practice of state surveillance. Peter Jessup, a staff member of the local Catholic Charities organization stated, “I am concerned about it. I know a lot of organizations in the area that don’t check people’s papers, and I think they’re going to be looked over a lot more. It’s going to be harder for people without papers to find jobs.”93 Amy McTernan, the manager of the Aspen Temporary Labor Service, pointed out that there is always a “fear factor,” even among local immigrants with documentation of legal residence: “Because some of these people, even if they’re legal it’s like, if you get stopped by a cop, you know what your heart does [it beats really fast]. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong . . . And they’re all people with legal papers.”94
The daily stress levels and surveillance practices that Jessup and McTernan discussed spiked as a result of the 9/11 attacks. Leticia Barraza, a student counselor at nearby Colorado Mountain College, spoke to the consequences of 9/11 for immigrant students in the valley:
[A] lot happened after 9/11. I think we would have stood a better chance had 9/11 not changed the way people see immigrants in our country. . . . [A]nother issue that has come up is the driver’s license. Before, through loopholes, they were able to get driver’s licenses, but now it’s nearly impossible to do. The Matricular Consular, the Mexican ID card, we were beginning to see them accepted as a form of IDs for immigrants here, but that’s not accepted now. Those are the two main issues that have been affected, other than jobs and payment for some of these people. . . . A lot of it is just based on fear [and] the whole fear factor makes it difficult for our Latino communities and their families and students.95
The post-9/11 moment, though, was not just about nativist reactions to the fear of immigrant terrorists. There was also a significant financial downturn nationally. Pitkin County sheriff’s deputy Marie Munday recalled many immigrants’ responses to the economic slowdown in the valley: “After that, a lot of people left because the tourist industry was hurt as a result of 9/11. A lot of people left to Texas or the Midwest. Many called me to say goodbye. Others called me from places like Minnesota to get help getting their last paycheck, which may have been withheld.”96 Other area advocates like Scott Chaplin concurred: “A lot of Latinos went back home during that time.”97
The Roaring Fork Valley was the site of a particularly tense moment in the aftermath of 9/11. It was the summer of 2004, and on a single day during the second week of July, the word on the street was that ICE was conducting raids throughout the valley. The raids were said to have occurred at a gas station on Highway 82, at the shopping market in Carbondale, at an area hospital, and at various worksites. Agents were believed to have rounded up and detained numerous persons, including men, women, and children. The news spread so rapidly that the next day a large number of immigrants stayed home from work and school. Many employers had few to no workers that day, and much of the valley was silent, as immigrant families took no chances and remained behind closed doors. The only problem was the “news” of ICE raids in the valley was just a rumor.98 While most of the public conversation during the following days was focused on how such a rumor could have started, the more interesting question was why it had had such an extraordinary impact throughout the area.
Since we arrived for a field research visit just days after the reported raids, numerous examples of the rumors came up during our interviews. Marie Munday remembered getting a call from an immigration services provider who stated, “a woman told me that the sheriff’s department, the Colorado state patrol, and Immigration are all doing roadblocks together.”99 Munday called the captain of the state patrol: “And I said, ‘now I know you do roadblocks for DUIs. And you work with other agencies. Is Immigration [ICE] over there?’ And he goes, ‘no, we don’t do that.’” Munday also called a colleague at ICE and stated, “they said you had roadblocks here, and I named all the places, and that you did raids at all these companies. She started laughing and she said ‘that’s pretty amazing for two guys [there are only two ICE agents in the valley]! They did all that?’ [laughter]”
Another person reported to an immigration services provider, “I got chased down the highway by an immigration vehicle.” There were similar rumors of raids in Durango and Colorado Springs around the same time. Munday told us, “I got this email from the Mexican Consulate that says ‘There have been no raids, we went to the prisons to see if all these people who were supposedly arrested were there and they’re not there.’” Another story claimed that fifty people were detained from the Aspen Temporary Labor Service, but Amy McTernan and her staff confirmed that ICE never showed up at their door.
