You call me wetback because I
crossed a river, so what can I call you?
You crossed an ocean.
—Carlos Loya, Roaring
Fork Valley resident1
While there may not be such a thing as a typical day in the life of an immigrant family in the Roaring Fork Valley, Luisa’s story may come close:
A normal day for me, it’s different in the summer from the winter of course because the children are on vacation. On a normal day, I get up at five, make breakfast for my husband, at six o’clock, make the bed, do all the chores. Wake up the kids, ask and organize all the activities for the kids for the day. At eight we leave to clean houses. Ten houses. Tuesday evenings I have English classes with a volunteer from the library. I always like to be home by four, because the children are just getting home then and I don’t like to leave them alone. And then my husband gets home, and we talk, talk about our days. Eat dinner. We go to bed at ten thirty and get up again at five.2
During our many visits to Aspen, we spoke to dozens of immigrants in the Valley; some of them longtime residents of the area, others were recent arrivals. We spoke with immigrant men and women in churches, day-care centers, schools, social service offices, and community organizations during the evenings and weekends when they were able to take time off from work. The stories they told us were numerous and revealed great variation, yet they shared many common themes.
Many newcomers to the valley face difficult living conditions, as they are frequently crammed into apartments or mobile homes on the side of highways or tucked away into residential enclaves out of sight down valley. One Carbondale activist described his brother’s home:
[T]here’s about eight people living in there and they’re all from different parts of Central America. My brother, being from Puerto Rico . . . he’s probably the only legal fellow in that house, the one that signs the bills and pays the rent . . . the house is about to fall down to the ground, it’s kind of sketchy. But nobody speaks up about those things, they’re just happy to have a roof over their heads and not being evicted by the landlord. It makes me a little mad because, as a white Anglo Saxon, you probably wouldn’t even consider living there or you would tell your landlord to fix the leaking roof and the toilet . . . the place is a mess. Not very nice.3
A number of people we spoke to were employed sporadically. The nature of work in a tourist economy is unstable, seasonal, and largely informal. This is true during both the winter and the summer, depending on one’s employment networks and skills. One man we spoke with, Jorge, was out of work at the time and living in an apartment with six other people, some of whom were not family members.
I’m from near Puerta Vallarta [Mexico] where I used to be a taxi driver and a waiter. The best thing about this area is the work because that’s what we’re here for. And it’s still better even if there’s not a lot of work because the wages are better than in Mexico. The worst thing is when there’s no work. Everything is fine, the snow, the winter, as long as there’s work.4
Veronica is from El Salvador and struggles to make ends meet. She told us:
I live in an apartment. They ask for a lot, I don’t have any rights. The rent is very expensive. So are the bills. Catholic Charities helped me find a place. They’ve been helping me financially. It’s difficult to live here. If I could get an ID, I could use my driver’s license. Sometimes we are forced to get IDs from Mexico even though we’re not from Mexico.5
Renaldo Menjívar, from Costa Rica, is a landscaper who lives in Carbondale. He emphasized that although there is plenty of poverty, there is also significant class diversity within the valley’s Latino community that should not be overlooked:
There are different classes of Latinos here. So there is a lot of wealth, there is money. And you can see that in the living conditions—they have a nice flat. And the opposite is also true. There are people that live two to three families in a small trailer and very poor conditions and they just have the basics. So there is a whole range.6
In our interviews, some people indicated that they were content with the opportunities they saw ahead of them, while others sought to move up and out of their living situations, which they defined as undesirable and often unsafe. The national fixation on whether immigrants themselves are here legally likely contributes to the fact that employers, landlords, and the police treat so many undocumented persons in ways that violate the laws of this country. Racial profiling, neglect of housing stock, wage violations, and health and safety risks on the job are routine insults facing these populations.
Most of what passes for “affordable housing” in the valley are mobile home trailer parks where the residents are working class and mostly Latino. In this area, these are the least desirable places not only because of the stigma of living in a trailer park but because they are viewed as inherently unstable habitations. There are some exceptions, however. For example, in Aspen, there are middle-class professionals who live in trailers that cost more than $300,000. The general rule, though, is that these are not the most sought-after living arrangements. There is a wide range in the quality of mobile homes throughout the valley, and those deemed “affordable” are at the bottom of the quality scale. The working-class trailer parks are unstable for at least three reasons: (1) many residents view them as transitional housing, which people hope to pass through only temporarily on their way up the socio-economic ladder (which reflects and creates a built-in disincentive for trailer-park managers to practice good upkeep and maintenance, and it lends the perception that these communities matter less than others); (2) many of the trailer parks are located in flood-plains or on the edge of highways—a classic example of environmental racism because such proximity produces greater risks to residents’ health and well-being; and (3) many of these communities have been threatened with displacement by developers who wish to build more profitable businesses at these locations.
The trailer parks in the valley (outside the city of Aspen) are mostly Latino, but they also include some professionals (for example, Scott Chaplin, a Carbondale city councilmember) and middle-class Latinos and Anglos who have simply been priced out of the traditional housing market in the area.7 Even so, these are not places that people would choose to live if they had options. La Unión’s Luis Polar noted that the entire valley is dotted with trailer-park communities, from just below Aspen all the way down to Rifle:
They also have some enormous trailer parks down there that are really run down. You go in there and there’s kids running around and there’s no roads. It’s a dirt road, and you think how can this be happening in a town that’s such a beautiful town? But they have these little sections that are hidden from the main road.8
Marie Munday spoke with us about two trailer parks in the valley and how these communities have taken on ethnic identities over time:
We have a place called the Aspen Mine Dumps, which are just old beat-down shacks that used to be where all the ski bums used to live, but now it’s almost all Latino. Once I was interviewing a person and asked them where they lived and he said “I live in Tijuanita.” That’s the name they gave it because everyone there was from Tijuana, but none of us cops knew that’s what it was called. There’s another trailer park in Carbondale they call Chihuahuita for the same reason: it’s all people from Chihuahua, Mexico.9
We asked Munday about the living conditions in some of these trailer courts. She replied:
The living conditions . . . there’s one really really bad trailer park down in Glenwood Springs that another cop had asked me to look into. He said half the time they don’t have electricity, so he asked me if I could get Latinos Unidos [an advocacy group] involved. . . . They’re paying really high prices to live in these trailers and the landlords don’t give a damn, and the place looks like hell, and it’s open sewage. I know where this trailer park is. So I talked to a few Latinos before I walked over there, which is something I do out of respect as an outsider. They told me that that’s mostly where all the newcomers live. It’s real horrible conditions there.10
There was widespread agreement that some of these trailer parks were one step up from a town dump.
