Column by George Sibley
Mountain Life – November 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
TRYING TO FIGURE OUT the geography of history — the way ideas and ideologies get worked out down on the ground — is as fascinating as it is complex. Living in Central Colorado most of these past 40 years, I only gradually became aware that these mountains and valleys I love are actually the upper edge of a huge “borderland” between two Americas, North America and Latin America.
Having grown up in North America well north of these borderlands in the 20th century — North America’s century — and being of Northern European descent, I generally found it easy enough to forget that there even are two Americas. But that was then, as we say, and this is now, and — all of a sudden, it seems, but it has actually been a couple of decades — we are experiencing substantial immigrations in Central Colorado from both Americas.
The immigration from North America has been going on episodically since the late 1960s. This began as an in-migration of primarily middle-class kids — like I was, when I came here in the mid-1960s, beating the real rush by a few years — looking for life beyond the urban/suburban formulas we’d grown up on. The larger migration into the region today is basically that same generation grown up and ascended, financially at least, to the upper-middle class or worse. It’s a generation either retiring here from successful careers or telecommuting out of here as “lone eagles” who enjoy the privilege of working at a remove from their consequences. The biggest businesses in most Colorado mountain valleys today are selling land to these immigrants, building houses for them, and taking care of their often extravagant properties.
The other immigration — not unrelated — comes from Latin America. Over the past 15-20 years, the number of Latinoamericanos in our mountain valleys has grown geometrically, as immigrants have bailed us out — the usual situation in North America — by coming to do the hard work here. For the past half-decade, the ski resorts and larger recreation businesses in most of the mountain valleys have been importing the majority of their seasonal laborers on a variety of temporary permits. And many of those workers have been staying on after their temporary permits expire to work construction or clean houses and mow lawns for the wealthy migrants.
A lot of other Latinos have been just showing up in the valleys with no permits at all, temporary or otherwise, in a don’t-ask, don’t-tell hiring environment. Mary Burt, the founding director of the Multicultural Resources Office here in Gunnison County (founded less than a decade ago), thinks that, in the Upper Gunnison valley, probably around 90 percent of the Latinos are undocumented. And the Upper Gunnison — still with less than 10 percent Latinos — is pretty lightly affected. Over in the valleys of the Upper Colorado River basin (Roaring Fork, Crystal, Eagle, Blue and other Upper Colorado valleys) the Latinos in the work force are approaching 30 percent.
THIS LATINO IMMIGRATION has, of course, been going on substantially longer in the rest of the borderland between North and Latin Americas, to the extent that the North Americans are no longer a numerical majority in much of the region. Until the past decade or so, the mountainous part of the borderland has been like a high rock the tide has washed around, but now the tide is high enough to wash over.
Both of these immigrations have their positive and negative aspects. The relatively wealthy baby-boomers bring a lot of transfer payments and capital — idea capital as well as money capital — into the region. But they also drive property values and construction costs beyond the ability of “essential workers” in the communities to afford ownership, and some of them leap into “community improvement” without looking and listening first. The Latinos bring a healthy work ethic and a willingness to do work Norteamericanos don’t want to do (human capital), but language problems and other cultural matters weigh heavily on local schools and social services.
IT IS EASY TO GET caught up in those negative aspects — which leads to crusaders like Tom Tancredo and the Three Amigos from the Colorado Assembly trying to fire up an anti-immigrant fever. But such crusaders are only “anti” the immigrants from Latin America, of course, and seldom complain about the wealthy North Americans moving in, even though the consequences can be as problematic.
Furthermore, the Tancredo solution — close the border, round up the undocumented workers (“illegal aliens” to him) and ship them back — ignores the geography of history. The historical fact is that what we North Americans call “the American Southwest,” and the Latin Americans call “El Norte” or “Nuevo Mexico,” has been an open region for at least four centuries — a place of conflict, collaboration, and confusion between the two geographic Americas.
North America and Latin America first tried to alleviate the confusion and avoid conflict over the overlapping ambiguities of territory in 1819, with the Adams-Onís Treaty. But shortly after that, William Becknell and Josiah Gregg breached the border with the Santa Fé Trail (while Mexico was otherwise occupied in throwing out the Spanish) and the cultural compass of the borderlands swung from a weak north-south azimuth to a stronger northeast-southwest azimuth on the basis of trade.
The current line in the sand that passes for a border was drawn after the expansionist surge of North America known as the Mexican War, but it has not really done much to resolve the economic and social interactions in a region whose compass still swings wildly between the north-south azimuth with Latin America and the northeast-southwest azimuth with North America. When it is convenient — when North America needs either more workers (as with the Bracero program in the 1940s) or some access to sin (the Prohibition era in the 1920s) — the border essentially disappears. When, or if, we no longer want those things, the border is redrawn in the sand. But a border of convenience is ultimately no border at all, and the Latinos keep coming, driven by the economic imbalance between the two Americas.
Today, we have Tancredo and company calling for a redrawing of the border — reinforced with a wall and a volunteer army to patrol it — at a time when we actually need the workers in the borderlands (and apparently everywhere else in North America, in reality). So forget it, Tom. Unless you want to counter it with some idea for getting the work done by those Norte amer icanos who, so far, don’t want to do the work.
Meanwhile — those WOOFies (Well Off Old Folks) just keep coming. Any idea what to do about their heavy impact on our local economies, Tom? Could we squeeze the one migration a little harder to help take care of the other migration that we need even more? Or what? The borderland remains a place of confusion and conflict, but so far not as much creative collaboration as we need.
This will, by the way, be the focus of this year’s Headwaters Conference over here at Western State College — November 4-6 in Gunnison. “The American Dream in the High Borderlands.” You can check out what we’ll be trying to figure out, and who will be doing it, on our website at www.western.edu/headwaters, or give me a call at 970-943-2055. It should be fun.
George Sibley teaches, writes, and organizes conferences at Western State College in Gunnison.