There were as many theories about the source of the rumor as there were stories of raids. However, there appears to be one plausible explanation. The morning of the rumors, a person called in to a talk show on a Spanish-language radio station in the valley who claimed to have seen vans picking up Latinos and hauling them away. That phone call is believed to have set off the rumors throughout the area. While the claim turned out to be false, it may have been based on the observation that there were indeed roadblocks and police stopping cars and arresting people on various roadways at the time. These were routine sobriety checkpoints during the July 4 holiday. Marie Munday told us:
State patrol always does a road block in Basalt for a DUI checkpoint. They said “we had cooperation of the local cops but no, Immigration did not come.” This one Mexican man called me and asked about it. He was the first one to call me, when they had the DUI roadblock. He was in Aspen and afraid to go home to Basalt [just down the road] and he says “I can’t go home to my children!” And his wife was there and they were both crying on the phone and I said “it’s OK, just a DUI roadblock.”100
Back at the Aspen Temporary Labor Service staff members recalled:
[Staffer 1]: “coming to Aspen some mornings about a quarter to seven, and everyday you just see droves of people coming here, going up to the mountain towns. But this place was a ghost town, that Tuesday and Wednesday when it all happened.”
[Staffer 2]: “I know lots of people . . . still walking on eggshells, you know. They see someone who looks like they’re official, they’re wearing a uniform, they’ll see them and they just take off running.”101
Many observers anticipated negative lingering effects of the “raid” rumor on immigrant communities in the valley, despite it being an unsubstantiated story. Marie Munday mused:
I’m guessing that it’s just a matter of time before people start losing their jobs. People who had good—or I mean good looking—green cards, that’s all an employer is required to look at. They’re not required by law to be experts in fake documents. What I think that this has done is that a lot of people might have had a good green card, a decent-looking green card, and they got the job, and now because they’re not showing up to work, the employer knows that they must be illegal, that that must have been a bad card. It has deeper implications.102
Peter Jessup of Catholic Charities connected the post-ICE raid sentiments back to September 11, 2001:
So to me it was an aftershock of what happened after 9/11. That’s how it played out in my mind. People were really afraid of being deported and were scared. I think immigration was going in the right direction right before 9/11, but when that happened, it created a lot more fear and segregation and a lot more problems . . . it just shows what level of fear there is in the community.103
A rumor, a false report, kicked off a community-wide panic that sent people running into the shadows, confined to their homes, or afraid to even try to return home for fear of being detained, deported, and separated from family, friends, and community. Just the mere threat of deportation is made very real in the everyday lives of immigrants. The seismic effect of the rumor reveals how tense relations are among the immigrant community, the Anglo community, and the state.
There is yet another view on the significance of the ICE raid rumor. Quino, a Mexican immigrant we spoke with about this issue, framed it for us as a response to the day-to-day racism he and other immigrants experienced at the hands of police:
There’s lots of discrimination in cars. It’s terrible. They stop us with like three or four officers because they think we have drugs. It’s just discrimination. Especially in Carbondale. They’re very racist. We clean their houses, we take care of their dogs. What they don’t want to do, we do. We need to be together to take the policemen away. We could stop traffic until they listen to us. We didn’t go to work one day and the company lost a lot of money.104
Instead of seeing this episode purely as an example of a government crackdown, Anglo racism, and undocumented immigrants running scared, Quino urges us to also think of this case as a demonstration of the power of immigrants to conduct a general strike and withhold their labor. There are precious few instances where undocumented persons are able to exert such public power over employers, and this case might be re-examined as one such expression. That all of this could happen in and around the city of Aspen—a place of serenity, enlightenment, and breathtaking natural beauty—makes this struggle that much more interesting.