Many of those we spoke with concurred with Munday that these communities are places seen only as temporary living arrangements, which residents hope to leave for better housing as they increase their savings and move up and into better jobs. Scott Chaplin stated that trailers are a “real place that Latinos could afford to get into. . . . So, it’s the kind of housing that Latinos would be more likely to get into because it’s much cheaper to get into a trailer than into a real house.”11 The temporary nature of residential life in these communities can intensify the tendency for many Latinos in the area to shy away from participating in public life and community politics. There are already more than a few reasons for this guarded stance, including the fear—among undocumented persons—of employer retaliation and ICE detention and deportation. Compounding that dynamic is the external perception that these mobile home communities are less stable and less important than others.
Not only is there poor waste management (in the form of open sewage) documented in some of these communities, they are often at a higher risk of exposure to ecological dangers such as flooding. The Denver Post reported that “[i]n Basalt . . . two of the parks are in the floodplain of the Roaring Fork River.”12 Jessica Dove, who works in Basalt, confirmed this claim. She explained that there were limited options for alternative sites for those in need of affordable housing. To its credit, the town wanted to move people out of the floodplain without simply shifting people downstream and out of the community altogether.13 Unfortunately, like so many communities, the situation remains stalled until a better idea is presented or disaster strikes.
As Hurricane Katrina and other tragedies around the world have revealed in recent years, the environmental injustices associated with politically and culturally marginalized peoples living in floodplains is not only unfortunate but exceedingly common.14 What is also evident from these tragedies is that moments of crisis are perhaps the worst time to device long-term solutions. Instead, ad-hoc temporary measures many times create greater future problems. And environmental problems require long-range thinking.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a conflict erupted in Carbondale’s Bonanza Trailer Park. The residents there were scheduled for eviction because a developer had purchased the property and was preparing to build a more profitable operation on the space. Most of the trailer park residents owned their homes, but not the ground beneath them. So they were paying a monthly lease to stay on the property. There were twenty families living in the trailer park (one of six such parks in Carbondale) and 80 percent of the residents were Latino. They were given a nine-month eviction notice when the Texas-based developers reached a deal with the property owners. The notice included six months free rent and a three-month grace period, which would cushion the blow of displacement, but residents were deeply upset at being forced out. In response, they organized themselves into a group called the Bonanza Families Secure Homes Project.15 One of the first items of business was to request that the town trustees pass a replacement housing ordinance.16 The neighboring town of Basalt had passed such legislation the year before, guaranteeing that 100 percent of all homes displaced by development projects would be replaced. Simultaneously, the Bonanza Families group tried several other strategies: they offered to purchase the land from the property owner, and they asked the city to buy the property and lease it back to the residents.17 Neither proposal got very far because the offers were for $1 million while the property had a market value of $2 million. The low offer was understandable, considering that the Bonanza residents held down jobs at which they typically earned between $8 and $12 per hour.18 At that point, the Bonanza Families sent an open letter to lawyers in the area requesting legal aid to support their case. Scott Chaplin was a resident of the trailer park and was among the public voices representing his community. He wrote, “We have begun collecting money from each household for legal expenses and other assistance.”19 Chaplin also conducted a survey of the Bonanza residents and found that the average monthly salary was $2,000 (which amounts to an annual salary of $24,000, a poverty wage in the Roaring Fork Valley) with 40 percent of residents bringing in less than $1,300 each month. The survey also found that the majority of the trailer park’s residents work in Aspen, followed by Carbondale and Snowmass; the typical residents’ occupations include carpenter, house painter, cook, landscaper, construction worker, stone mason, housekeeper, and ranch worker; and the average adult had lived in the trailer park for six years.20 Chaplin and Bonanza Families used this information to make the case that they were hardworking members of the valley community who simply needed assistance in keeping their homes.
In addition to collecting money from the trailer-court residents, the Bonanza Families Secure Home Project organized public benefits to raise funds for the cause, including a dance party complete with a band. The flyer for the occasion reads: “Dance to the Norteña rhythms of Los Brillantes del Valle. Funds will be used to help pay legal and planning fees for the group’s effort to create a new affordable housing project.”21 A note written on the flyer after the event took place states “we made over $5,000!” Latinos Unidos was the sponsoring organization, but despite this outpouring of local support, the fund-raising effort fell significantly short of its goal.
With no success in sight and in a moment of desperation, the group’s allies on the Carbondale and Basalt town councils asked their richer brethren—the Aspen and Pitkin County officials—to assist with the relocation of the Bonanza residents. Unfortunately, this effort failed.22 The situation became particularly tense when it was discovered that the Carbondale Council on Arts and Humanities (CCAH) was considering a “land carrot” offered by the developer interested in placing a three-story, mixed-use commercial and residential facility on the property where the Bonanza Mobile Home Park was located. A press release stated, “This location would enable CCAH to play an active role in supporting and continuing the vitality of downtown Carbondale. Bringing gallery openings, art shows, and frequent performances to downtown could be mutually beneficial to CCAH and the commercial core businesses.”23 In other words, the deal with CCAH and the developer was that the arts council would receive a new space in return for the eviction of the families from the Bonanza Trailer Court. At this announcement, two prominent members of the arts council board resigned in protest.24
The trailer park was eventually torn down and the residents evicted. Speaking about the legacy of this struggle, Scott Chaplin recalled, “Some of the families were able to find new places in town. They knew about a year in advance that they would have to start saving money. Some of them have been able to buy houses, others are renting. Some moved to Rifle, others left the state, and one family moved back to Mexico.”25 Chaplin remains friends with some of the former residents, but the fact remains that the community was destroyed.
The problem of marginalized immigrant communities scraping by to make a living in mobile home parks in the valley is common. We spoke to Simon Silva, a Mexican immigrant and resident in a similar community, which was on the developers’ chopping block as well. He told us that the trailer park owner sold the property without consulting the residents. The new owner planned on building condominiums and a retail village on the site, and the residents had limited time to leave and find new housing. Silva said there were more than one hundred families in the community:
[T]hey don’t think about the families, the children. Where are we going to live? They’re not going to relocate somebody, they’re not going to do it. Why? Because nobody’s going to make a big loud noise, you know? They only make the business, between the owners and the new owners. Everybody wait and see what happens. We need the place, we need to make noise. What happened, what happened with these kinds of people is really amazing, it’s really bad because we pay taxes, we work, we are a hundred people in Aspen and Snowmass. We make money for these guys! Somebody has to do something. Because it’s really bad for us.26
Mr. Silva makes clear the reality that immigrants in mobile homes simply do not count socially, and this devaluation is reinforced by the absence of significant public political participation on the part of these communities. This is why the most powerful and positive legacy of the Bonanza Trailer Court struggle—despite losing the battle with the developers—was that a previously inactive group of people became politicized and vocal, contributing to a public discourse around affordable housing and equitable development in the valley, where virtually none had existed before the incident.
