Today, the Roaring Fork Valley is a bustling, thriving series of towns. Despite the nostalgic picture painted by the area’s few long-term residents, and contrary to the nativist ideal of Aspen as a stable community with deep local roots, the population here is constantly on the move. In fact, virtually everyone in the valley is a newcomer or a transplant.
Despite the dominant Anglo presence, this is an area marked by rich ethnic and racial diversity, with immigrants from Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. There are many native-born Latinos and a smaller population of Asian Americans and African Americans as well. As one local leader related to us when we asked about the African American population in the valley:
Actually, it’s surprising, I think the census said there are 40–60 in Carbondale, but that doesn’t count Latinos who are of African descent. You go to the grocery store and you’ll see a lot of afros, but they don’t speak English and don’t identify as black, they identify as Latino. They are not really counted because they’re undocumented.1
Thus it seems that a lot of the social diversity of the valley is undocumented, because of the presence of undocumented workers. Moreover, much of the valley’s diversity is often unrecognized, because many Anglos lump together all people of a darker hue as Mexicans. Beginning in the 1980s employers and towns in the Roaring Fork Valley began recruiting workers from Latin America to fill jobs in the area’s growing tourist industry. The expectation was that these were temporary workers, but as they began raising families and setting down roots in the valley, these workers became permanent residents.2 The influx of a mélange of cultural and ethnic groups to the valley since the 1980s has posed significant challenges for local institutions to serve newcomer populations and to address the sense of anxiety that preexisting populations feel about immigrants. Fortunately, there are many organizations and individuals committed to this kind of work. In this chapter we hear from advocates working from within and on behalf of Latino immigrant communities in the Roaring Fork Valley. These leaders offer critical challenges to nativist environmentalism and environmental privilege in their analytical and grassroots political work. They offer assistance and solidarity to immigrant communities and confront the political forces seeking to expel or restrict the rights of immigrants. Most importantly, they articulate a vision of social, economic, environmental, and global justice and embrace policies in pursuit of these goals.
George Stranahan is what you might call a character. We sat down with this enigmatic and irreverent man one day, and he gave us an earful. For years he has reigned as the Roaring Fork Valley’s most visible and flamboyant left-leaning philanthropist. An heir to the Ohio-based Champion Spark Plug Company, with a PhD in physics and formerly a tenured professor at Michigan State University, he left MSU to teach high school and pursue a vision of social and economic justice. A rabble-rouser with plenty of clout, Stranahan counted the late Hunter S. Thompson as a personal friend in addition to the recording artist Don Henley and the actor Don Johnson, who are his neighbors in Woody Creek, a small town just outside Aspen. There, Stranahan owned the Woody Creek Tavern until recently. The pub and restaurant were closed for a time after a dispute with the Colorado liquor license officials who objected to his printing the phrase “Good Beer, No Shit” on his Flying Dog Brewery product labels. In 2007 Stranahan told a reporter, “I’ve ended up doing a lot of businesses. But it was sort of incidental to some sort of social or political purpose.” In fact his business motto is “Do good. If you make money, God bless! That’s more fun even.”3
Stranahan founded the Aspen Center for Social Justice, which, as one journalist quipped, “sounds like a contradiction.”4 That organization gave birth to the Stepstone Center for Social Justice—the left-leaning, Carbondale-based activist group that has led some of the most visible social struggles in the valley during the last decade. Stranahan revealed, “It’s modeled on the Highlander Education and Resource Center in Tennessee, [ founded by] Myles Horton, which is about popular education. So rather than doing organizing for you, we teach popular education so you can organize yourselves. I used to go down there [to Highlander] a lot.”5 The Stepstone Center, in turn, gave birth to Latinos Unidos (Latinos United)—a group focused on improving Latino-Anglo relations in the valley.
Despite being so jaded about the Crystal City of Aspen, Stranahan has put many resources into some of the most important socially and environmentally progressive activities in the valley, making possible the existence of a strong, organized activist community. Without his assistance, the movement for environmental and social justice in the valley would not be what it is today.
And while Stranahan has been quite influential, there is no shortage of nonprofit groups in the valley, all of them vying for a limited pool of dollars from local government and foundations. One local activist stated, “There’s about three hundred right in this valley. All nonprofits. I think the worst part is just competing for funds . . . funding is really difficult and it’s getting harder all the time.”6
There are a number of nonprofit organizations in the valley that work to meet some of the critical needs of the area’s immigrant communities. One such organization is Colorado Mountain College (CMC), an important educational support anchor for Latinos pursuing college degrees, various credentials, and pathways to economic stability. We spoke with Leticia Barraza, a representative of CMC’s Office of Student Access. Her office began with a basic approach to addressing local needs, starting with the establishment of a “Latino Help Desk,” which answers students’ questions in Spanish. CMC also initiated the Alpine Bank Scholarship, which is earmarked for Latino students. The Help Desk staff also coordinates an annual Latino Youth Summit to provide mentoring and guidance for the valley’s young people who are themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants. Barraza is the main staff person at the Help Desk and is sympathetic to the experiences of young Latinos in the area today because she has lived through some of the challenges they face:
I was born in Mexico and came here not much different than a lot of these students. I came here illegally but have been able to obtain my citizenship. It would be impossible for me to move back to Mexico with my kids. A lot of these kids here know nothing but the valley.7
Barraza contends that one of the barriers to the success of Latino youth here is the official hostility toward bilingual education. She explains that the local school district is “pushing for English only” and has convinced many local families that bilingual education is a bad idea. She objects to the general move away from dual-language classes in the state’s schools. The problem and solution are in the politics of education, she says:
Bilingual education definitely works, but if you don’t have the backing of school districts there’s not much you can do about it. It’s about being able to retain your language. When I grew up, I started school speaking Spanish only. But back then, you couldn’t even speak Spanish at school, even on the playground [it was forbidden by school officials]. My mother was a migrant and she pushed for more English at home. Consequently my Spanish is very limited—I can understand it but not speak it very well. That’s what happens when you try to force someone who has dual languages to only speak one language. Instead of finding ways to teach in a way that allows them to learn a new language and retain the old one . . . the bottom line is that they are saying “forget everything you’ve learned, the 5,000 word vocabulary you obtained in your first four years of life. You’re starting from scratch.” That’s why we have a lot of Latino kids placed in “special needs” classes when they don’t belong there, but they’re being labeled “special needs” kids.8
Not surprisingly, many Latino youths never finish high school. In 1997 the Latino dropout rate in the valley school district was 62 percent.9 Ultimately, Barraza asserts, local Latino youth tend to remain confined to occupational and residential ghettoes, and without significant institutional support, this is not likely to change anytime soon:
For the most part I think they end up, most of them, obtaining fake papers and working. Hoping that they can find a job and stay here. As far as education, most of them express interest in wanting to continue. It makes it very difficult because we want to give that to them . . . but most of them end up quitting school unfortunately. [They say] “If I can’t keep going, I’ll just look for a job.” It’s very frustrating because they could be a valedictorian, but if they’re undocumented—which most of them are—then how can they get a decent job? So many of them work in the service industry. We have many students who take one class at a time [since they have little money or time to commit to more than that]. Many of them hope that this state passes the Dream Act so they can go to college. But for now, we don’t see a lot of hope because Colorado is such a conservative state.10
The Roaring Fork Valley’s public schools and colleges have a monumental challenge ahead of them. Fortunately, there are other organizations in the area working toward the same general goals.
Jessica Dove is the coordinator of an Adult Literacy Program in the valley. An Anglo transplant from the East Coast who has strong connections with many Latinos in the valley as a service provider, Dove moved to the area with her husband in the late 1990s. She recalls her initial impressions upon arriving in Colorado: “I noticed that the population here was very bicultural—Anglos and Latinos. They lived in the same area but don’t mix together much.” She was able to secure her position as coordinator of the literacy program “because I had strong language skills and I wanted to bring people together, by building relationships. My official job is to bring people together in the community. I have fifty volunteers in the literacy program who help tutor students.”
