Jimmy Brownson maneuvers an all-terrain forklift precariously close to a wall of windows his crew is replacing as they remodel an Aspen mountain home.
He sets the lift almost 30 feet high as one of his workmen, Carlos Loya, climbs onto the forklift platform to grab plywood and the new window destined for the space in the log home.
Anglo and Latino. Working together, speaking two languages, creating homes neither will ever afford in a transforming Roaring Fork Valley. And at the end of each day, they move in opposite directions.
In the ’90s, the valley, which is second home to some of the nation’s wealthiest celebrities and tycoons, also became home to thousands of Latinos, newly arrived from Mexico and other Latin American countries. It was the largest influx of immigrants the area had ever seen.
The three counties of Pitkin, Garfield and Eagle are among the most expensive places in the state to live, but also offer service and construction jobs that Latinos are eager to fill.
Many live in cramped trailers in areas 50 miles away or farther from the big mansions that dot the Aspen hillsides in towns named Rifle, Silt and Carbondale.
Latinos do the work that is largely unseen, in kitchens and hotel rooms and on construction sites. They mix and mingle with Anglo co-workers and share laughs and the stresses of the jobs. But when it’s over, they go their own way, away from workplace commentary that is sometimes subtly or overtly discriminatory.
When Loya first arrived in the valley, he was often told to go back where he came from or called derogatory names.
“We are able to put up with more at work when people say things to us,” he says. “They (Americans) may not care about us or want us, but they need us to work, so they just accept us.”
Fifteen years later, he can respond in English. The underlying sentiment he encounters now is that people like him are taking over.
The workplace, for adults – and the schools, for children – are the only places that force interaction and invite understanding between Latino and Anglo cultures.
And even in those rare activities that do bring two groups together, there is separation. On soccer fields parents sit on different ends of the same sideline. In the gym, during practices of folklorico, the traditional dance of Mexico, Latino moms sit in the bleachers, Anglo moms under the basketball backboard.
“It’s not without friction. … In the schools there is a lot of question about what language should be used and are the kids from Mexico holding back our kids from going to college,” says David Adamson, director of the Mountain Family Health Center, which provides services to low-income families, mostly Latinos.
“On the other hand, I don’t think there is a member of the chamber of commerce that would not say there is no way that tourism and construction could exist without that workforce.”
Living among millionaires
Carlos Loya has lived in the valley for nearly 15 years. He has advanced in his trade but, like many area Latinos, still has multiple jobs.
For 17 years, Brownson, 38, has been overseeing projects for Jack Wilkie Builders Inc. in the valley. In the past five to eight years, he has noticed more Latinos in the area applying for work on his sites.
“They help us out a lot; they usually want to come and work hard,” says Brownson, who understands Spanish better than he speaks it. “They are also advancing in the trades, looking for higher pay and an easier trade such as carpentry. Usually they start out in stone or concrete, and that’s a tough job.”
Carpenter Loya, 42, is one of the pioneers in the valley, and his story is familiar to those who came later. He left Mexico in the mid-’80s to harvest fruit in the U.S., first in Phoenix and then in Hotchkiss.
While picking apples in Hotchkiss, he met a man who owned a hotel in Aspen. When the season was over in 1989, he traveled to Aspen to work in housekeeping at the Mountain Chalet Aspen.
His young wife and son were still in Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua. They arrived in 1991.
He made the switch from full-time cook to full-time carpenter five years ago after working his way up and training on construction sites during summers and while doing part-time work.
Latinos in the area, including Loya, typically have more than one job. He has refereed soccer games and cleaned offices for the Aspen Skiing Co. This summer he’ll look for weekend work on a landscaping crew.
On a recent spring day, Loya and his co-workers are on scaffolding built to access high windows on the mountain cabin they are remodeling. The carpenters, Loya, Robby Peters and Hector Weber, also from Mexico, banter in Spanish and English with country tunes blaring from a yellow DeWalt industrial radio on the ground below.
Foreman Brownson, a New Mexico native, chooses the music. Sometimes when he takes a break, the others will put on canciones, songs in Spanish.
The old garage will become a guesthouse, Loya says. As he stands in the middle of the garage, an area the crew is using for breaks and the planning and coordinating of the remodel, he waves his arms to indicate its size. He says his house, a double-wide modular, would fit in that one room.
