Enduring Legacies: Ethnic Histories and Cultures of Colorado

Editors’ Introduction: Where Is the Color in the Colorado Borderlands?

 A rich mosaic of histories and cultures converges within the borderlands of Colorado. Situated on what was the northernmost boundary of Mexico prior to the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846–1848, the state of Colorado forms part of what many scholars call the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands—a zone in which collisions structured by forces of race, nation, class, gender, and sexuality inevitably lead to the transformation of cultures and the emergence of new identities .1 The impetus for this volume of scholarship arises, first, out of a deep and profound respect for the struggles of communities of color to forge or maintain a cultural and political space in the Colorado portion of the borderlands. Second, it comes from the need to honor scholarship that strives to tell the stories of communities of color in Colorado. These communities consist of the original denizens—Utes, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Kiowa, and Apaches—displaced and sometimes massacred by the Anglo-American empire and expansionism . (Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, this volume does not address Native communities.)2 They also consist of Colorado’s Mexican, Hispano, and Chicano families and their complex mestizo (fusion of Spanish and Indian) identities as revealed through ritual, song, architecture, food, and dance. The book is also driven by the need to tell the stories of the arrival of African Editors’ Introduction: Where Is the Color in the Colorado Borderlands? Arturo J. Aldama, Elisa Facio, Daryl Maeda, and Reiland Rabaka  Editors’ Introduction: Where Is the Color in the Colorado Borderlands? American miners, cowboys, and “freedom” seekers in the “free towns” of northern Colorado; the hard work of Chinese miners and businesspeople; the sexual violence Chinese women endured, forced to function as “exotic” spectacles in the businesses of burlesque and prostitution; and the ways Japanese American families resisted their structural criminalization and forced incarceration during World War II. Despite Colorado’s remarkable ethnic, cultural, and racial diversity, the state’s dominant narrative—expressed in museums, murals, and history tours— often reflects an Anglo-centric perspective that begins with the 1859 Pike’s Peak Gold Rush and the establishment of statehood in 1876.3 For example, the historical museum at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities features the restored 144-year-old Haines log house. The museum extols the history, virtues, and struggles of European wheat farmers but overshadows the history of the original indigenous communities and Mexican families. This exhibit reifies a Eurocentric history that marginalizes the Cheyenne Arapahoe and later Mexican families as insignificant actors in Colorado’s history. Similarly, the heavily trafficked Garden of the Gods visitor center in Colorado Springs focuses on the area’s geology and the “discovery” of what is now called Pikes Peak but relegates the legacies of Colorado’s indigenous and Mexican peoples to a few photos and objects on the lower level. As these examples show, Colorado’s diversity has yet to be fully integrated into public histories of the state. Enduring Legacies aims to complicate the study of Colorado’s past and present by adopting a borderlands perspective that emphasizes the multiplicity of peoples who have inhabited its territory, the diversity of cultures they have practiced, and the various ways they have contended with racism. In doing so, this volume draws on an extensive corpus of borderlands scholarship that highlights the intersections of race, nation, culture, and power in the contact zone between what is now the United States and Mexico. This literature has impacted studies of states like California, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico but has yet to be extended to considerations of Colorado. Borderlands scholarship has affected fields such as American studies, ethnic studies, history, anthropology, literary studies, and Chicana and Chicano studies. Foundational texts include Américo Paredes’s “With His Pistol In His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1970), which charts unequal power relations in turn-of-the-century Texas through the story of Gregorio Cortez; Hector Calderón, José Saldívar, and Ramón Saldívar’s anthology, Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (1991), which brings post-structural theory to bear on borderlands literary and cultural pro- Arturo J. Aldama, Elisa Facio, Daryl Maeda, and Reiland Rabaka  ductions; and Gloria Anzaldúa’s widely influential Borderlands/Frontera: The New Mestiza (2nd edition, 1999), which is grounded in her family’s history of dispossession in southern Texas and her struggle for mixed racial, as well...