Dove is a strong advocate for her students and for the immigrant population in general. When we asked her whether businesses suffer from federal immigration control policies, she responded:
No. Immigrant workers have no rights, no control over their work schedule or working conditions. They often work seven days a week, sixteen-hour days, with no overtime. Businesses are not suffering. I’ve only heard of perhaps one fine that’s been imposed on a business for hiring undocumented folks. The onus is really on the immigrants themselves. Businesses just have to show that they’ve had paperwork on their employees, and that’s easy.11
But Dove is hopeful for the future. Like the Latinos Unidos organization, she emphasizes that empowering Latinos will only happen if alliances are built with Anglos:
[N]ot all Anglos have tension with Latinos. We had a graduation ceremony the other day for the . . . Adult Literacy Program and the families of the tutors (Anglo folks), mostly husbands, were coming up to me saying things like “this is so great that you’re bringing these two communities together!” They really were so happy to be able to participate in a multiracial, multicultural gathering, and I think it speaks to the desire among many Anglos to work together and cooperate across the two cultures. So that’s what I do, my job is not just about having people learn English, it’s also about building relationships.12
Even so, there are significant stress points, even among immigration advocates. Dove informed us that most of her literacy tutors are Anglo, but not all fully support her mission: “Most volunteers don’t ask questions, but some of them insist on tutoring documented persons only. That can be a problem.”13
Asistencia Para Latinos (Assistance for Latinos/APL) was yet another organization founded and funded by George Stranahan. Since 1992, this Glenwood Springs–based agency provided information regarding housing, citizenship, immigration services, work visas, and much more to members of the Latino community in the valley: APL’s mission was “To empower the Latino Community towards self-sufficiency through services, education, advocacy and inter-agency collaboration.”14 Asistencia confronted many of the challenges facing immigrant communities, including the tensions that occur between immigrant parents and their newly Americanized children. To address that particular issue, APL launched an initiative called Strengthening Latino Families. They also went farther than a typical social service approach and offered small loans to Latinos for microenterprise development.15 One beneficiary of this program is Ernesto Leon, the proud owner of a Mexican restaurant and bakery in the valley. He met with APL’s director, who helped him develop a business plan and awarded him a small loan. He is now a successful Latino business owner and credits APL with getting him started.16
According to APL’s documents, in 1998, their client profile looked like this:
61% male, 39% female;
76% from Mexico, 14% from El Salvador, 2% Guatemala;
37% report little to no English proficiency
70% have no more than a 12th grade education
51% report a monthly income of $1,000–2,000
54% report health insurance, 24% report none
73% are employed17
This profile suggests that the client base is working poor, with little formal education, and with minimal healthcare coverage. That same year (1998), APL served 3,500 clients and helped 165 of them become U.S. citizens and 153 more to become legal residents of the United States.18
This group was honored with a national excellence award from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary in 1996. A number of prominent valley immigrant advocates served on the APL board and staff, including Marie Munday, Felicia Trevor, and Jessica Dove. With this level of human capital, it seemed that this organization had a bright future ahead of it. Instead, APL was frequently overwhelmed with daily demands from the community and eventually shut down due to a lack of funding and a high rate of staff and board turnover. One community activist speculated that local governments were given a huge fiscal break because APL provided many of the services that state agencies would normally offer. She stated, “It was one agency that had to do so much. It’s not surprising that they were overwhelmed.”19
The closing of APL’s office is an example of the difficulty of immigrant life in the valley. Not only do immigrants themselves face economic and cultural hardships there, but finding adequate, professional help to deal with these issues is also difficult. And even those organizations providing such help have a hard time staying above water, since they operate in such a neglected part of the valley’s consciousness.
We asked the Stepstone Center director Scott Chaplin—a leading immigrant rights and environmental justice advocate in the valley—whether burnout was a factor, given the heavy workload at APL:
Yes, that happened with some people with Asistencia. They were underfunded and trying so much. Even for Latinos who come here looking for help, you could spend two to three solid days with just one person, helping with their problems. Their problems are huge. I have a friend in the trailer park where I live, came in the other day. Her husband passed away in March, he was helping her with her paper work, so now she doesn’t know what to do and may be deported, so this is quite common.20
Catholic Charities, a social services organization in Glenwood Springs, stepped in to pick up where APL left off when they closed. Peter Jessup, a staff member at Catholic Charities, recalled that when APL
went under . . . a lot of people started coming to us. . . . Before that, CC didn’t even have any emergency assistance, to say nothing of immigrant advocacy, so Asistencia did all that. We didn’t do that kind of work before, so then we shifted our focus. So we’ve been doing cultural orientation days and discussion sessions with people involved in a range of services.21
Like other advocate groups in the valley, one of CC’s principal pursuits is multiracial unity. Jessup asserted, “We need to educate the broader public so that we’re not just preaching to the choir or to only Latinos.” And while Catholic Charities generously offered a wide range of immigration services, the loss of APL—a key organization founded to empower Latino immigrants—is still felt today.
Peter Jessup sees himself as a person on the front lines of the fight for immigrant rights, and his efforts as a community leader speak to the difficulty of making progressive change in the interest of marginalized groups. The Glenwood Springs native has a special interest in seeing his hometown evolve into a place marked by social justice:
I went to Colorado Mountain College and transferred to Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. The reason why I went there was that they have a lot of classes on social justice. We did a lot of work unionizing and organizing Latinos there. My biggest change was when I did a semester abroad in the Dominican Republic. There was a group of fifteen of us and we did a lot of service work. We studied the structure of oppression in classes—those were the best classes I’ve ever taken—and we were able to see it for yourself. I came back after that and it was earth shattering for me, and still is. One of the persons I met there told me that “if you really want to do service work that will challenge structures of oppression here, then go back to the United States and do social justice work there where you are, and change the cycles of oppression that are oppressing us.” That really struck me and stuck with me because it’s true.
Jessup joined the staff at Catholic Charities after returning to the United States and has been working on human rights issues ever since. He stands out in this valley as an Anglo resident who is more than willing to engage in anti-racist politics. He decries the ongoing and very present racism in the area:
It’s shocking how much racism actually still exists. There are a lot of businesses and they hear the word “Latinos” and they kind of say “oh.” For example, hospitals—I try to call them up and negotiate to see if they could use part of their charitable funds with us, but when they hear “Latinos,” they kind of shut down and it’s just such an easy way for them to discount wanting to do a human service. So they’ll say “we can’t help you out because they are undocumented.” They say “what are you doing, helping the wetbacks?” Others in churches I’ve visited have asked “why is the church helping out with these people? They’re illegal.”
This type of quiet refusal on the part of businesses and other organizations to support immigrant communities suggests that institutional racism and nativism operate on multiple levels in the valley. However, others were not so quiet about their racism. Jessup told the story of an employer who repeatedly hired undocumented Latinos yet boldly refused to pay them:
This story is so amazing . . . an employer went out of her way not to pay her workers. . . . She lives in Rifle and she just hires people and contracts them out to Aspen. When I came on board here, I served as an interrogatory on the case. We’re just about ready to get her to pay. She has more than twenty people who have filed a suit against her, so to think about how many people she has screwed over in the valley is amazing. So we’re trying to get her to pay and to go to jail. We’re trying to stage a protest outside her house with a lot of people in the area. We asked a Rifle judge if it was legal to [protest] and he said “Yes, and I’ll go down and join you guys!” So we’re getting people not to hire her.22
This kind of blatant labor exploitation of persons without official status is, unfortunately, all too common across the United States.23 Catholic Charities also collaborates with other advocacy organizations in the valley, although this process was affected by the nativist environmentalist backlash. Jessup states:
I see it as amazing, how we’re able to organize throughout the valley. We do referrals to them [other immigrant social services groups] and they do the same to us, but we always say to each other that we need more of us because there is such a demand. We get funding from the Salvation Army and from Tom’s Door—a Carbondale organization that helps us a lot. We also work with Alpine Legal Services, which is a nonprofit legal assistance organization. We used the Aspen Valley Community Foundation (AVCF) in the past, but not any more because they kind of had a problem with that.24
The “problem” with the AVCF was a result of public political pressure from Mike McGarry, Terry Paulson, and others who pushed publicly to stop the agency from serving undocumented immigrants.