In interview after interview, virtually every immigrant and immigrant advocate we spoke with underscored the importance of legal status in shaping the quality of people’s lives in the valley. This comes as no surprise. Legal status determines whether you can feel safe driving a car, coming and going to and from work, to the supermarket, or to your child’s school. And considering the ever-present threat of ICE raids on businesses and communities, legal status determines whether you can feel safe at work and in the privacy of your own home. The activist Felicia Trevor remarked, “I think legal status is the most pressing issue. How to get it.”27 Luis Polar seconded her point: “I’d have to agree. Because if you are an illegal individual, you know that your paperwork is corrupted, or whatever . . . that if you are driving down the road and you get pulled over, there’s a chance that they might find that paperwork being illegal and you’re going to find yourself in the Garfield county jail, or find yourself back in the country where you came from.”
Julio Soto, a Latino immigrant we spoke with declared, “Cops will just be on my tail and they’ll just follow me around, they won’t turn their lights on sometimes, just following. Especially, we have two Hispanic officers and they are the most notorious [laughter].” Scott Chaplin chimed in, “Those are . . . forms of harassment, driving while Latino, like driving while black.” Renaldo Menjívar added, “I remember one year there was a guy that got his car stolen so he called the police and he ended up in jail because he didn’t have papers.” Such incidents serve as a serious deterrent to undocumented persons cooperating with law enforcement, which immigrant advocates argue ultimately harms everyone.
Many interviewees linked the rise in official immigration surveillance and harassment to the fear and loathing of foreigners that gripped the nation in the wake of September 11, 2001. Marisa is a Mexicana and has full documentation, but that has not protected her from regular monitoring by the authorities:
In my case, now to go to the airport—I had to go register at the airport, when I go in and picked up my boss there. And before, it was not like that. Now they are asking for IDs, you have to fill out forms—you just get checked more, you know? We never saw that before. And now it’s like people around here I hear that they have to travel with their legal papers or else police will turn you over to the INS. All that has gotten worse after September 11.
The job-related stress for undocumented Latinos has also increased lately, as the national nativist sentiment remains high. Lorenzo Vera works on construction sites in the Valley and has seen this more and more:
You can see the pressure in the work, the employees . . . it’s harder to get a job because they’re getting more interested in if you’re legal or illegal. Now it’s “no good papers, no pay.” I have an employee that’s getting legal papers and he hasn’t gotten social security to be able to work. And my boss said if he doesn’t get a social he’s not going to get paid. And I said “what do you mean? You owe him like a month now.” And he said “sorry, if we don’t get a good social, he’s not getting paid at all.” So he [the employee] was kind of worried because he said, “well, what if I never get my social? I’m not going to get paid.” And I said “well, don’t worry, I’m going to start looking around for some information and see what we can do.” But I don’t think they can keep your money if you already worked. And the question is, don’t they think that he has to pay rent, he has to pay his way of living here? It’s getting really tough.28
Many other immigrants we interviewed confirmed these claims. Melinda is from Mexico and works as a housekeeper in an Aspen home. Unfortunately, like many of her friends, she is dealing with an abusive employer:
My employers didn’t pay me and I’m still trying to get my money back. And that’s the difficulty that I’ve been having here. I’ve been getting jobs, but not getting paid. I’ve been working for this person for three months and she didn’t pay me anything in three months . . . it’s very difficult to get an American, to force them to pay an immigrant.29
Legal status also serves as a dividing line within Latino communities, as some documented and native-born Latinos discriminate against and harbor real contempt for those who are recién llegados (“recent arrivals”) or those sin papeles (“without papers”). One of the most difficult realities facing undocumented persons in the valley and around the United States is the treatment they receive at the hands of some documented and U.S.–born Latinos. There is a long and simmering relationship between these groups, which adds complexity and pain to the white racism many indocumentados experience. This discrimination along the lines of citizenship status, generation, and language adds salt to collective social wounds.30 Much of the contempt stems from anxieties that undocumented persons drive down wages and contribute to harmful stereotypes that many Anglos have of all persons of Mexican descent.31 Javier, a recently arrived Mexican immigrant, spoke about these tensions:
I don’t feel safe here. Some people are really nice, and some people are not. There is racism here. But the immigrants are worse than the nonimmigrants. I mean the other Latinos in the valley. The other immigrants who get here first get frustrated with the new immigrants, because they feel like they’re taking their work away. Sometimes when people have papers, they’re the ones that treat the undocumented worse.32
Celia, a Mexicana immigrant, concurs: “Basically the ones who are documented are sometimes more racist than Americans. That’s what I see happening.”33
Leticia Barraza, of the Colorado Mountain College Office of Student Access, knows this dynamic well, personally and through her children, revealing some of the complexities and nuances of race and citizenship in the United States today. As native-born Latinos in an environment increasingly characterized by new immigrants, her children have to negotiate a difficult path through their teen years:
My kids are kind of in-between, they don’t fit in either world. They have to deal with three groups: the Anglos, their generation that’s been here, and the newcomers. I’ve raised my kids to be themselves, who they are and to be proud of that, so they’re very outspoken. My son wants nothing to do with Anglos, especially Anglo teachers. But he doesn’t know enough about his Mexican and Latino culture, so he really can’t identify himself in that position either, although he leans more toward the Latino/Mexican culture. But that’s the major conflict and I’m constantly at school talking to teachers and they say “Your son has no work ethic, he doesn’t want to be at school.” And I bring up the issue that “He feels you’re racist, he feels you’re doing this” and they say “Oh no, we’re not doing that.” It’s very confrontational.34
Laura is a college graduate from Mexico City with a degree in political science and public administration. She came to the valley in 1997 and has done very well for herself, working at a bank. While she agrees that legal status is a major concern within the community, she notes that language is also a serious issue:
I think that more than the legal status issue it’s the language. You can have a better communication with the culture here, it can open doors, and give you the opportunity to work in a different environment, and learn more about the culture and the problems around you. So I worked in different nonprofit organizations like Stepstone, Latinos Unidos, and La Misión, which opened my mind and eyes to see how important it is to support the people who are not legal. And how you can support something to make this valley a better place to live. So learning English would be the priority. There are a lot of people in this valley who are legal, but they don’t speak English. In my work environment I see a lot of people doing labor work because they don’t speak English. Sometimes people who are workers are being mistreated by somebody because they have a heavier accent than me, and they are laughing at them and that really makes me pissed off.35
David, a Honduran immigrant, echoes Laura’s analysis more bluntly: “Yes, the language is most difficult. If you don’t learn English, you don’t work.”36 Or at least you do not get respectable work. Leticia Barraza concurs and links the language issue to Latino youth experiences in the valley, particularly the divide between native born and immigrants:
There is a big gap, because those who have been here feel that they are from here. Those that are coming in, come in with a sense of “I don’t want to be here, and I don’t know why you brought me here.” And they do get at each other because they say “Oh you think you’re so good because you talk good English.” So they do get at each other, especially at the middle school level.37
All of the above issues—discrimination, legal status, and language skills—intersect to create hardship and opportunities for immigrants in the Roaring Fork Valley. Those immigrants without papers and with poor English skills tend to face the greatest stress in terms of risk of harassment and discrimination by law enforcement, Anglos, and other Latinos (especially those with documentation). But the list would not be complete without a consideration of working conditions and health care.
