Nidian Calzada and her friends slouch in the back of the classroom, talking and laughing in hushed tones. They complain in Spanish, quietly grousing that the other student council members don’t ask them to join in.
Several desks away, the rest of the committee plans details of the upcoming prom and senior luncheon.
“They exclude themselves by sitting in the back and speaking Spanish,” says senior Danette Rodriguez, student vice president at North High School. “I understand Spanish, too. Mostly we wanted them to come up and participate; it’s just difficult.”
Every day, a rift largely unseen by Anglos is played out in schools, on job sites and among extended families as longtime Coloradans of Latino descent learn to cope with an influx of immigrants who mirror their looks but who arrive with different ideals and a strong bond to a mother country many Coloradans lost generations ago.
It is a Chicano-vs.-immigrant tension that permeates the Latino community. It is mostly silent but influences Latino relations at all levels. And while school officials and community leaders are keenly aware of the rift, they struggle to bridge the gap between the groups.
Many longtime Coloradans of Latino descent consider themselves Chicanos. Mexican-American activists coined that term in the 1960s to describe the civil rights movement and the struggle for equality. The moniker has been passed on in some families, while others simply identify themselves as Mexican-American, Hispanic or Latino. Immigrants tend to identify themselves by their country of origin – Mexican, Nicaraguan, etc.
By the 1990s, immigrants were becoming an ever-greater segment of the Hispanic community. The Chicano struggle for civil rights seemingly took a back seat to issues vital to the new immigrant population – language, education, jobs and housing, among others.
Largely owing to the influx of immigrants, Colorado’s Latino population nearly doubled from 424,301 in 1990 to 735,601 in 2000, according to the Census.
Immigrants account for 34 percent of the state’s Hispanic population, while 47 percent of Colorado’s Latinos have been in the U.S. for at least three generations, according to a report by the Population Studies Center for the Urban Institute. The statistics include Latinos who have moved to Colorado from other states.
“Those of us here for a long time lost the language,” says Polly Baca, a former state legislator. “There is tension between old families and new families. We have to be just as concerned about (immigrants) as we are about our own families. Those kids who get beyond it and make it are the ones who will make a difference.”
Tension in the halls
Hispanics make up 84% of North High’s students, but differences lead to name-calling and stereotypes.
North High School, like West and Lincoln high schools, has undergone a transformation that reflects the changes in Denver and throughout Colorado. The school is 84 percent Hispanic, and 17 percent of the school’s students are new English- language learners, according to the district.
The division is not just language; it’s also cultural.
“The Chicanos separate from the newer kids,” says assistant principal John de la Garza. “When the Chicano students are complaining about the Mexican students, I try to remind them that they are shooting themselves in the foot because other people see them as the same as the Mexicans.”
The students’ differing influences and attitudes are exhibited at home and show up at the prom, on the ballfield and in the halls. It is obvious in their music selection, their fashion and in what language they choose to greet their buddies.
It plays out every day, from the morning announcements in English and Spanish, to the cliques in the lunchroom where students gather not by grade but by language.
Chicanos and immigrants use derisive terms for each other, including pocho (a term immigrants use for U.S.-born Latinos who don’t speak Spanish) and “cheddar” (for new arrivals who sprinkle cheese on their food or in reference to those who receive government cheese). “Beaner,” used by members of both groups, is a kind of generic insult for anyone of Mexican descent.
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Cliques are split by taste in music or country of origin, including roqueros (Spanish rock fans) and charros (who listen to traditional country Mexican tunes).
Mexican boys in cowboy hats and belt buckles greet each other with the saying “Cien perciento,” which is a shortened version of a phrase that means “100 percent Mexican.”
Meanwhile, second- and third-generation Hispanic students greet each other with “Dude” and “Hey.” They dress in Gap-style T-shirts and baggy hip-hop-style pants, with their hair flattened by baseball caps or CU beanies.
It’s a rural Mexican influx in a land of hip-hop and Chicano “Spanglish.”
This type of inner struggle within an ethnic group is not new, just rarely discussed. Divisions have historically existed between light-skinned and dark- skinned blacks, educated and uneducated Anglos, and northern and southern Italians who came to the U.S. decades ago.
For young Chicanos and immigrants, already on a quest for identity during the teen years, the divisions can be unsettling.
“People know it’s there, and no one has wanted to talk about it,” says Ramon del Castillo, chairman of the master’s program in nonprofit management at Regis University. He is also a Chicano poet who wrote “Flowers From the Same Garden,” about the divide between immigrants and Chicanos.
“The Mexicano doesn’t understand the Chicano for what he is, and the Chicano sees the Mexican and doesn’t understand why they are the way they are,” says del Castillo, who is also co-chairman of the Collaborative School Committee at North. “Nobody has peeled back the onion to see they are the same.”
Longtime Latino residents and immigrant leaders are exploring options to address tensions and bring both groups together. They want to find common ground instead of focusing on language differences, history and the notion that immigrants get more help than Chicanos, del Castillo says.
“We need to mix the two and help them learn from each other; we have to help people engage,” he says. “We could be the most powerful force in the state if we could get people to come together to realize that.”
Until that happens, longtime Latinos continue to feel they are in the middle – stuck somewhere between immigrant and Anglo.
Neither one nor the other
Derided by immigrants and Anglos, Danette Rodriguez, a third-generation Coloradan, is caught “in the middle.”
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| Post / Cyrus McCrimmon |
| Dina Rodriguez looks in the mirror at her daughter, Danette, preparing to go to the North High School prom with her boyfriend.