The “Aspen Idea” was adopted by the Aspen Institute, an organization Walter Paepcke founded in the 1950s to boost the town’s brand name and image. The idea was that Aspen was a place where the elite could rejuvenate and strengthen their minds and bodies through both intellectual stimulation (via Great Books seminars and lectures at the Aspen Institute) and physical exercise on the ski slopes and hiking trails. A local journalist offered his own view: “The [Aspen] Institute has from its inception been a bastion of corporate conservatism, just as Aspen is a favorite vacation retreat for many of the architects of monopoly capitalism and globalization.”105 The Aspen Institute commissioned Sidney Hyman, a University of Chicago professor, to write a book titled The Aspen Idea. This was a cultured, refined, and humanist approach to life that would allow the white-collar class to come to Aspen and return to their work refreshed and with renewed purpose.
We believe that the rarified, glorified notion of the Aspen idea often hides a whole mountain of ugly truths, both in the Rockies and in cities around the world. Peel back the ideals of the Aspen idea and you’ll find the Aspen Logic—a way of seeing and shaping the world that preserves systems of inequality and injustice in a manner that allows one to justify and feel good about them. It is capitalism with a green facelift. And it’s not found only in Aspen. Think of the “green wash” that occurs when the Dell corporation publicizes the fact that it plants trees, even as it uses tons of toxic waste to manufacture its computers;106 or when Walmart sells low-energy fluorescent light bulbs while paying workers less-than-livable wages and sourcing materials from sweatshops in China. The Aspen Logic is not just corporate environmentalism or a green wash, though; it is also a white wash because it includes social, environmental, and economic claims to pureness and goodness, to whiteness. The Aspen Logic suggests that unfettered market capitalism is just fine as long as we give some of our profits to a charity for the downtrodden or to a fund for greening the city. As we pat ourselves on the back, we ignore inconvenient truths and the roots of innumerable social and environmental problems.
We can see the influence of the Aspen Logic spreading down valley. A councilmember from one of the valley’s towns manages a corporation that works toward environmental solutions and is a classic illustration of the Aspen Logic. He told us:
I run a company that is purely for making zero-emission, light-weight cars. Our company’s goal is to make the car a much smaller player in the environmental pollution aspect. Part of the reason I’m an elected official is, you know, you can fix the car but still have suburbs, and they’re still going to have issues. You can’t have zero-emission cars without the environmental implications of everyone having two cars, etc. So keep going toward higher-density downtowns, rediscovering our downtowns, getting rid of our suburbs, it’s going to take hundreds of years to do that, but I think that that trend needs to start as opposed to the “leave the city” mentality. I manufacture cars, so that doesn’t exactly fall into environmentalism, but I think that’s a dilemma that many people have with cars that they purchase. They want to be an environmentalists but then they need a sport utility vehicle to get to the mountains to go appreciate the environment.107
By his own admission, this council member’s company might be a small step in the right direction, but it is not in any way a fundamental challenge to business-as-usual, and that’s the point.
One of the many difficulties of the Aspen Logic is that it suggests that social change occurs only from the top down . In other words, the Aspen Logic suggests that in order to be a true environmentalist, one must be a millionaire or billionaire. Only then can you purchase guilt alleviation and truly have an impact on social change, despite the fact that your wealth likely originated in a socio-economic system that by its very nature produces social and environmental injustices. Within this logic, environmentalism and capitalism are natural allies—indeed, money is perhaps the only hope that our planet has! While radical ecology groups like EarthFirst! argue that the environment and the almighty dollar are diametrically opposed, the Aspen Logic takes for granted that we can achieve environmental sustainability only by supporting capitalism and the current social hierarchy. If Aspen is a defining space that embodies the best of environmentalism, then much of that movement becomes wed to the condition of the privileged. Thus, environmentalism is not progressive politics but a politics of the rich and comfortable that claims progressive ideals. Mainstream environmentalism thus becomes entirely consistent with—and a close cousin of—nativism and racially exclusionary politics, and has been since its beginnings, when environmental organizations defined themselves as part of America’s white, affluent citizenry.108 The Aspen Logic is merely today’s manifestation of a centuries-old, deeply American, cultural dynamic.