We asked Jessup, “Where do you get the drive to do this work, which must be so stressful and draining?” Without hesitation he responded, “I get an anger inside me, and anger is good, and that really brings me through. I try to be reasonable with people, demanding justice, but I get really worked up at the inequalities and the injustice that goes on. That’s where I get my drive.”25
Another key social service organization working on immigrant rights in the valley is Roaring Fork Legal Services (RFLS). We spoke with James Knowlton, an attorney who worked for this organization. He said, “Roaring Fork Legal Services was started in about 1996 by a group of lawyers headed by the city attorney who decided it would be important to make access to the legal system easier for people who are on the lower end of the income spectrum.” Knowlton pointed out that like most other nonprofits, RFLS “always had to fight for its money, [but] we did get a grant from George Stranahan.” They opened an office in Carbondale and immediately saw an overwhelming community response from both immigrants and those who oppose immigration:
[T]here was a flood of over five hundred calls—basically they took us by storm. We helped a lot of people, [including those] seeking asylum. . . . I do know that when we were doing immigration there was a lot of attorneys who would not give us financial support, because we were doing immigration, we were helping “illegals.” What happened is just our office wasn’t able to keep up with the demands.26
Eventually, RFLS merged with Garfield County’s legal services unit to form Alpine Legal Services, which offers assistance to Catholic Charities and other core organizations in the valley.
In the late 1990s, a new kind of social movement began sweeping the United States and other nations—the anti-globalization movement. Also known as the global justice movement, its primary targets were large transnational corporations and the governments and international financial institutions (like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) that supported them. Among other things, this movement represented an important moment when activists on the Left articulated a more or less common global framework that encompassed and celebrated local differences. The framework fairly coherently linked concerns among workers and labor rights advocates, environmentalists, indigenous peoples, and others who had experienced the violence of cultural and economic globalization processes that were otherwise uncritically celebrated by the mainstream media, elected officials, and economists at the world’s leading universities, think tanks, and corporations. This was a time when the now famous “Battle in Seattle” took place, where tens of thousands of activists successfully shut down the Millennium Round of talks among delegates to the World Trade Organization in 1999. That massive uprising was essentially repeated many times over in other cities around the world whenever significant gatherings of global political economic elites took place. The global justice movement lives on and has become more sophisticated. Unfortunately, since the attacks of 9/11, the United States and many other governments have hampered many left-leaning direct action movements, creating serious barriers for future activism.27
While the global justice movement captured headlines in Seattle, Miami, Washington, DC, Porto Alegre, Davos, Prague, Mumbai, Caracas, Nairobi, and other places, its real strength came from the countless local actions and mobilizations that constituted the movement and posed a threat to various power brokers. The Stepstone Center for Social Justice and its partner group Mountain Folks for Global Justice play a vital role in the Roaring Fork Valley.28 George Stranahan founded these groups with a vision drawn from his time at the Highlander Folk School, which is located near New Market, Tennessee. One of the cornerstones of the Highlander philosophy of social change is that the collective possesses the greatest power, not individuals or experts, no matter how brilliant or charismatic they may be. Stranahan stated, “One of us alone ain’t gonna make any change, but when everybody gets together, watch out.”29
The Stepstone Center is a project of COMPASS, formerly the Aspen Educational Research Foundation, another Stranahan-funded organization dedicated to educational reform and, more recently, social justice. The center’s first significant victory was the fight to keep the INS out of the valley. They built on that local success by organizing a series of events around the global justice cause in the summer of 2000.
One of their projects offered an excellent exposé of Aspen’s extremes and the vast differences that can be seen throughout America between the interests of the elite and the countervailing efforts by grassroots community interests. “The People’s Summit on Globalization” was intended to provide a progressive alternative to a decidedly exclusive conference held simultaneously at the Aspen Institute, “Globalization and the Human Condition.” The Aspen event—organized to herald the Institute’s fiftieth anniversary—featured such luminaries as Henry Kissinger, Gerald Levin (former TimeWarner CEO), and James Wolfensohn ( former head of the World Bank). Also featured was a presentation by Norm Augustine, the chairman of the executive committee of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the global security firm and weapons contractor. While there were some progressive personalities and voices present at this event (including President Jimmy Carter), the dominant theme was a celebration of globalization and twenty-first-century imperialism. This was actually quite fitting considering what Aspen stands for—environmental privileges and excessive financial and political power for the few.30
Mountain Folks for Global Justice was not invited to the Aspen Institute event, which perhaps was not surprising since members of this group were known to have recently been involved in the Battle in Seattle protests. Mountain Folks and the Stepstone Center responded by organizing the People’s Summit and invited many well-regarded national figures of the Left, including Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange, Njoki Njehu of 50 Years is Enough, Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, and Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Labor, environmental, alternative media, and Green Party leaders were also in the lineup of speakers. And while the Aspen Institute’s conference charged $750 for admission, the People’s Summit charged $7.50, one one-hundredth of the institute’s price.31
The People’s Summit featured a teach-in on the social and ecological devastation associated with economic globalization. This event also showcased a nonviolence training session by John Bach, a Quaker activist who served three years in prison as a conscientious objector to the U.S.–led war in Viet Nam.32 Activists also led a march near the Aspen Institute, a public rally at Paepcke Park, and an event at which U.S. foreign policy was put on (mock) trial.33 Hundreds of people participated. The Aspen Daily News editorial page later named the People’s Summit one of the top news stories of 2000.34
This case is important for the larger story surrounding immigration and environmental politics for three reasons: (1) Stepstone became one of the most effective voices for both immigrant rights and environmental justice, (2) Stepstone would later place much of the blame behind undocumented immigration to the United States on economic globalization and U.S. foreign policy, and (3) the creation of Stepstone signaled a maturity in progressive grassroots politics in the valley, which tied together a vision of environmental justice, social and economic justice, and immigrant rights.
Many activists work as staff members and volunteers for social justice organizations in the area and make the grassroots movement gains in the valley possible. Felicia “Flash” Trevor hails from Chicago and moved to the valley in 1977. She studied renewable energy, solar power, and sustainable housing at a local college and planned to apply that knowledge, along with her Spanish skills, in Latin America. Instead, she fell in love with the valley and never left. She worked as the Stepstone Center director for five years. As someone who still works closely with the center, she stated, “We provide a place for people to organize.”35 Luis Polar is a Puerto Rico–born transplant to the valley and was the editor and publisher of one of the area’s only Spanish language newspapers, La Unión (formerly La Misión). He recalled that when he first arrived in Glenwood Springs he “fell in love with the place, especially the small town atmosphere.” He began getting involved with local NGOs and soon realized the distinct need for media that would serve the Latino community:
I volunteered at KDNK, the public [radio] station, doing a Latino show in Spanish. And ultimately, in early 2000 is when a group of people got together in the Basalt-Carbondale area and they were looking at what was the immigrant community missing in this area. And an informational source was critical. There was no radio show at that moment with news. No newspaper, no TV in Spanish, except for cable that came from all sorts of places. And I connected with these folks.
Some of the major concerns Polar and other leaders shared included the lack of affordable housing for immigrants, poor educational services for Latinos, and the associated high drop-out rate among Latino students. Media as an educational and political tool was understood as critical to addressing these concerns:
What we needed also was a newspaper, some sort of a way to print what was going on in the valley, put it in Spanish. We decided that we needed to do this. And they gave me a computer, an old Macintosh computer and a scanner, and working out of my home, which I still do, we started publishing this newspaper, La Misión. My job is publishing this newspaper and doing the articles and selling ads. We started in September 2001. . . . At the beginning it was very small, eight pages. And now we’re up to thirty-two pages. It still prints once a month, I still work out of my home office, and I’ve been having a little bit of a struggle finding the resources. In terms of staff it’s just myself. We are the only source of news in Spanish in the valley and we are actually also bilingual, bilingual format. That way we can bridge that gap of language between Anglo and Hispanic, and the Anglo community can realize some of the issues that we’re facing and the Latino community can learn English.