Coming to the United States is often a trial. Most of those crossing the border without papers are forced to pay exorbitant sums of money to coyotes (those who smuggle people over the U.S./Mexico border), and they are frequently robbed, raped, and dehydrated while moving through rugged, inhospitable terrain like the Sonora Desert (located in parts of Mexico, California, and Arizona). They come to the United States for jobs that are in short supply back home, where wages are depressed, agricultural economies destabilized, and land systems altered to drive up prices to benefit investors, making life difficult for working-class people. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ushered in many of these changes, intensifying unemployment and social and environmental inequalities throughout Mexico, increasing the appeal for people from rural areas to migrate to work in border maquiladora factories or to continue northward to the United States.38 Countless other immigrants come from throughout Latin America for similar reasons.
Work is the singular reason for migration into the Roaring Fork Valley. In our focus group interviews, the list of occupations people held was long, some of which included housekeeper, landscaper, child-care provider, banker, electrician, sheet rocker, maid, nanny, cook, carpenter, and nonprofit staff member. Amy McTernan, the manager of Aspen’s Temporary Labor Service, described the range of jobs in which she places people (mostly immigrants):
We do house cleaning, we do snow removal, we do all kinds of secretarial, bookkeeping, a lot of construction labor. In this part of the county there’s events all the time, so we do a lot of events. The workers, they are probably two-thirds men, and they do construction mostly. The women tend to do secretarial, housekeeping, landscaping, property management. And the pay’s good up here for them. In Loveland they were paying six bucks an hour and up here the lowest pay is ten dollars an hour. And the Ski Club . . . some of those jobs are $9.50 an hour, but I’ve never paid anybody less than that. The popular jobs are the jobs where they’re going to be there long term. As far as the least popular jobs, you know, to me, digging trenches would be the worst.39
Gloria is an immigrant who works as a housekeeper. She described her schedule to us:
I clean houses, for the eight years that I’ve been here. I work in Aspen, Snowmass, and the Rancho Roaring Fork [residential community] in Carbondale. Everyday is the same, I get up at five thirty, make lunch for my husband, pick the house up a little bit. I work maybe six or eight hours a day, Monday–Saturday, it’s the same routine.40
While her work is hard and monotonous, Gloria is fortunate to have a steady job. Jorge Carillo explains that, because of his limited language skills, his employment opportunities are limited. He says that back in Mexico,
I used to be a heavy machinery operator—that is my passion. But unfortunately here in the States with my lack of English—I don’t speak much English—at the ranch that I work on I do mostly maintenance. Keeping the grass, cutting the grass, doing posts, cutting trees, keeping the landscape in proper shape. I also paint. So all sorts of manual labor.41
While many workers face extraordinary hardships, some enjoy more privileges than others. Rosalinda works in an upscale hotel in downtown Aspen:
I’ve been working . . . for ten years. I work in the lobby. I get up every morning at five, take a six o’clock bus, and then I finish at three thirty. In the lobby I make sure that everything’s in its right place—you know, this is a very fancy hotel—that the furniture is in its right place. I make sure that it’s all clean, so I vacuum the carpet. I work forty hours in a week and get medical and dental benefits, personal days and a holiday bonus.42
One of Rosalinda’s co-workers proudly adds, “And she was the employee of the year. Two times! In 2003, employee of the month, and in 2004, employee of the year.”
Many of the folks we spoke with emphasized that, despite the hardships, they also worked hard to ensure family stability and contributed to the lives of others in various ways. Carla stated, “I have been working in Snowmass at the hotel. I’m a housekeeper, for two years. I work five days there, and on my extra day, I clean houses. I get up at 6 a.m. I finish at 7 p.m. And every other Friday I volunteer at the Aspen thrift shop.”43 Federico, a longtime resident of the valley, leads a full life, which integrates different opportunities in the area. He and his family have been able to enjoy an existence that is beyond the labor of survival. Federico proudly tells us:
I’m a carpenter. I also work in Aspen. I remodel houses, very big houses. I work eight hours a day, 7 to 3. Tuesday and Thursday evenings, I go to the Colorado Mountain College in Carbondale for classes. I also help my kids with homework, to help them with their Spanish because they speak more English than Spanish and we want our kids to maintain both languages. Two of my youngest sons dance for the city of Aspen ballet. We go to church on Saturdays—the Spanish masses—because it’s very important for us to maintain our religion, pass it on to our children. Another routine is that I referee soccer.44
Rosalinda and Federico are documented immigrants, and it is likely that this legal status is part of what makes their relative success possible. As remarkable as Rosalinda and Federico’s stories are, they are eclipsed by the painful daily encounters with racism and nativism that so many other immigrants—particularly the newcomers—face. Lupe spoke to us about her difficulties getting paid a decent wage, when she got paid at all:
It’s been twelve years since I arrived in the United States. I am from Honduras. I heard stories from people who used to come here for work. Financially, they were paid more here than other places. But when I arrived here, it was a different issue. I came here and I was having trouble finding a place to live, finding a job. For the reason of being undocumented, it’s been difficult. They don’t pay what they said sometimes. Instead, they would pay you how much they want to pay. I’ve been in Glenwood Springs for five years now. We have to do a lot of work and we don’t get paid very well.45
The nature and availability of work can change dramatically, depending on the season and one’s social networks and work experience. For some, winter is a time of abundant employment opportunities, while for others it is a lean season during which work is rare and one waits for summer. For temporary labor contractors, however, it is always busy. Amy McTernan of the Aspen Labor Service told us:
Yes, well, this time of year [summer], is the “slow season” or what they call the “off season,” but I’m nuts because they’re fixing everything, they’re building everything. And then in the “on season” you’re nuts because I get up ordinarily around 4:30 a.m. or 5 a.m. and I don’t usually get home until around 6p.m. or 7 p.m. at night. So mostly in the summer it’s construction and in the winter it’s work for the ski resorts and property management.46
Juanita, a staff member at Catholic Charities, explained why the seasonal changes can play havoc on people’s lives:
In winter it’s very difficult to pay the bills and rent because a lot of people get laid off. In the winter it’s only the people who work in the hotels or restaurants in Aspen that have work. Other than that a lot of people are laid off. That’s the worst part of the year.47
Magdalena and Corazon, two Mexicanas, confirmed Juanita’s assessment. Magdalena stated, “The winter is better because the hotel is full in winter.” On the other hand, Corazon noted, “for my husband the summer is better. When there’s snow, there’s no construction.”48