“It’s all the space we need,” he says. “I hope the millionaires continue to be successful so they come and build homes here so we can continue to build their homes and have good jobs.”
Forging an understanding
As the Latino population grows, efforts are being made to promote the mixing of cultures, on job sites and away from them.
On the job site, Loya and other Mexican immigrants mix easily with the Anglos. It is a dynamic that many in the Aspen Valley are trying to duplicate.
The Aspen Valley Community Foundation recognized its changing community in 1999. The nonprofit charitable organization created a three-year Latino initiative to help address some of the issues presented by the influx of new immigrants.
“We had this growing new immigrant group that had exploded in the last 10 years,” says director Ellen Friedman. “They weren’t just new to Colorado and our valley; they were new to the United States, and that posed a lot of interesting issues. At the same time, we recognize how dependent the whole valley is on this immigrant group.”
The initiative works with groups that try to improve education and break down barriers between people.
“How do we bring the Latino and the Anglo together?” Friedman asks. “There is racism, we can see the great divides, but what can we do?”
Infrequently, the groups interact outside of school and work.
“Yes, there are a few who don’t accept us,” Loya says. “There is integration, too. At sports events all the parents are there together, Latino and American, and we talk in English or Spanish or Spanglish or sign, but we communicate and get along.”
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Carlos and Isabel Loya’s middle son, Adir, 12, plays on the Basalt Black Toast soccer team. During games and tournaments, the parents are on the sideline cheering on the boys. The Anglo parents sit to the right on lawn chairs and under umbrellas. To the left the few Hispanic parents – there are three Latino boys on the team – stand or sit together cheering in a mix of English and Spanish.
At a recent tournament, parent Billy Long walks along the sidelines handing out CDs to parents containing digital photo images of the players he had taken throughout the season. When he gets to Loya, he stops and asks whether the family has a computer and then haltingly explains that there are great photos of Adir on the disc. Loya converses with Long about the disc and the photos. And he says thanks.
“Yes, often you separate, but as time passes there is more togetherness,” Isabel Loya says as she watches the game from her grassy seat on the sideline. “Sports and activities are the opportunities to socialize with the Anglos. I think the separation is based on language, since it’s easier for me here with the parents who also speak Spanish.”
During Ballet Folklorico practice, the few primarily English-speaking parents, including one Glenwood Springs- raised Hispanic mom, hang out together on the gym floor discussing costumes, helping organize hats and accessories, while the mostly Spanish-speaking Latino parents watch the practice from the bleachers.
It’s Cindy Maestas, who is Anglo and married to a Hispanic, who helps rally the parents, who has helped plan a park potluck for the instructor after the final practice before the big performance, and who speaks Spanish with effort and accent.
“The first time I walked into the room and everyone looked at me, I felt like the outsider,” Maestas says. “It’s natural, the segregation that happens. I don’t think we consciously do that, but all it takes is opening that door everyone is looking through at each other and saying who you are.”
Isabel Loya remembers feeling that way when she and 3-year-old Mario joined Carlos Loya in 1991. They moved into a cramped, tiny, one-bedroom apartment in Aspen that they paid $500 a month to live in. It was employee housing.
She wanted to go back to Mexico. Aspen was cold, expensive and completely foreign. She felt very alone, with no one to talk to except her toddler and her husband when he was not working.
But slowly, as her child grew and two others were born, she began to meet other families. She also began to work cleaning houses and earn an income. Finally, the family moved to a Basalt trailer court where many other Latino families with children lived.
That $18,000 two-bedroom trailer was their first home purchase. Three years ago, the family moved out of the Roaring Fork Trailer Park and into a modular trailer across Colorado 82 in the Aspen Basalt Trailer community. This time the family paid $80,000 for the four-bedroom double-wide. Loya pays an additional $400 a month to rent the space his trailer occupies.
“Now we are looking at the next dream – a house,” Loya says. “We are still growing, and we have dreams that are being made here.”
Someday Loya would like to build his dream house, but not in Aspen. It’s too expensive, he says. Instead, each summer, during his vacation to Mexico, he tinkers around his house there and plans future remodels.
The family’s modest income is supplemented by the work Isabel Loya gets cleaning homes. She began seven years ago cleaning the home of the daughter of the family that owns the Mountain Chalet, where Carlos Loya was working at the time. AndFrom there, she picked up more work through word of mouth.