At that same time, Scott Chaplin was the director of the Stepstone Center and a town trustee in Carbondale. His biography is revealing: he is the son of a Latin American Studies scholar and lived for a while in Spain, where he began learning Spanish. He came to the Roaring Fork Valley after college, and after travels in Nicaragua and Guatemala, found himself living in a mobile home park in Carbondale where the majority of residents were Latino:
I moved there in ’94, and by ’97 the owners were thinking of just tearing it down and evicting everybody . . . and we basically engaged in this three-year battle, organizing all the neighbors and trying to get some compensation for the loss of the homes. It was like 80 percent Latino, 10 percent Native American, 10 percent Anglo in the trailer park. We ended up getting ninety thousand dollars between twenty families—not very much. I think around that time . . . I started working at the Stepstone Center. So Stepstone was actually involved in helping with . . . part of that campaign to get some compensation. Also I, on the side I had this little dump truck and I would hire people to help me all the time with different landscaping jobs, just a weekend thing that I would do to make a little extra money. So I got to know a lot of Latinos that way too. I don’t see Stepstone’s mission as being exclusively Latino . . . we’re trying to fight all kinds of discrimination.
We asked Chaplin what it is like being an Anglo man working in this community. He answered:
It’s kind of neat because I’ve got trust in a community that other people don’t have access to. We did this collaborative struggle [over the trailer park evictions], so that helped. When you struggle alongside people like that, a different bond develops. My old neighbors, I still sustain contact with them [despite the dissolution of the community when the mobile home park was sold].
As Latinos, Luis and Felicia are frequently overburdened with requests to do volunteer community-based work throughout the valley. Felicia says they are called on to do “anything and everything.” She attributes this demand on their schedules to the fact that there are so few Latinos doing community work since most of them are busy working multiple jobs and barely have time for family. “So when Luis started here I said, ‘oh you’d better be careful because everybody and their brother’s going to ask you,’ and sure enough, he was the new Latino poster child in the valley.”
And while there may be too few Latino leaders and organizations in the valley, there are other colleagues and friends supporting and collaborating with Trevor, Chaplin, and Polar. Alejandro Manjarrez is a Costa Rican immigrant who serves on the boards of directors of Latinos Unidos, the Stepstone Center, and, before it closed, La Misión:
I have lived here in the valley for almost two and a half years and I’ve been doing different kinds of jobs, like right now I’m gardening [laughs]. But I also work with some nonprofits like Computers for Kids Foundation, I have a couple hours, and basically that’s my job.
Alejandro also speaks Russian because the Costa Rican government paid for him to travel to Russia for graduate studies in Forestry. Luis chimes in, “These are the kind of Latinos we were talking about. He doesn’t fit the profile of the uneducated. We need more Alejandros in the valley.”
Miguel Ortiz and Aurelia Cerda also participated in our discussion at the center that day. Aurelia is deeply involved in community work, although not in such confrontational and public ways as other activists. She said, “Right now I’m a ranch caretaker, I’ve been in the valley since 1991. And been involved here and there, you know, as part of Latinos Unidos. Right now I’m really involved at the church, I’m a general treasurer and the person that does the Women’s Association.”
This is where I live. I like to help a lot of people that have problems translating, you know. I’m a notary public also, and I get a lot of people that come to get help from me doing letters for them or just translating some papers, things like that. So I know a lot of people in this valley. And I like to get involved with the community. . . . I also was the president of the Head Start Program. And I was the president of the parents association at school. I would go once a month to Grand Junction for meetings and just get information for what was going on in our valley, what we could do for all Latino parents. Then I would come to Carbondale and make a meeting for the parents in the Head Start program and just translate to them everything that I learned up there.
The kind of work that Aurelia and Miguel do is crucial for the day-to-day functioning and survival of the Latino community here. Their efforts challenge the notion of immigrants as temporary sojourners who provide little or nothing to the community in which they reside. Rather, they are just two of many members of the immigrant community who share a strong commitment to improving the schools, social service organizations, churches, and other institutions that support families in the area.
Activists in the valley also directly engaged and challenged the problem of environmental privilege. Felicia Trevor noted, “[we reject] the whole idea of only the wealthy can have beautiful [mountain] views and things like that, so that’s part of what we deal with.”36 Trevor also spoke to the class dynamics associated with the kind of market chaos that produces environmental privilege found in the valley; a class inequality that cuts across racial groups: “There’s a whole group of young people that lived here in Carbondale that have all moved out because they couldn’t afford to live here and think about buying a house unless they wanted to work eighty hours a week. They were all white people that were here.”
Jessica Dove, the Basalt activist, echoes Felicia Trevor’s analysis of class and race inequalities:
The issue of the difference between yesterday’s wages, prices, and rents versus today’s has really come out in the wake of immigration. But what we really need to be asking is “who benefits from all this?” Years ago working-[class] whites could live here and work here, but no longer. Businesses get labor for lower costs, so they make out very well. The people being hurt are working-class whites and Latinos who are not experiencing upward mobility at all.37
While nativist environmentalists blame immigrant populations in the valley for a host of social problems, they seem to ignore the fact that both working-class whites and Latinos face economic and political marginalization. Dove also questions the level of environmental privilege among valley Anglos and speaks to what she sees as the root of the problem—white anxiety over threats to that privilege and power:
I’d also love to get a sense for what kind of ecological footprint these different groups produce and then compare that to immigrants. When my literacy students visit my house they always remark that they can’t believe only two people live there because it’s so big compared to what they are used to. They can’t process it . . . it’s kind of curious to me that you’re focused on Latinos when it’s really Anglos who are the problem—they’re the ones who have created this discourse of blame and should be studied. You should focus on white folks because it’s about them, because they are generating the discourse.38
Dove’s comment is incisive and powerful. It is also in line with some of the most exciting academic research on the study of whiteness and white privilege, issues that tend to go unexamined by scholars studying race and the experiences of communities of color.39 One of the goals of the growing field of Critical White Studies or Whiteness Studies is to bring to light the largely invisible and understudied phenomenon of whiteness and the ways in which this category has been created, protected, inhabited, transformed, and undone. For example, well into the twentieth century, only people from northern and western Europe who were Christians were viewed as culturally white in this country, while people of Slavic, Irish, Italian, German, Catholic, and Jewish ethnic and religious heritage—who are understood to be “white” today—were not. The legal standards that define whiteness have constantly changed over time as well, creating confusion for Americans of Asian, European, Middle Eastern, Latin American, and African descent who, depending on a court ruling or legislation, could instantly be defined as white or nonwhite. Research on whiteness also makes clear that white supremacy and white racism have historically been detrimental to the goals of democracy and have done untold harm to white working-class communities.40 Environmental privilege is often reflective of white racism and the preservation of whiteness.