Evita Salinas is Amy McTernan’s counterpart at another temporary labor contractor in the valley. She offers more details on the difference between seasons, particularly in terms of how the work varies by gender:
Most of the guys here are doing construction labor—about 80 percent of them. It all depends on the season. During the summer time you can have like 60 percent working construction and the other 40 percent are landscaping. During the winter it’s very tough and there’s not a lot to do, so many people are getting out and working in hotels and restaurants. There is a little bit of construction. And snow shoveling. For women, during winter time there is the hotel. You can do piece rate and you do as many units as you can—they pay you per unit—or you can work on shifts at hotels. That’s tough for women because there’s not a lot, just cleaning and landscaping. Or on the golf course the girls are doing some restaurant work. And it’s tough because most of the girls in this town have kids. There is no real childcare here. There is a lot of childcare for gringos, but you need to pay a lot of money and you cannot afford it. So what we do is to have one friend take care of ten kids, but it’s awful, it’s tough. It’s like a system. Somebody will take care of the babies and they will get maybe $10 per baby, but its very difficult. That’s why I don’t have babies [laughter].49
As with many tourist economies, services like affordable childcare for the manual workforce are rare or nonexistent. The available choices for the care of children of immigrants are extremely limited. We interviewed Gustavo, a grandfather in his late sixties, who, for the second time, crossed the treacherous Sonoran desert. He did so at the request of his daughter who asked him to come to the States in order to care for his ill young grandson. Like many immigrants, Gustavo had worked for much of his adult life in the United States, sending his paychecks to his family in Mexico with the intent of building a house and retiring there. After many years of hard labor, Gustavo achieved his goal only to find that his grown children needed his help while they struggled in Colorado. Now, he spends his days inside a trailer home that he shares with his daughter’s family of four, looking after a grandchild with special needs and who requires round-the-clock care, while his daughter and son-in-law work as janitors in Aspen. His deeply lined face, marked from years of labor in construction sites and agricultural fields, showed little emotion as he cracked a polite smile and said with a shrug, “Of course I’m here. My grandson needs me. Who else is going to take care of him?”50
In addition to challenging the notion that ski resorts are lucrative for everyone during the winter, these stories offer insights into how resort economies are fickle and unforgiving for those who live there year-round with family responsibilities. Healthcare is also a constant concern for these residents.
Healthcare is often a struggle for native-born U.S. citizens, more than 46 million of whom currently have little or no coverage.51 Given the scope of the problem for people with citizenship, one can imagine what it must be like for undocumented immigrants from another nation. We spoke to one young couple—Josefa and Tomas—who had arrived from Mexico just a few months prior to our visit. Tomas had a chronic health condition related to a perforated liver, and Josefa was seven months pregnant. She told us:
We are worried about the healthcare because everything here’s pretty expensive. We tried to sign up for some services and couldn’t get them here. They told us that we have to pay four hundred dollars up front, and it’s a cost between seven and eight thousand dollars to have the baby in the hospital.
Given that child labor and delivery are covered under emergency healthcare and therefore available for everyone—including undocumented immigrants—we asked if the clinic and hospitals Josefa visited had enrolled her in the public health insurance program.52 She said, “I already went for one office visit and had an ultrasound and it was eight hundred dollars. And I haven’t been able to pay, and now I have another appointment on the 29th, but if I don’t bring four hundred dollars they won’t see me.”53 Already in her third trimester, Josefa had only had one prenatal care visit and did not expect to go back to the hospital until the labor.54 Another interviewee experienced similar treatment. She said, “I paid six thousand dollars for my birth. I gave four hundred the first visit, eight hundred the next, and now I’m making payments.” However, in an earlier focus group, we spoke with another Latina who had just given birth a few weeks ago at the same clinic that Josefa visited. She was judged to be indigent and was not charged for her delivery. There appear to be significant inconsistencies in the cost and quality of healthcare in the valley. For low-income immigrants, whether they receive health care for which they are eligible seems to be at the whim of clinic administrators, sheer luck, or divine intervention.
Other immigrants and advocates we spoke with related similar stories. Juanita, a staff member at Catholic Charities in Glenwood Springs, told us, “There’s a clinic in Rifle, but we’ve been receiving a lot of complaints that they are being really racist—the people who work up there—they don’t tell clients that there’s a low-income service up there. So even people from Rifle are coming up here for services.”55 Jasmine, another immigrant valley resident, stated, “Healthcare is a huge issue. We don’t have health care. I had to pay $600 for $100 worth of insurance. It’s really bad here. There are programs to help Latinos for health care, but I don’t know which ones they are. There is Medicaid, but in order to qualify, you have to make no money. We don’t get health insurance through the job.”
Most Latino immigrants working in the valley do not have employment-based, healthcare benefits. Instead, immigrant residents have found ways to maintain their health through other means. Jasmine’s uncle added, “I don’t have insurance. None of the members of the family have insurance here. We get medicine from Mexico and try to stay away from the doctors here.” Renaldo agreed and also linked the issue of healthcare to work:
I don’t have any insurance either. I had pinkeye and went to a pharmacy, but you have to have a prescription. So I couldn’t do it, so I treated it myself. We all medicate ourselves. I had a friend who got shot with a nail gun on the job. He has some doctor but he can’t go back to work because he is injured all the way to the bone. His boss doesn’t care. Employers will fire him. They don’t understand about health.
We asked Renaldo, “Do you worry about your health and what you’ll do if you get sick and need serious healthcare?” He responded, “No. It’s just in the hands of the Lord. It’s something that you just put aside, and focus on another thing . . . I don’t think about that. I just hope nothing happens.”
Many of the people we interviewed expressed frustration with the sense of collective impotence, a general feeling of powerlessness and invisibility within the immigrant and Latino communities. These individuals work to confront these issues everyday. Echoing Simon Silva’s earlier comments, Renaldo Menjívar also spoke to the lack of political participation among many immigrants in the valley and how undocumented status simply exacerbates that problem:
I would say it’s almost 80 percent of the population that is just surviving. And they get, they don’t get involved in anything because they know that they don’t have papers. So this is why they don’t get involved in the community, politics, anything, they don’t even organize themselves. They take whatever, nine dollars, ten dollars, eleven dollars [per hour]; they take it because that’s the way it is. And that’s a big concern and people are afraid so they don’t get involved in anything.