“It’s funny; instead of me learning more English from them, they want to learn Spanish with me,” she says.
Neither Loya nor his wife has health insurance. They pay $325 every six months for the boys to be covered under the Children’s Health Plan Plus, a state program for low-income families.
Lack of health insurance is a problem for many low-income families in the valley, most of them Latino, says Adamson, of the Mountain Family Health Center, the independent nonprofit that offers services on a sliding scale based on federal poverty guidelines.
The center, opened almost five years ago, has grown quickly. Last year the center saw 4,100 individuals for almost 12,000 visits. Of those, nearly 65 percent were Latino, and 80 percent of the Latinos are from Mexico or Central America. Many are children.
It’s these children who bridge the culture gap between Anglos and Latinos, says Ramon Verdusco, who heads the school district’s pre-collegiate program.
“We have a strong shell”
Verbal attacks still come against Latinos and those who try to help them. But the valley’s allure helps keep dreams and traditions alive.
As good as life seems in the beautiful valley, it also has been difficult. Loya, more than his family, has been peppered with insults – the ethnic slurs and demands that he go back to Mexico.
When he is provoked beyond his patience, he responds one of two ways.
“My ancestors were here in Aspen long before you got here,” he tells Anglos. “This land used to be our land.”
Or he asks a question: “You call me wetback because I crossed a river, so what can I call you? You crossed an ocean.”
“Without knowing it, they are making us tough and giving us patience and strength when they do this,” Loya says. “We have a strong shell.”
And so must those who try to help them. Like Aspen ophthalmologist David Singer, who was vilified for offering free glaucoma screenings to Latinos last year. He made the offer after reading a study that showed Latinos are at a greater risk of developing the disease.
He received threatening phone calls and eventually opened the offer to anyone who wanted a screening.
“Several people called my office and left very negative remarks on my office answering machine. Some said I was discriminating against Anglos and used disparaging terms to describe Latinos as ‘wetbacks,’ ‘welfare takers’ and others too obscene to mention,” he says in an e-mail response to questions about the incident.
Singer was surprised by the virulence of the responses.
“It was my feeling/sense that the educational level in the Roaring Fork Valley was quite high, and on that basis I imbued the residents with a greater ecumenical sense than they deserved, and I was greatly disappointed,” he says.
Loya, for his part, has big dreams. Building on his university coursework in Mexico, he passed the U.S. GED exam. He plans to start taking classes in the fall toward getting a real estate license.
“This valley is very rich. Laborers earn $10 to $14 an hour. That allows you to have an apartment or a trailer and a car – not this year’s model, but something that works,” he says. “In Denver, even though it is a big city, there is more concentration of people.”
And Loya believes the valley is safer and cleaner. Once the family went on vacation for 10 days, forgetting their bicycles outside. When they returned, the bikes were still tossed near the trailer where the children had left them.
“In comparison to Denver, in drugs, vandalism and robbery, the Roaring Fork Valley is clean,” he says.
The views are famously picturesque. Town councils want to keep it that way while ensuring that all their residents live in safe and adequate housing.
It’s a delicate balance for the towns most Latinos live in. Historically, the affordable housing for the working poor has been in the trailer courts. Many of the courts are old, and some are in areas teetering on ridges or in floodplains.
In Basalt, where two of the parks are in the floodplain of the Roaring Fork River, leaders have adopted a 100 percent housing replacement plan that must be honored by whoever develops and restores the river, says Kay Clarke-Philip, Basalt’s director of community relations.
Should that development and restoration become reality, the Loyas, who used to live in one of the courts in the floodplain, hope to purchase one of the new homes. Until that day, their current trailer park is a safe distance from the river.
They want to stay in Basalt but are also willing to move down the road to Carbondale, which has the largest Latino population in the area. The elementary school in Carbondale is 65 percent Latino, according to Judy Hapstonstall, assistant superintendent of the Roaring Fork School District.
Mexican restaurants and shops dot the road through town, including Garcia’s Caf, where patrons can purchase Mexican chocolate, baptism dresses and specialty products. The store, run by Leticia Garcia and her husband, opened five years ago when they moved to the valley from California.