Catholic Charities’ representative Peter Jessup weighed in on the question of race, immigration, and environmental privilege as well:
There are two really hot issues here. One is immigration and the other is development. I think you can have both. With me, where I take my environmentalism is that I’m really against commercial development, seasonal homes, and golf courses. That’s preposterous, it’s awful. But at the same time we have to ask what is right for Latinos. Because if we do bring in more commercialism, we provide more jobs for Latinos, so I understand that. But I don’t think it’s a cycle that can continue, bringing in more commercialism. If we provide more fair housing it’ll solve a lot of problems. So I think we can build low-income housing and be environmental at the same time.41
Alice Hubbard Laird, a former Rocky Mountain Institute staffer, pointed to the global market forces that make Aspen ecologically and economically unsustainable:
I’m one of these people that feel like Anglos—North Americans—cause far more environmental damage than people from other countries. The problem is that Aspen has an international market for its real estate. When you have an international market for places to live, it does weird things to the economy. It pushes the millionaires out; people cannot afford to live there. The professional class of Aspen lives in Basalt. When you have people who will pay anything to say they own a piece of property in Aspen, it creates this weird dynamic. The transportation problem is more that this whole region is a desirable place to live, and it’s not at all a result of immigration or greater numbers of people coming here. It’s more market forces.42
Jonathan Fox-Rubin, of the Basalt City Council, argues that, ironically, the very people who come to the valley to “get away from it all” and enjoy their own tract of unspoiled nature contribute the most to ecological strains in the area:
I think the number of people here is not necessarily a problem, but the impact that the number of people who are here have on the environment and on each other is a problem. The kind of growth that we approve is what Colorado land law allows and that small communities are trying to get a handle on all over the map. You have a person who wants to live on the biggest piece of land they can buy with the biggest possible house with as many possible amenities. So kind of where the capitalist culture meshes with the rural West.43
The most common argument by immigration control advocates for building up national borders is the claim that immigrants pose an economic threat to U.S. citizens: they take away “our” jobs or immigrants depress “our” wages. Jessica Dove provided her own analysis:
Wages are deflated here because of the greed of businesses and home owners, not because of immigration. I used to think that we all would benefit from the low prices, but it hasn’t happened because it’s actually resulted in businesses taking a greater share of profits. There has not been an increase in wages in the valley here in twenty years. My husband is from here and is not making any more today than he was then. There are a lot of white working-class people here who are disgruntled because they used to be able to make $20 an hour cleaning second and third homes, but cannot now. Do people make those connections about low wages and immigration?44
Dove’s words coincide with leading studies that find that the real wages of Americans have declined or remained stagnant over the past four decades, while the earnings of the wealthiest Americans and the profits of large corporations have skyrocketed.45 According to data from the Internal Revenue Service, the share of the national income that the richest Americans take home is the highest it has been since World War II, and some scholars believe it has not been surpassed since the 1920s. The richest 1 percent of U.S. residents held 21 percent of all income in 2005, while the bottom 50 percent of income earners received just 12.8 percent. The trends associated with wealth inequality (i.e., property, stocks, and bonds) are even more dramatic. For example, the top 1 percent of income earners in the United States owns 35 percent of the wealth and the bottom 40 percent of income earners owns less than 1 percent. As of 2007, the top 20 percent of income earners in our society controls 85 percent of the wealth. In other words, just 20 percent of the people own a remarkable 85 percent of the nation’s wealth, leaving only 15 percent of the wealth for the bottom 80 percent.46 What is interesting is how tensions over these class inequalities gain expression through racist and nativist language and politics directed at immigrant workers, who actually receive even lower wages than the average Anglo or other citizens. Moreover, wage levels fell and income inequality grew as a result of de-industrialization, capital flight, economic restructuring, and the dismantling of labor unions in the 1970s and—all of which occurred before the current influx of immigrants into Colorado.47 Immigrants, however, remain easy targets during these unsettling times, and the argument that they represent an economic threat seems intractable despite these historical dynamics.
The claim that immigrants are an environmental hazard is equally problematic and disturbing in its implications. We asked Felicia Trevor what she thought was driving elected officials and environmentalists in Aspen to link immigration and ecological harm. She spoke frankly:
Racism plain and simple. I mean, we went to the conference that they did on the myths of sustainable growth, and finally somebody actually said it, they put this chart up and they said “if we don’t curb immigration by 2050, our population is going to be one-quarter white. We’ll be the minority.” So they actually said it and I was going to ask “so then next will you have laws about interracial marriage to make sure that you keep the population white or what?” As far as I’m concerned, that’s totally where it’s based.48
The environmental and racial privileges on display in Aspen are also rooted in environmental injustices that occur elsewhere. That is, the market forces that give rise to the wealth controlled by Aspenites produce social and ecological violence in communities of color and working-class neighborhoods in other locations. Noting that coal-fired plants are disproportionately located in communities of color and poor communities, Felicia Trevor expresses the irony of Aspen’s environmental privilege:
[H]ow much energy and BTUs are we burning to keep their driveways from frosting over? And then they talk about immigrants degrading the environment. How many hours does a coal plant have to run so that their driveway keeps the snow melted?49
Despite all of the critiques of nativist environmentalism, Jessica Dove points out, however, that undocumented immigration does have impacts. It is not as if the population of a town, state, or nation can increase by millions of persons without effect. Dove is particularly concerned about the social impacts:
[S]trains on the educational, medical, and law enforcement systems are the ones most apparent to me. And I think these impacts need to be addressed thoughtfully. What do you do with a classroom of kids where half don’t speak English, and the teacher is undersupported and underpaid? What do you do when families are not eligible for medical insurance and people aren’t receiving the medical care they need? What do you do when people are afraid to report crimes because they don’t want to interface with the “authorities”? And what do you do when lots of drivers are unregistered and driving without insurance? All of these situations impact not just the undocumented immigrants but the greater community as a whole. I think that the scapegoating of “illegal” immigrants for these impacts only distracts and confuses us, making it harder to really think about and find solutions.50
Dove maintains that there are responsibilities and obligations that citizens and governments must meet to address the needs of newcomers. Her analysis suggests that we might shift resources toward greater emphasis on social welfare on the domestic stage. This would require a major transformation of the current policy orientation in the United States, given that more than 50 percent of its federal discretionary budget goes to military operations.51
Roaring Fork Valley employers, temporary services, resort owners, and business groups frequently advocate immigration reform (increases, not restrictions) so that they can meet the growth and labor demands of Colorado’s tourist economy. While this hardly constitutes advocacy in the progressive sense, they do share common ground with social justice advocates on this point. They are immigration advocates, not necessarily immigrant rights advocates.
Amy McTernan, the manager of a temporary employment service in Aspen, spoke vehemently and openly about her views on immigrant workers:
[T]his is a temporary labor company and we put people in temporary jobs. We’re not an immigrant service. I have very high respect for the men who work for me. They take care of wives and children, and you know what? They pay taxes. I take taxes out of their checks, you know? So I don’t understand what the big whoop is. And everybody deserves the same chance if they’re willing to work for it. You know? I don’t care what color they are, what language they speak.52
Actions by business leaders in support of immigration often carry great weight. Scott Chaplin remarked, “Luckily, for the wrong reasons, a lot of the business community—the landscaping community, golf course community, and hotel community, the people who really depend on these workers, right or wrong, because they need the cheap labor. So they’re combating it [immigration restrictions] more than we could ever.”53 The Stepstone Center and resort business leaders are an unlikely alliance, but they have this one thing in common.
The Rural Resort Region, a multicounty business association, held a conference in September 2001 titled, “The Immigrant Workforce . . . Opportunity, Pain and Profit in Paradise: An Exploration of Issues Surrounding Foreign Workers in Colorado’s Premier Resort Areas.” The RRR, made up of commissioners from Eagle, Garfield, Lake, Pitkin, and Summit counties, had planned to lobby the U.S. Congress to relax laws on immigration so that they could meet the needs of their resorts, which were projected to be 63,000 workers short in a few years. The RRR sought to push Congress to go beyond the H1-B visa and other related foreign worker categories and allow for more workers to gain documentation without being tied to particular employers. The RRR contended that “documented foreign workers with full rights and responsibilities under U.S. labor laws will not only pay taxes to support the community services they use, but will be less susceptible to employer abuse and more likely to participate in the affairs of the communities in which they live.”54 The RRR representatives visited the White House to lobby for a new class of visas that would allow foreign nationals to live and work in the United States for up to three years. Members of the Bush administration reportedly were inclined to consider these proposals. That was before September 11, 2001.