Laura, the college graduate from Mexico City, agrees with this assessment and intends to be a part of the effort to change things. She describes the political environment today as tough largely because of what she views as the federal government’s harassment of immigrants:
Immigration [Service] is like a crazy government organization that takes forever. They charge you a lot of money. They’re always trying to scare people, asking “What is your criminal record?” A lot of harassment, even though you show them that you’re a good person and have a good record and don’t want to do anything wrong. Plus, they kill a lot of hope in people, because if you try to do the right thing, then it’s not enough. It’s not right! We need to do something. That’s one of my goals. I need to get citizenship and that way I can vote and I can support my people.
Immigrant residents of the valley may not always be visible and public with their politics, but this does not mean they do not have strong feelings about the way they are treated. What emerged from most of these interviews was a distinct sense of not being wanted or appreciated by the dominant culture around them. Or perhaps more accurately, many immigrants expressed the sense that they were wanted in Aspen and the surrounding towns only for their ability to do the work no one else was willing to do. Aside from that, they felt as if Anglos just wanted them to disappear. For example, Marisa lives in a mostly Anglo neighborhood in Carbondale and has never felt entirely comfortable there, despite her being middle class:
I’ve had some neighbors that are Anglos and I got the feeling that when I moved to the neighborhood they kind of said, “Oh, more Latinos are coming in here,” like if we were going to come and destroy the neighborhood or something. And I said well, why can’t they just see us as, we’re here for the same reason that they’re here. We’re here to work and to make a living. We have to work harder to be able to show the rest of the population that we’re not as bad as they think. If something looks bad it always goes to the Latino people. They say “Oh, it was them” or “Oh, it was probably Mexicans that did it.” And we have to work harder to demonstrate that it’s not that way.56
Statements like Marisa’s deepen our understanding of the broader ramifications of environmental privilege because it is not just reflective of the ways that Anglos secure greater access to ecological amenities and exclusive social spaces; it is also about the ways other groups are restricted from that world but whose labor is required for it to function.
Marisa and many other Latina/o immigrants understand the unequal scrutiny under which they are judged. This makes them cautious and self-conscious about what they do and how they do it. They must work against negative assumptions regarding who they are and why they are here. This kind of self-monitoring and discipline works to maintain environmental privilege by marking particular people as unwanted or a burden upon someone else’s space. The needs and desires of a wealthy tourist who visits his or her second or third home for two weeks out of the year are unquestioned. Marisa, on the other hand, is made to constantly account for her existence.
This scrutiny is pervasive and exists on a daily basis, not only with regard to housing, work, and health care but also in almost every other institution immigrants encounter, including local law enforcement. Luis Polar of La Unión newspaper voices a critique of local police harassment: “People are afraid when they see a police officer. People are scared, people don’t trust police officers. They’d rather somebody get something stolen from their house rather than calling the cops. They’re not going to do it, because they might get searched or harassed or something like that. So it definitely has a negative effect.”57
Many immigrant advocates and law enforcement officials note that these dynamics between undocumented persons and police often create a crisis for both citizens and noncitizens. The lack of cooperation with police in many situations can endanger the lives of those in serious need of protection or emergency services. Additionally, local law enforcement’s disproportionate attention to immigration policy issues may have a similar effect.58
We repeatedly saw how people lived with the fact that federal authorities could swoop in on their homes or places of employment and detain them at any moment, day or night, yet they continued on with their lives in spite of these real threats to their future. When we asked Amelia what she thought about the proposed ICE office in Glenwood Springs, she told us “I’m worried because if I saw Immigration [ICE] I would have to say I don’t have papers, I don’t have nothing.” We asked her “Does that keep you from doing certain things?” and she responded, simply, “No”.59 We view this response as evidence of resistance and resilience to continue building a life undeterred by these terrifying possibilities.
Karina works at an insurance company in the valley and offered a critique of racism, patriarchy, and other forms of social inequality in the United States. She stated:
I think the United States is a joke because I don’t think there’s equal opportunity of anything. Working at an insurance place, I learn that there is a lot of discrimination issues with Americans: if you’re black, white, if you’re old, or young, there is a lot of things. And being a woman, I don’t get the same pay as the guys that I work with. Plus I’m Hispanic, but they look good as a business because they have a Hispanic working there. At the insurance place, a woman’s license will never make the same amount of money as a guy. I can’t understand that. I’m very disappointed because I had to pay more taxes because I’m single, I don’t have babies. I think there’s a lot of things that are not fair between men and girls.60
Carlos Loya works as a laborer throughout the valley and has had plenty of experience with racism. Sometimes when whites yell epithets at him, he responds in one of two ways. He might tell Anglos, “My ancestors were here in Aspen long before you got here. This land used to be our land.” Or he poses a question: “You call me wetback because I crossed a river, so what can I call you? You crossed an ocean.” Loya stated, “Without knowing it, they are making us tough and giving us patience and strength when they do this. We have a strong shell.”61
Many of the parents and youth in the valley resist racism in multiple ways. One of the primary sites of confrontation over institutional racism in the area is the school system. In January 2004, a group of Latino parents secured a meeting with Roaring Fork School District officials to discuss concerns over state educational testing, substandard English as a Second Language (ESL) offerings, overcrowded classrooms, and racial discrimination directed at Latino students at Basalt High School and Carbondale Elementary.62
And after the July 4, 2001, murder of four Mexican immigrants in Rifle, Colorado, concerned parents there organized in the schools specifically around racism and nativism. A flyer announcing a meeting of “Parent Issues at Rifle Schools” stated that one of the primary issues of concern was “No more tolerance of racist actions such as racial slurs and not helping when asked.” Under the heading “Possible solutions” the flyer read, “Rules regarding discriminatory or racist language. . . . Teachers enforcing the rules . . . Training on what is a ‘slur.’” Other proposed actions included greater resources for ESL and bilingual teaching and staff at the town schools. Spurred by violence and growing hostility, parents in the valley organized to confront the racism facing their children in the school system and in the broader community.63
For their part, Latino students in the valley express their discontent with the system of inequality in often subtle ways. Leticia Barraza from Colorado Mountain College’s Office of Student Access told us:
A lot of the kids do have jobs. Once they reach a certain age, it’s expected that they are here to help the family. And if they need to quit school, then that’s what they are expected to do. When we surveyed Latino kids in all three of our high schools, the number one reason they left was to work to support their families; the number two reason was the racism they felt from their teachers and from the administrators of the school.64
Numerous Latino immigrants and other people of color paint a portrait of the Roaring Fork Valley as a place where opportunities for advancement and success exist for some newcomers, but for the vast majority of folks from south of the border, the road to opportunity is paved with everyday insults and assaults in the form of institutional racism and violence. And while many undocumented Latinos feel compelled to remain under the public radar, others are able to engage in private and public expressions of protest and demand change.