Another difficulty of the Aspen Logic is the way it distorts our understanding of social realities. Still a force among America’s intellectual Left today, the Aspen Institute funds scholars to study poverty, among other things. We find this emphasis curious, though perhaps not surprising. Poverty research in the United States tends to focus on the ghetto, the barrio, and black and brown women’s reproductive behaviors, index crimes, and failing inner-city schools.109 The Aspen Logic suggests that that is where the emphasis should be, and policymaking should focus on those problem “hot spots” in society, rather than examining the social system that produced such ills. We believe that in order to understand poverty we need to go not to the ghetto but to Aspen; in order to understand the Mexican border and immigration politics, we need to move beyond the barrios and instead go to Aspen; in order to understand the ugliness of racism and nativism, we need to go to Aspen. Scholars, journalists, politicians, and any of us wishing to understand social problems should stop focusing exclusively on poor communities—and turn our eyes toward the people and institutions that create poverty and environmental destruction in the first place: those places on the earth where the economically wealthy, the politically powerful, and the racially dominant live, work, and play.110
The Aspen Logic also serves as a very convenient mask. Much of what passes for environmentalism in the United States is not much more than people with wealth and privilege trying to mask that reality; power, and privilege “made over” to be something other than what it really is. Reading through reams of newspaper articles and personal letters from residents of Aspen from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, it became abundantly clear that so much of the “news” from Aspen is actually boosterism, marketing designed to lure tourists and investors to the city. In that sense, Aspen feels quite artificial indeed. Imagine walking through a neighborhood in Aspen and realizing that the owners of many of the homes live there just two weeks each year, and that the immigrant workers who service the town are present but socially invisible and are being targeted for exclusion. This is a new kind of ghost town. Much of nature in Aspen is constructed. Like many ski resorts, they make fake snow when necessary; the trails are immaculately groomed; the streets and lawns in the town are manicured by a phalanx of immigrant workers. Nature is constructed in a more abstract sense as well: for most immigrant workers, the mountains are basically unreal because, for these workers, they have little or no access to them.
Through the privatization of nature—which is what a ski resort is, after all—the mountain becomes a product to consume, a replicable commodity, even for the wealthy who come to ski. Aspen is an “experience.” When we privatize space and nature, we limit the kind of people who can enjoy it, and we limit our vision of the world in which we live. Capitalism, by its very nature, seeks to privatize everything with potential economic value. Superficiality is the result. In such a context it is difficult to build relationships and community. Aspen’s local philanthropist George Stranahan noted, the community has become fragmented:
[F]or most of the people, it wasn’t bad having tourists here until about 1975 and then all of a sudden having tourists here wasn’t really fun anymore. Now we had to get into the entertainment business. You can’t chat with tourists. They send their maids to pick up the mail, to pick up the groceries. So I would say really a fragmentation of community is a lot of the change. It used to be a community because we all walked to the post office at the same time when we knew the mail was out. So there we all are, walking down the street for the purpose of getting our mail and that’s when you did the little exchanges, you know, “did your sister have her baby yet?” “oh God! It was a boy!” “Really?” Yeah, that kind of thing. Socialization in the community. Without that kind of groove there is a fragmentation given that you’re not talking to people who are on the East End, not talking to people who live on Pitkin Green. Not only geographical fragmentation, but a fragmentation of interest. [Tourists will say]: “Oh, I only care about the ballet;” “I only care about the art museum.”111
The Aspen Institute was developed, in part, as a critique of the boom-bust, Old West, capitalist town embodied by the nineteenth-century Aspen and other mountain cities in the region. Unfortunately, any sense of humanistic community was destroyed when the Aspen idea gave way to the Aspen brand.