The RRR conference was scheduled to take place less than two weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The attacks that day in Washington, DC, New York, and Pennsylvania quickly set off a spike in nativist sentiment throughout the country. Reactionary response in Colorado was predictable, given the state’s long history of nativism. Always reliable, Mike McGarry stepped into the fray, denouncing the RRR for undermining Colorado’s culture and economy. But this time, he took the brash and creative step of addressing the Mexican government because a representative of the Mexican Consul General in Denver was planning on attending the RRR conference. McGarry wrote a letter to the Consul that stated:
Dear Madam Consul . . . It has come to my attention you will be appearing in Snowmass, Colorado, on September 20–21 at the invitation of the Rural Resort Region. I ask you to reconsider doing that. The U.S. is in a national emergency because of the murderous destruction illegal aliens from the Middle East perpetrated on the thousands of innocent people. Your coming to Snowmass at this time to a forum designed to encourage the “normalization” of illegal aliens and by implication, the encouragement of further illegal immigration could be seen by many here as indelicate at best, but more likely as grossly inappropriate. The choice is yours, of course, but if you do decide to attend the meeting—a meeting which I and others believe in violation of Colorado law—you should know you will be asked some very challenging questions, questions you will not be able to dismiss with rhetorical slights[sic]-of-hand, platitudes or clichés.55
McGarry’s letter created a minor international incident when the Mexican General Consul Leticia Gomez had authorities check into his past to assure the Consul that he was no security threat.56 McGarry and Aspen councilman Terry Paulsen tried to secure a legal injunction against the RRR to prevent them from holding the meeting, but they were denied. Ultimately, however, the “War on Terror” drowned out any possibility of discussion of immigration and the economy, and the RRR tabled its campaign for immigration reform.57 Even so, it is important to acknowledge the complexities of immigration and environmental politics, which are evident in the efforts of area employers to recruit immigrant labor to a town whose city council has rejected the idea.
Depending on whom you ask, Marie Munday is either a saint or a handmaiden to all that is evil and contemptuous in Aspen. She is that city’s Anglo-Latino liaison at the police department. Munday is a veteran of the police force, and her current job is to facilitate a more cooperative relationship between the sheriff’s office and the immigrant communities in the areas surrounding the city. “110 percent of my time is spent with the Latino community. And a lot of that is outreach. I go to their English classes at night once a quarter and talk to them about legal rights and responsibilities.”58 She is bilingual, having studied Spanish in Sevilla and Mexico City while she was enrolled at the State University of New York. Like many transplants to the Roaring Fork Valley, Munday came to the area for recreation and soon decided she loved the place and stayed: “In 1979 I moved here to play, to learn how to ski after grad school, and was general manager of a radio station here.” She remembers when “there were about five Latinos in the valley” and estimates that there are upwards of twenty thouisand today. She is outspoken about the nativism and racism that emerged in response to that population shift:
It’s sad because . . . Aspen was known as being open to the whole world and so liberal and lenient. It’s amazing to hear educated—what we always thought were decent people—speaking out like this. And of course they always use excuses. Like ex-Governor Dick Lamm. And it’s always a green thing that they’re hiding behind. They’re saying “it’s just the environment, it’s overpopulation, it’s not just because they have dark skin or they speak funny. It’s because we can’t have more people coming into the state or into our valley.” And I don’t buy that, because when you really get ’em hot, the statements will come out about “those people” and it’s pretty obvious that it has nothing to do with polluting our rivers or overpopulating the area. So why don’t they go after the wealthy homeowners that have these huge estates with servants and they’re not even here half the year? What depletes our resources more, you know? It doesn’t fit, what they’re saying.59
Mike McGarry, Terry Paulsen, and other nativists have attacked Munday in public fora and in the newspapers. Munday told us “Mike McGarry slams me in the papers every chance he gets, and he’s written letters to the editor saying that I should be fired for working with ‘illegals’, and a few people have done that over the years.” But when she’s not waging a war of words on the editorial page on a day-to-day basis,60 Munday works as an advocate for immigrant communities:
A lot of times it’s civil stuff. A lot of times it’s about an employer that didn’t pay. “I quit” and now he says “you can’t get your last paycheck. I know you’re here illegally so there’s nothing you can do about it.” So I often make a phone call and say “do you know that you can be fined for hiring someone you know was undocumented? And did you know that state labor law says if you hired them you have to pay them?” A lot of times it just takes that phone call and they’ll say “it was just a misunderstanding or a language barrier. Tell him his paycheck’s ready.”61
Munday has a rock-solid reputation in the valley’s Latino community. Every immigrant resident we met who knew her offered praises and had stories about selfless deeds she had performed. Munday explains how she earned this respect:
I love the immigrant community. They are—for the most part—the hardest-working people I’ve ever seen. When I go to classes I tell them “if you screw up and break the law, I’ll probably be the one arresting you, but I’ll treat you with dignity and respect.”. . . If I hear that somebody didn’t show up to traffic court, I’ll call them directly and figure out a way to keep them out of jail and to avoid the $300 fine and get them right on the docket. Gringos don’t do that. They’ll embarrass a guy right in front of his family, which is the worst thing for Latinos, to lose face. So they trust me. I like to break the ice and say, “It’s not like you killed somebody! It’s just a traffic violation!”62
But she is more than just an officer of the law. Munday works directly with all the immigrant rights groups in the valley. “I’m going to be on a panel with Peter Jessup of Catholic Charities. I’ve worked with Stepstone for years, I’ve been on committees with them. We all work together.”
Munday also puts in a great deal of time training other police officers to achieve a deeper understanding of issues facing the valley’s immigrant communities. She recounted an experience during which she was giving a presentation at the police academy. She remembered, “I was in the middle of the presentation and talking about the minimum wage and argued ‘who wouldn’t move to a foreign country to feed their families?’ You see a lot of lights go on and people getting won over little by little.” However, some officers at the class session expressed concerns that undocumented immigrants were prone to lethal violence:
One female officer said “well, do you know that the people who live on the border now have to arm themselves because the immigrants coming over are armed and they’re [Anglos] fearing for their lives?” And I said, “No, actually it started the opposite way, the immigrants started arming themselves because of the vigilantes that were out there for sport, pickin’ them off.” And three slides later I have a picture of a guy who was lynched, it shows the body with the mark around his neck and it says “lynching victim,” and she said “OK,” so it was perfect timing! But that’s the propaganda that’s out there and it’s hard to fight.63
Munday’s story is remarkable because she is the exception to the rule. Immigrants feel routinely harassed and profiled by law enforcement in the valley, and she works to bring both communities to a place of mutual respect. Aside from local law enforcement units like Munday’s, there has been a strong presence of federal immigration agencies in the area. Recently, that presence—and local perceptions of the actions—of federal agencies created significant social impacts in the valley.
In the fall of 1999, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS, now ICE) announced that it would locate what it called a “Quick Response Team” center in Glenwood Springs, right in the middle of the Roaring Fork Valley.64 The center would be a site where “criminal aliens” would be held for twenty-four hours before being transferred to a detention center in Denver, where they would await official actions that would result either in their release or deportation. This move came in response to (1) continuous reports of undocumented persons living, working, and traveling through the I-70 corridor that links the Roaring Fork Valley with much of the Rocky Mountain region; (2) a congressional assessment that the INS had not been achieving its goals with regard to stemming the flow of undocumented immigration; and (3) a new law that provided the INS with additional operational resources.
Local law enforcement officials had complained that the understaffing of INS offices created a burden for police who regularly encounter van-loads of undocumented persons traveling on Colorado highways but have little capacity to apprehend and detain them. Congress then passed legislation that funded forty-five new facilities around the nation, five of which would be located in Colorado (at a cost of $21 million for Colorado’s expansion alone). Colorado congressman Scott McInnis (R-Grand Junction) and Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-CO) both supported the legislation. In addition to adding five new offices in Colorado, the INS doubled its staff to meet the goals outlined by Congress, and the Glenwood Springs facility was an important part of that plan.65 Many local law enforcement authorities greeted these developments with open arms. Terry Wilson, a Roaring Fork Valley area police chief, pledged to work with the INS and praised their greater capacity for surveillance and monitoring “criminal aliens” with the agency’s state of the art computer systems. He stated admiringly, “Big Brother has a lot of computer databases out there.”66
Historically, concerns regarding “criminal aliens” have ever been present in the United States. One of the earliest laws passed in this country was the Naturalization Act of 1790. This law—passed by the U.S. Congress the year after the Bill of Rights was signed—limited citizenship to “free white persons.” Later amended to include African Americans (in 1870), after Emancipation, the law was used repeatedly to exclude Asians, who were barred from citizenship under later legislation based on this precedent. From the beginning, citizenship was defined and marked by race, not just national origin. In 1798 Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which gave the president new powers to censor the activities and speech of foreign nationals and to deport them if they were deemed a threat to national security (at the time, it was feared that radical sympathizers with the French Revolution would stir up dissent within the United States).