The transformation in the valley has been quick. When Mario Loya, now 16, was in elementary school, he was usually the only Latino on the school sports teams and in after-school activities, recalls his mother, 41.
Now Adir and youngest son Ivan, 8, are among the many Latinos in their classes and on teams.
The Loyas have also noticed the difference in business. More companies are offering services in Spanish. Local retailers have hired Spanish-speaking employees, and even local supermarkets are carrying more Hispanic food products.
At City Market in El Jebel, Isabel Loya has noticed that in the evening, there are more Latino cashiers than there are during the day. She and many other Latino families shop after work, so it makes sense, she says.
The family left the valley for one year in the ’90s. They settled in Hobbs, N.M., in an effort to be closer to the border and the folks back in Mexico. But it just wasn’t right. It wasn’t Roaring Fork.
“What we gave up in winter cold, we got in scorching heat,” Carlos Loya remembers. “And to be close to the border also means you have to present your green card on every corner. Here the jobs are better, and in the summer it’s like our native Chihuahua with the weather and the mountains.”
Carlos and Isabel Loya still suffer through cold and snowy winters, but the boys look forward to the ski season. The Loya boys are regulars on the slopes through the Aspen Ski and Snow Club, which offer discounts and scholarships to low-income families so the children can learn to ski or snowboard.
The children go every Saturday from January to March for an all-day lesson.
Carlos Loya learned to ski five years ago. He wanted to participate in the sport his children have adopted from the Aspen natives.
“I had a problem after a couple of days of lessons when my son says, ‘Follow me, Dad,”‘ he says. “That was my first big fall on skis. We had to learn to follow the kids.”
Crossing the divides
Carlos Loya’s kids help him improve his English, while folklorico dance gives Anglo children and their parents a taste of Latino culture.
On a recent day in May, Mario Loya is in charge of getting his brothers to Aspen Santa Fe Ballet Folklorico dance practice because his parents are working late. He is pleased to help. He’s the proud new driver of a white 1991 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme his parents bought for him in anticipation of his new driver’s license. Where his mother has a rosary hanging from her rearview mirror, he has SpongeBob SquarePants.
He plans to pay for the car insurance, which his mom and dad pay now, as soon as he starts earning money from his summer job as a busboy in a Snowmass hotel.
“I don’t want them (parents) to pay for everything,” he says, wearing a sweater with a Shady LMTD-brand logo on the right breast. “My parents work hard.”
The Loya boys, who speak Spanish at home and with their friends in the trailer court, move easily between the two languages. One summer afternoon, before Carlos Loya and his wife return from work, Mario watches MTV2 and a special on singer Beyonc Knowles. Ivan sits at the computer, and Adir watches from behind.
But when the boys answer the phone, their greeting is in Spanish: “Bueno.”
With their dad, they often speak English because he wants to practice, says Mario, who is a point guard for Basalt High School’s basketball team.
“I translate words for him that he doesn’t understand. He switches up some words, and I help him, but not in front of other people,” he says.
On a recent day, the children finish practice with the local Ballet Folklorico troupe, then meet with friends and other parents in a park to celebrate the upcoming show in Aspen. Carlos Loya drops them off and runs off to buy Domino’s pizza. Isabel Loya works cleaning homes and hasn’t had time to make a dish for the potluck.
John Richards surveys the potluck scene. He is the only white male in the crowd of parents and children. His wife, Tonie, is Hispanic; his daughters, Kelsey and Erin, bicultural.
“You just always have two groups until you get to know each other,” says Richards, who volunteers to drive a bus whenever the kids have a faraway performance. “Until you get to know each other, the more I’m not just ‘that white guy.”‘
The party at the park is the first time all the parents have gathered outside of the practices, says Kim Johnson, as she eats mole and tamales made by the other moms.
For Johnson, the introduction to folklorico has come through her daughter Clair’s bilingual fourth-grade class at Basalt Elementary School, where 145 students are enrolled in the classes, 40 percent of them Anglo.
Ten-year-old Clair came home asking if she could be in a dance group. Her mother thought it was jazz or ballet.
Clair was set on folklorico.
“We put her in bilingual ed because we saw the writing on the wall, so to speak. Our college-age daughter is bilingual, and we see how good she is doing, and we wanted to stick with it,” she says. “She’s in bilingual because of the social aspect. The more you can get along, the better off you’ll be.”