For those of us who do not own million-dollar second homes, or would not dream of driving an SUV, Aspen can seem as far away as it does for immigrant workers down valley. And yet none of us can avoid the consequences of what is happening in Aspen. The legal scholar Kevin Johnson, for example, reveals how the anti-immigrant agenda is almost always interwoven with broader racist politics directed at all citizens of color:112
Rather than just a peculiar feature of U.S. public law, the differential treatment of citizens and noncitizens serves as a “magic mirror” revealing how dominant society might treat domestic minorities if legal constraints were lifted. Indeed, the harsh treatment of noncitizens of color reveals terrifying lessons about how society in fact views its citizens of color. It is no coincidence that anti-immigrant sentiment caught fire in tandem with the anti-minority backlash of the 1990s. . . . The connection between civil rights and immigration, and thus the struggles of noncitizens and citizens, has important implications for the quest for social justice. . . . Unless racial justice and immigrant rights activists work together, we can expect a “divide and conquer” strategy to the detriment of all people of color, immigrants and citizens alike.113
The way immigrants are treated via government policies and practices affects the political future of all people of color. But what about European Americans?
In our global world, for better and for worse, one’s privilege and disadvantage is interconnected with others. The immigrant rights movement largely focuses on obtaining justice and legalization for undocumented persons, but without also paying sufficient attention to the ways in which citizenship for the rest of us has simultaneously come under fire and has been eroded. Consider the growth of the prison-industrial complex, the militarization of municipal police forces, the exponential rise in the use of surveillance technologies, the broader cultural transformation around civil liberties facilitated by the USA PATRIOT Act, and the weakening of existing protections and civil rights, all authorized by the federal government.114 In other words, no matter your race, class, gender, sexuality, or citizenship status, we are all impacted by these changes and should have an interest in challenging the rapidly degenerating post-democracy in which we live.
Alongside our democratic ideals, there is perhaps one other thing that Americans hold sacred: our wallets. These too are in jeopardy. The bestselling author, columnist, Nobel Prize–winner, and economist Paul Krugman shares our concerns about the widening class inequalities in the United States. He contends that this country has entered a “new Gilded Age,” with an economic hierarchy similar to that of the 1920s, as wealth is increasingly concentrated at the top of society’s elite class. He writes, “Over the past thirty years most people have seen only modest salary increases . . .[but] the explosion in C.E.O. pay over the past thirty years is an amazing story.”115
These national trends are also reflected globally. Both here and abroad, economic inequality is nothing less than a threat to basic democracy, since those with greater financial power tend to also enjoy disproportionate political power. Krugman is also worried about the problem of access to environmental amenities like public resources such as parks and open space. He tells the story of an attempt to secure environmental privileges during the first Gilded Age (as Mark Twain labeled the late nineteenth century):
In 1924, the mansions of Long Island’s North Shore were still in their full glory, as was the political power of the class that owned them. When Governor Al Smith of New York proposed building a system of parks on Long Island, the mansion owners were bitterly opposed. One baron—Horace Havemeyer, the “sultan of sugar”—warned that North Shore towns would be “overrun with rabble from the city.” “Rabble?” Smith said. “That’s me you’re talking about.” In the end New Yorkers got their parks, but it was close: the interests of a few hundred wealthy families nearly prevailed over those of New York City’s middle class.116
Today, this penchant for what Mike Davis and Alessandra Moctezuma call “crabgrass apartheid” functions to make parks and other ecological amenities off-limits to the working and middle classes, and Aspen is only one site of the struggle.117
The consequences of the Aspen Logic are serious. An environmentalism that embraces market-based reformist tactics to solve the ecological crisis is doomed to fail. The point is, we are headed down a road where watersheds, critical habitats, oceans, the air, land, and human health are deeply threatened by massive, human-induced changes. That road is Highway 82, and innumerable other roads both literal and metaphorical throughout the country.
The UN Millennium Environmental Assessment recently reported unequivocally that the state of the world environment is worsening each year.118 If efforts to combat these trends are not transformative and revolutionary, then they are simply neither serious nor worth our time and energy. The environmental movement will have to radically reorient and rethink its future, given its racist and nativist past and present, if it is to remain relevant.119 Environmental justice movements offer a more plausible vision. But we cannot just consider the plight of the poor: if we are to truly challenge environmental racism and injustice, we must recognize the scourge of environmental privilege. We must confront the Aspen Logic wherever it appears. We must challenge crabgrass apartheid with grassroots justice.