Finally, at the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Border Patrol was in formation, in large part to control Chinese immigration across the U.S.– Mexico border. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was the first law to regulate who could enter the country based on race and became the cornerstone of the unfolding national body of law on immigration. The forces that gave birth to this immense agency, which we now associate mainly with the control of the flow of Mexicans and other Latin Americans to the States, were first set into motion to control Chinese immigration. The fear of an Asian ethnic invasion became the foundation of our current immigration legal framework and drove racial anxieties over threats to the cultural fabric of a white Anglo-Saxon dominant nation.67 For more than two hundred years, the United States has formalized presidential and federal powers to monitor, control, repel, and expel foreigners for certain political activities or for being members of particular racial, ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, political, or national populations. Again, this was all before September 11, 2001.
Then, in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, on March 1, 2003, the functions of several border and security agencies, including the U.S. Customs Service, the Federal Protective Service (FPS), and former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) were transferred into the Directorate of Border and Transportation Security within the Department of Home-land Security. As part of this transition, these agency functions were reorganized into the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whose mission became to link the enforcement and investigation branches of the Customs Service, of the former INS, and the FPS. This integration of powers was intended to enhance information sharing among federal agencies and facilitate more cohesive enforcement of immigration laws.
From this legacy, the “criminal alien” is derived. The U.S. federal government defines a “criminal alien” as a person who is a noncitizen convicted of crimes while in this country legally or illegally.68 Documented foreign nationals and legal residents of this nation can be defined as a “criminal alien” if convicted of a crime. Clearly the terms “criminal alien” and “illegal alien” are pregnant with explosive symbolism. They blatantly combine and draw on every negative stereotype and hot-button image associated with immigration; they dehumanize immigrants while avoiding crucial questions about why they might be in a new country, who is benefiting from their labor, what kinds of conditions they live and work under, what rights they are entitled to, and what their contributions to society may be. The terms eviscerate all of that in just two words. The political linguists George Lakoff and Sam Ferguson write:
“Illegal,” used as an adjective in “illegal immigrants” and “illegal aliens,” or simply as a noun in “illegals” defines the immigrants as criminals, as if they were inherently bad people. In conservative doctrine, those who break laws must be punished—or all law and order will break down. Failure to punish is immoral. “Illegal alien” not only stresses criminality, but stresses otherness. As we are a nation of immigrants, we can at least empathize with immigrants, illegal or not. “Aliens,” in popular culture suggests nonhuman beings invading from outer space—completely foreign, not one of us, intent on taking over our land and our way of life by gradually insinuating themselves among us.69
Consequently, this is not simply rhetoric. These words have enormous cultural, ideological, and political power. They are also solidified by federal governmental policies and practices. For example, ICE has a Criminal Alien Program (CAP) whose mission is to focus on “identifying criminal aliens who are incarcerated within federal, state and local facilities thereby ensuring that they are not released into the community by securing a final order of removal prior to the termination of their sentence.”70
Mike Davis and Alessandra Moctezuma write about the “second border” as the mobile dragnet of state surveillance and detention practices directed at immigrants within the U.S. domestic interior.71 Indeed, ICE’s own language and practices support their thesis. Consider this statement from the federal government to the city of Glenwood Springs, concerning the application for a permit to build and locate the new ICE facility there: “Quick Response Team facilities are an integral component of the ICE interior enforcement strategy. They support this strategy nationwide by minimizing the impact of criminal alien and smuggling activity on local law enforcement and the communities they serve.”72
The initial plan for locating the INS office in Glenwood Springs changed when it was decided that there was not enough space for a sally port for the intake of “a bus full of ‘criminal aliens.’”73 The INS estimated that between thirty-five thousand and forty-five thousand undocumented persons lived in the state, lending strong emotive support from many quarters for this project.74 This may account for their surprise at the reception they received from local activists and community leaders when they tried to move the proposed facility to Carbondale.
Throughout the Roaring Fork Valley and beyond, residents, activists, and others protested against the proposed INS facility. The editorial board of the Denver Post fired one of the first salvos. A mainstream-to-conservative paper, the Post voiced support for the cheap labor-hungry employers of the state’s resort regions. They wrote:
[T]his mandate, indeed all federal law governing immigration, conflicts sharply with our economic necessity. Ski resorts, agricultural areas, commercial kitchens and other businesses desperately need hard-working employees, and not enough US citizens are willing to take on these low-paying jobs. When federal agents and local cops swooped through Jackson, Wyo., in late 1996, they ousted 153 immigrants—marking numbers on their arms with felt-tip pens as if they were cattle and herding some into a horse trailer to haul them to jail. . . . Yet the INS in Colorado will crack down hard on these very workers, quite possibly smashing the viability of ski resorts, a key factor in our vibrant economy.75
This quote recalls our earlier discussion of the simultaneous economic dependence upon and social contempt for poor immigrant labor. We often defend immigration because it is economically profitable, not because immigrants are fellow human beings. Of course, not all immigrants experience social contempt. One news story on the Stepstone Center’s response stated, “Felicia Trevor sees the INS move as a blatant act of racism. ‘There are (Anglo) undocumenteds all over the valley. They won’t get harassed.’”76 Trevor gave voice to the frustration over the double standard that allows white Australians and European immigrants into the valley to live and work unmolested, even though many may overstay their visas.
The Stepstone Center and Latinos Unidos soon organized a petition drive and a public campaign around the proposed INS facility, and they held a town hall meeting on the issue. At that forum, one Latino resident stated her fears of deportation and the need for organizing: “If one member of my family has to leave, the whole family will have to leave, and we’ve been here a long time. . . . If we don’t get involved, we might as well start packing up now.”77
Since Carbondale was the site of the facility proposal, activists decided to stage a major public protest march in town in early November 1999. Hundreds of people descended on Carbondale for several hours of marching and speeches at a rally. One of the protesters was Sister Maria José, of St. Vincent’s Catholic Church in Basalt and St. Mary of the Crown Catholic Church in Carbondale. She carried a framed likeness of Our Lady of Guadalupe, one of the most potent symbols of Catholicism in Mexico. She declared, “I am here to support the Hispanic community and Our Lady of Guadalupe . . . is always there to walk with the needy, those people who are suffering. . . . She is the patron of Mexico, and I believe she will help us not have immigration offices here in Carbondale.”78 Other participants carried colorful signs emblazoned with messages organized around the same theme. The following is a sampling of those placards: “Permite vivir en paz (Let us live in peace)”; “Respeto a los derechos humanos (Respect human rights)”; “There goes the neighborhood”; “We want the Latinos to stay, the INS should go”;79 “Deport the INS”; and “Aliens=people.”80 A significant percentage of marchers were Anglos demonstrating their solidarity with Latino immigrant communities in the valley. But not all Carbondale residents shared these sentiments. Vicky Johnson, a local resident, told a reporter, “I don’t know much about what’s going on, but I wouldn’t mind if all of them would go back home.”81
In addition to public actions like this, Latinos Unidos and the Stepstone Center eventually adopted a triple-pronged approach to fighting the INS facility proposed for Carbondale. One component was to frame the concern as one of a jail being located in a quiet neighborhood and how that would be hazardous because of the risk to public safety associated with criminals being held there. Of course, that framing explicitly accepted the INS’s own labeling of immigrants as criminals. Another frame was that the danger the public building posed to the community constituted a “taking” of property owners’ rights under the U.S. Constitution—a classic conservative populist argument. And still a third frame, built on a more critical social justice perspective, argued against the broader ripple effects of such a facility’s presence—that it would instill fear, terror, and lend itself to racial profiling of Latinos, whether documented or not. Felicia Trevor, as a resident of Carbondale, filed an appeal of the building permit issued for the facility. Her letter read: “One of the primary uses of this facility would be as a detention point for dangerous criminals, and the building would become a staging point for detaining and transporting these criminals. . . . This will present a danger to many Carbondale residents, both in the kinds of persons that will be processed, as well as the danger of this office becoming a target from those outside.” The letter also stated,
There is a highly populated residential neighborhood surrounding the site, and property owners in this area have not been provided adequate notice that this “public building” would include a secure facility designed to harbor federal criminals. Permitting occupation of the site by the QRT [Quick Response Team] is an unjustified taking of these property owners’ rights to quiet enjoyment of their homes in safety, and a violation of the residents’ constitutional rights.82
Trevor and the Roaring Fork Legal Services director Kathy Goudy appeared before the town board to express their concern that the presence of the INS facility would lead to more harassment of Latinos, causing many to leave the area. Activists deliberately combined these three seemingly contradictory frames to gain the widest possible support for opposition efforts directed at the facility.