We asked José Cordova, a local resident, worker, and activist, what he thought about the claim that immigrants harm local ecosystems. With a degree in environmental sciences from a university in Central America, Cordova was very critical of such arguments. He stated, “I think that’s a misperception because I’ve been working with construction companies and the mess that they do with that stuff! There’s no ecological preservation. They just throw away everything. I don’t think it’s the Latinos affecting the environment.”65 Cordova then became more specific about the relationship between population growth and environmental harm, and how that debate masks important power relations:
My position is that that the concept of overpopulation is not that accurate. That’s one of the arguments of groups to justify policies, to say there is poverty because of overpopulation. But if we go into details about wealth and the lands that are available, we see that maybe we may all fit in the world. I don’t think the problem is overpopulation; the problem is redistribution of the wealth and the redistribution of knowledge.66
Cordova offers a critique of the general orientation of environmental policy in this nation. He contends that the focus is never on the point of production, but rather on what to do after we have produced or consumed goods. Like the population-environment debate, the post-production and post-consumer recycling fixation of U.S. environmental policy and environmental movements benefits powerful institutions that remain unchallenged:
I understand all these programs of recycling, reuse, rethinking. It’s OK, it’s nice. But that’s not the problem. The problem is from the beginning—how you produce those goods. You can produce something and make something new out of this, but the problem is that they are producing it in the first place, so the problem is conceptual and ideological. The forest and all the resources will suffer because you have not changed the approach to nature. . . . So we produce more and we are working in this [consumer] phase of the production cycle, so they say we can recycle and reuse, but the problem is the same. And from that perspective you cannot say or argue that the foreigners or immigrants are the cause of the environmental problems. The companies are drilling for oil right now, it’s right here, these companies need natural gas and money, so it’s not the foreigners. It’s how you use nature.67
Finally, Cordova issues a criticism of the United States in terms of its lack of commitment to global environmental agreements, implying that the immigration-environment debate benefits not only corporate polluters but also the federal government, which will not seriously address its environmental responsibilities within and beyond its national borders.
The United States has not signed the Kyoto Protocol [on climate change] and all those agreements that are well accepted all over Europe, and other countries have accepted it. I understand that they say that it’s not economically sound to change all the production systems. But all these other countries are doing it. Germany has changed legislation to change the way the companies work.68
Cordova’s analysis and assessment of U.S. environmental politics coincides with what progressive scholars, policymakers, business leaders, and activists here and in other nations have been arguing for years.69 His appraisal of the population-environment debate speaks directly to the overarching quest for environmental privilege in the Roaring Fork Valley and elsewhere. Environmental privilege is not just about maintaining exclusive access to ecological amenities (mountains, rivers, lakes, beaches, parks, trails, etc); it is also about maintaining access and belonging to broader social spaces, of which both ecological and nonecological amenities are a part. In other words, environmental privilege is part and parcel of the larger problem of social privilege. The dominance over social space in the valley is as real as the mountains that mark the landscape. Many Latinos feel it when they walk around places like Aspen. Karina is a Mexicana and works in hotels in the valley. She explained:
You don’t fit in Aspen. It’s like I don’t feel comfortable to even be walking on the streets in Aspen because people look at you like you got out of the sack or something, you know, “go back!” You get that feeling. People look at you different. They’re very scared to see a lot of Hispanic or Latino people around because it’s very exclusive. So I think that the main point is that they are being concerned about, you know, losing the exclusive part of this area.70
The kind of control over social space that Karina spoke of is at the heart of white environmental privilege. Lorena is a co-worker and friend of Karina’s. She told us:
You just feel that you’re not wanted around those rich people other than to do their housekeeping and work for them, you know? At one point I got stopped by a police officer in Snowmass Village. And he told me I was speeding and I said, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention,” and I gave him all my information, my license and registration, everything. And then when he came back [from his car], he said, “Everything’s fine, just take it easy.” And I said “Oh thank you sir,” and he said, “Don’t thank me. Even if I charged you, you wouldn’t have enough to pay me.” And I was like, “Oh okay.” You know? Yeah. That’s what he said. It got me mad at that point, but I said oh, Aspen people, just let it go. You get that, treated like that all the time up there. In stores and when I have to go into town and do errands for my boss, I feel bad because people look at me like “What are you doing?” You don’t fit with the Aspen people.71
Aura works as a housekeeper in the valley and concurs with Lorena and Karina in their characterization of social space in Aspen:
I had an experience like a couple of years ago, when I went with one of my best friends to buy a sweater—a very expensive one. So when we get in there [the store], we were looking, and the lady told us, “Oh, that sweater is like eight hundred bucks. Do you have enough money to pay for that?” You don’t see people like us in that kind of stores. I mean you can see Hispanic people in the Gap or some other kinds of stores, but you will never see them in Gucci or some other [ fancy] places. They always think that they don’t have enough money to spend in those stores, or just they don’t deserve to buy whatever stuff they have.72
Aura added that some other places are much more welcoming than Aspen: “I think Carbondale is a very friendly town.” However, she noted, “But if you go farther south, like the lower cities like Rifle, they look at you like ‘What are you doing here?’”
White environmental privilege is apparently enforced from one end of the valley to the other, with a few notable exceptions. Karina continued with an analysis of how the changing cultural and political dynamics reveal threats to white environmental and spatial privilege:
The problem is when the Hispanic community are getting businesses and they’re interacting more with the organizations, and they’re getting more involved with the important issues in this valley. That is when it pops up as a problem. That is my experience. More than, “I don’t like you because you’re Mexican.”73
In other words, structural or institutional racism, not just interpersonal racism, is at the core of the struggle for white environmental privilege—the most important and troubling response to the growing Latino and immigrant presence in the area. As José, Lorena, Karina, Aura, and so many others can attest, environmental privilege is ultimately an exertion of power; it is what happens when the dominant culture employs nativism and its racist logic to demarcate where particular people belong.
This phrase is a twist on the popular reframing of the way “the environment” is defined by many environmental justice activists as those spaces “where we live, work, and play.” One thing that struck us in many of our interviews with immigrants in the Valley was how few of them ever had a chance to enjoy the one thing that attracts Anglos and other tourists to the area: nature. While a few immigrants were able to ski from time to time, they were the exception to this social rule.