While the controversy continued in the Roaring Fork Valley, the other four proposed locations for new INS/ICE facilities in Colorado raised eyebrows as well. One of these facilities was slated to be built in Durango, Colorado, where a newly formed advocacy group emerged to challenge the INS’s plans there. Olivia Lopez, an organizer with Compañero Latino in Durango, stated that she had collected more than four hundred names on a petition asking the INS to stay away.83
Back in Carbondale, Latinos Unidos, Asistencia Para Latinos, and the Stepstone Center got a boost when the Public Counsel of the Rockies joined them in their challenge to the INS facility. The PCR is a well-funded legal group, which up to that point focused on battling threats to ecological sustainability, but it deepened its analysis of the environmental problems facing the valley to support affordable housing and public transportation.84 Eventually, in January 2000, the Carbondale Zoning Board of Adjustment voted to deny the INS its building permit.85 Not simply savoring this victory, Latinos Unidos and Stepstone took proactive steps to propose new directions for the agency. In a letter to an area newspaper, they stated “We also believe the INS should restructure their present immigration procedures to include greater emphasis and resources on processing of immigration documents and the creation of temporary work visas, and to lessen the focus on the detention of undocumented workers.”86
As a Basalt City Council member, Jonathan Fox-Rubin recalled this battle as a great moment when different racial and ethnic groups built solidarity and unity locally: “I think it was a major success of a couple of organizers who brought in some of the Anglos as allies on that. As you probably know, a lot of the undocumented Latinos are not in a position to fight.”87 Because of the past and continuing harms visited upon undocumented communities by the ICE, Scott Chaplin still becomes emotional when he talks about this case:
Interstate 70 is a major corridor for people being shipped around the country, that’s why the INS wanted a presence here. For them to put a detention center in Carbondale, we thought that would be very detrimental. A lot of us didn’t like the INS tactics. They’ve done such horrific things in Colorado. Arresting people, taking off all their clothes down to their underwear and putting them into a hotel room, and that’s a detention center. Taking their shoes so they can’t run away. And they’d leave. This was down in Durango. Somehow they [the detainees] wedged a window open and there were like fourteen Latinos running around in their underwear. This was about a year and a half ago. So that kind of cowboy treatment is pretty bad. A lot of times people call the police for help, the police show up and ask for an ID, and they don’t have proper documentation and they get deported. This has happened with a domestic violence case or when a guy got his car stolen. I think we ought to be able to call the police without getting deported. Once Mexicans get arrested, they just kind of disappear. You don’t hear about it.88
Unfortunately for immigrant residents and advocates, ICE eventually succeeded in building its detention facility in the valley, and, according to Marie Munday, that development has been accompanied by a rise in arrests and deportations. We asked Munday if her approach to advising valley immigrants has also been altered. She stated,
I used to say “Oh don’t worry about Immigration, you only have a traffic ticket.” But that’s changed. If they’re in Glenwood and have to go to court for some reason and Immigration’s just around the corner, they could get scooped up down there. I used to say, “They’re not lurking around every corner. You can live a semi-normal life here in Aspen if you’re not committing crimes,” but that’s no longer true. If you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. . . . If people go to visit someone in jail down in Glenwood Springs, if Immigration happens to be there, I’ve heard of people getting arrested. And that was very rare years ago but now it’s better for them to just not go visit someone in jail if they don’t have documents.89
Munday says she has a working relationship with ICE personnel in the valley. But she is also blunt about their intentions and approach: “They’ve made it clear to me that they really don’t care if people are scared, they want people to be scared.”
On the other hand, immigrant rights and social justice groups in the region have stepped up their efforts as well. Luis Polar told us about the formation of new organizations like the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition (CIRC) and Congregations and Schools Empowered (CASE), which have organized rallies around immigration reform and community building across divides of race and nationality in the valley:
So in the last few years we’ve been getting more groups that are pro immigrant, that are supporting immigrants. We know we’re getting more immigrants coming to this valley, and so we are organizing people. You’d be really impressed to see what people have been doing with not much resources.90
It is not just the ardent, vicious, right-wing political forces that support nativist environmentalism; it is often the liberal, left-of-center folks who share these ideas as well. Consider the following words from two Aspen area environmentalists who consider themselves liberal on a range of issues:
[Liberal 1]: I think there are different cultural . . . sort of responses to the environment. I mean I know I’ve just witnessed certain times where I see Latino people throwing trash out the window or on the trails and things like that. And I talk to my friends who are from Mexico and they say “yeah that’s just the way we do it.” I mean, that is sort of more of a litter issue, but I think more people [coming] and again the development pressure, pressure on water and other resources and things like that. Ripple effects . . . and development to house people and then limited water. All throughout the west, rivers are down and we’ve just had drought for the last couple years.91
[Liberal 2]: There has been a huge amount of growth here. We’re seeing probably not the best type of growth that we would like to see and that’s a problem that all communities face. . . . So and of course, with the population expansion, we’re getting more people here who don’t have that type of appreciation for the environment. They’re coming here for different reasons now. A lot of which are simply opportunities for jobs. They’re not choosing this particular place because of the environment. I think there are—there’s a segment of the population that’s growing pretty rapidly that isn’t here for that reason. And . . . whenever you have a shift in values, that’s going to have an impact.92
Again, these two quotes come from liberal to progressive voices in the valley. The battle among liberals and progressives who maintain views consistent with nativism requires greater critique. There appear to be two paths in this immigration-environment debate in the Roaring Fork Valley and the United States in general. One path is to continue to pursue a nativist environmentalist agenda, which ultimately facilitates violence and exclusion not only in the name of selective entitlement but also in the service of racial and environmental privileges. Jessica Dove, the Anglo social services provider in Basalt, critiqued that path:
In a way, the discourse surrounding undocumented immigrants and the environment has little to do with the immigrants themselves, and more to do with the perceptions and misperceptions of the white people engaged in the discourse. It’s kind of like the excuses for racism in general. These excuses function to help white people “accept” the mistreatment of (and denial of access to resources to) the majority of the world’s population. The excuses do not have a whole lot to do with people of color themselves, who are not, of course, the cause of racism, but merely its target.93
The other path is to challenge the social violence embodied in the way we use national borders. George Stranahan spoke to this possible direction:
Well, I’m very much a “one world” person. It’s a small enough world for us that we should feel like we’re all in the same lifeboat. And it doesn’t do any good to not give biscuits to half of the members and throw the other half into shark water. I say open the doors.94
It will be up to the Roaring Fork Valley community as a whole to make the choice as to which path it will chart. And, since virtually everyone in the valley is a newcomer (“transplant” is the term generally used for Anglo immigrants), a helpful way to move forward might be to develop a “framing of belonging” that does away entirely with the division between “immigrant” and “citizen.” As Amy McTernan of the Aspen Temporary Labor Service told us, “the thing about Aspen is that nobody’s really from here.”