We asked Marisa what kinds of recreational activities she and her family enjoy, and whether they ever ski. She responded:
Not in my case because it’s so expensive to do that. In our case everything was going to our mortgage, so I haven’t been able to take my kids. They really want to go skiing. My daughter, she’s already ten years old, and every year she’s like “Mom, when are you going to take me to ski, I want to learn.” We just keep saying every year, “we’ll go so that you guys can start taking advantage of what’s around this area.” It’s funny because when we go to Mexico or we go out to other states, they think that we come from Aspen and that we take advantage of everything that’s out there, when we don’t even know what it’s about. For us, it’s “no, we just do the work, we just do the cleaning” and that’s it. We don’t even know the mountains out there.74
Juliana added, “We’d like to ski here but we’ve never done that. We don’t ski or even know the mountains. When we visit Mexico, people think we’re doing skiing here, but we’re not.”75 Most of our interviewees echoed this point. There are multiple Aspens—depending upon who you are. For Latino immigrants, this life generally entails little to no engagement with the area’s natural landscapes.
We stated earlier that immigrants are often socially and politically invisible, since they form the backdrop of the local economy in the valley and are forcibly socially segregated. Julio’s story is yet another illustration of this practice. He and his wife live half the year in Mexico and the other half in a trailer park in the valley with his adult daughter and her family. The trailer park manager knows he is undocumented and will not allow him and his wife to live there even though his daughter is a resident. Julio said,
I have to go in, sneaking in. The manager is always watching. But if the manager finds out that I’m there with my daughter, he will just tell her to move out of the park. I have to park like a mile away and just walk home, sneaking, you know. So that’s why we don’t even go out, we don’t even enjoy the garden, we have to be in the house. My wife doesn’t work, so she’s in the house twenty-four hours a day. Even though we have good salaries out here, with the rent and things they have to pay, you don’t get to enjoy, you don’t get any extra time or money to go bowling, to do fun stuff with your family. We don’t get to have fun stuff like most people do.76
Julio and his family live in constant fear and enforced invisibility, and the isolation under these conditions is severe. Other immigrants who are more privileged in their ability to move about the valley have made efforts to find ways to develop friendships and build meaningful community connections. For example, José Cordova stated,
I go to church, you know? And usually we have Mass and a little youth group. And I’m involved in that, in helping teenagers. On weekends, we have retreats and . . . we’ve become friends with the youth and we go sometimes to camping or we play football, soccer and stuff like that. Even just sitting around and talking about different topics, that’s what we do usually.77
Others find or make time to relax after work, in ways that would be familiar to most people. Javier said, “After work sometimes we have a beer and play soccer, here in Carbondale. Behind the middle school there’s a basketball court, and we organize there to play soccer in the field.”78 Josefa is also involved in a church group and works hard to carve out a space there for the Latino community. She explains, “We can’t do skiing and other things that are expensive sports that the Aspen people do. We do baseball, though. The whole Latino community reads La Unión—that’s our paper. And we also listen to radio.”79
Still, it must be said that the Aspen Ski and Snow Club is bucking the trend by offering discounts and scholarships to a modest number of low-income families in the valley. This special deal allows children like Carlos and Isabel Loya’s sons access to ski lessons and a chance at the slopes during the season.80 This practice is acknowledged and commended, but it is not likely to seriously alter the reality of environmental privilege. For the great majority of immigrants and people of color in the valley, they are there to work and make a living so that the wealthy of the world can play, relax, unwind, and enjoy nature, unsullied by the hordes of brown folks who must remain off the social radar but always be available for a good housecleaning, a hot meal, condo construction, or a landscaping touch up.
For everyone who articulates a critique of nativism, racism, and environmental privilege, that person also offers a vision of a hopeful future—“our future, our dreams”—for themselves and their communities in Colorado and their countries of origin. Carla and Roberto spoke of their trials, aspirations, and successes as new immigrants. Roberto said,
We took four planes from the capital to the border. I learned the English vocabulary for the orchards, apples, and tomatoes, in the hotel and on different jobs. My English grew. In carpentry, my English grew. That’s when I went to school so I could speak a little better. We have the desire to have the opportunity to grow, to improve. All the Latinos do. We just came looking for opportunity. We all have the capacity, all the talent that we’re bringing from our country and we’re just looking for an opportunity.
Carla continued the story:
It’s really hard when you first get here. It’s not all rose colored. When you get here your house isn’t waiting for you [laughter]. We don’t know English, we don’t have a house, we don’t have anything. When we arrived here, we had a house in Mexico. When he arrived here, it was like, there’s your little corner. We did not come to slave for somebody, we came to work. We rented an apartment for half of one year in Carbondale and we got an opportunity to buy a mobile home in Carbondale. And we are finishing to pay this December [everyone present cheers and claps].81
Eva, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, spoke to us about her hopes for the future: “to improve our lives a little bit more, economically. The most important thing would be to buy a house. A car isn’t as important as a house.” We asked Eva where that house would be, and she responded “in Mexico.” We queried about the rest of her family—her children in particular. She told us,
My husband and I have a plan that the kids will study English for five years and learn it really well and then we’re going to go back to Mexico. They’ll really be able to get good jobs in Mexico if they know English well, like telephone operator or something like that. That’s all we care that they learn English. By the grace of God we have enough money to feed our kids. It’s really difficult to raise kids in Mexico right now. So we’re just really happy to have this opportunity to come here to make a better life for them to go back to Mexico to.82
While Eva and her husband spoke of their children’s future here and in Mexico, others dreamed of contributing to the lives of others, beyond their immediate families. Elena told us of her plans to complete her degree at Colorado Mountain College, not for personal advancement but for community building:
I want to get that degree and get back to Mexico to use that knowledge to help people. In this country, they have a lot of organizations that can help people . . . they give some help. In my country they don’t have these organizations period! So my goal will be to start something . . . to help people on the streets. That will be my goal.83
We return to José Cordova, who clearly is an inspiration to many people in the valley. Cordova is a carpenter and works as an activist and youth mentor during what little free time he has. Like Elena, he spoke about his hopes for a better future by sharing his energies and skills with a broader network of people:
I actually work down valley and up valley. I do carpentry. And I like it because I think it’s an opportunity for me to learn. It’s not just about the money, the money’s good, you know? But I’m learning. I’m learning the base, how to build houses and stuff like that. And one of my main goals is to go and maybe work for a development organization. One day, you know? Maybe building small houses for poor people.84
During our time in Aspen, the power and strength of people like Carla, Roberto, Eva, Elena, and José was clear. The depth of the challenges that these men and women face every day move us to believe that a socially, economically, and ecologically sustainable and just future is possible. Like them, we also believe that people from different national, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural walks of life can communicate, collaborate, and cooperate to build such a future, pursuing a social carpentry of justice. However, the barriers to justice are formidable given the extent to which nativist logic has pervaded our public discourse, and shaped the ways people in the United States see each other and their environment.