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Danette Rodriguez, who will attend the University of Colorado at Boulder in the fall and won more than $13,000 in scholarships, senses it from Anglos on the college campus and immigrants in the high school. She is neither one nor the other.
A third-generation Coloradan, the 17-year-old is the quintessential all-American girl with a 4.0 grade-point average at North High School. She plays basketball and softball and is on the student council. Her boyfriend, John Sigala, plays football and baseball and also will attend CU-Boulder.
Still, she feels left out somehow. She isn’t confident about her Spanish skills, even though she understands it when others speak.
“I’m in the middle; I get judged twice. If I do speak Spanish, everyone is, ‘Whoa,’ and if I don’t speak Spanish, the Mexicans are saying, ‘She’s just another guera (light person),”‘ says Rodriguez, who lives in Montbello. “I am Hispanic. So I go to Boulder, and there are a lot of white kids who give me the impression they think they are better. But I have the same grades, and I’m paying the same amount of money.”
And it doesn’t help that her extended family – and other longtime Coloradans – call her “whitewash” for being such a success.
“The Mexicans think they have it tough, but I say try being a Mexican-American, because we have to please both sides. They don’t care about pleasing anyone,” Rodriguez says.
This observation is not lost on the immigrant students, says Nidian Calzada, also 17, who was born in Mexico and lived in Los Angeles and Mexico before arriving in Colorado four years ago. Among immigrant students, the general consensus about their Chicano counterparts is that they are lost.
“The Chicanos feel like they are in the middle. They don’t know which way to go – with the white kids or the Mexican kids,” Calzada says. “They are trying to figure out who they are.”
This unease caused a rift between Chicano ROTC students and Mexican roqueros, rockers, early in the 2003-04 school year. It eventually erupted into a fight.
Administrators invited the leaders of the groups to a meeting to discuss the situation, says Darlene LeDoux, assistant superintendent on special assignment as principal at North.
“We brought them together to talk about the differences and found out it was language,” she says. “They didn’t understand each other. They thought they were talking about each other.”
LeDoux chose some of the students to attend an off-campus conflict resolution center. The next time tensions flared, those students were able to defuse the situation.
LeDoux is well aware of the differences between the students and the complaints they lodge about each other.
“It has to do with who you are comfortable with, and we tend to be comfortable with those who are like us. What we need to teach our kids is to get out of their comfort zone to learn about others,” she says. “I try to model those behaviors myself by talking to everyone, by teasing and laughing and by speaking Spanish to the staff.”
There are spaces and places where the groups come together for a common cause or effort, and that can create an understanding of their differences. Students who work on projects, do community service or participate in after-school activities often build bridges through their common interest.
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In the case of the sometimes- tense student council meetings, the ice broke after a male student from the immigrant group confronted the other students. This led to the committee’s first serious talk about cultural differences and expectations and paved the way for real cooperation.
A life rich in traditions
Through mariachi music and family customs, Nidian Calzada stays in touch with her native Mexico.
Calzada, with her permanently tanned look and high cheekbones, is soft-spoken. Those who talk to her sometimes have to lean in to hear her accented sentences.
She’s a lead singer in the school’s mariachi band and won the “El Grito” contest, the traditional cry that commemorates Sept. 16, 1810, when priest Miguel Hidalgo called on Mexicans to battle the Spanish. She also earned a 4.0 GPA, performs in the bilingual Shakespeare Club and is the soccer team’s goalie.
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| Post / Cyrus McCrimmon |
| Five-year-old Lilybeth Yanelly talks with her cousin at her graduation dinner. Nidian, whose father won’t allow her to date, went to the prom with her friend’s brother.
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Calzada is the second of six children, all born in California except for her. She was born in Mexico. As a child, she had to pretend to be her older sister when crossing the border.
The family returned to Mexico to live when she was 10.
“My dad wanted us to go back to Mexico to get away from gangs and for us to learn more about the culture,” she says. “If we had stayed, I would speak mocho (broken) Spanish like them (Chicanos).”
They stayed in Guerrero, Mexico, four years before returning to the U.S. and settling in Colorado.
“In some ways, I did want to come back because I know you have better opportunities here, but I really felt more comfortable with my people over there,” Calzada says.
So she found some of her people here. She found Eric Lujan, 16, whose father is from the same town as her father. And she found Eber Herrera, 19, and Karina Ortiz, 17, who not only share her affection for mariachi music but also are from Mexico.
At home and with her friends, Calzada speaks Spanish. In the halls, she walks with friends, greeting others with “Hola,” finishing short conversations with “orale pues,” loosely translated as “OK, then.”
Each class period goes slowly in anticipation of her favorite class, Mariachi Band. Calzada strums a vihuela, a mini-guitar she plays in Mariachi Cevallos.
The popular Mariachi Vasquez, a well-known professional mariachi family that travels across the country performing, sponsored the class in its first year and came to North almost every day.
On the last day of mariachi class, Calzada has tears in her eyes but tries not to cry.
“Me carino con ellos,” she says. “It’s because they (the Vasquez family) are good people.” (Loosely translated, “I have affection for them.”)
The family Vasquez scrawled signatures across their CD cover for Calzada. It’s the same CD she listens to during classes on headphones. It’s the only CD in her black Adidas shoulder pack.
Posters of the Mariachi Vasquez and Denver’s Shakespeare festival are the only dcor on the walls of the bedroom Nidian shares with her sister Brenda in their family’s four- bedroom apartment near West 12th Avenue and Vrain Street.
In the house one recent night, the language is Spanish, even among the children who are all fully bilingual. The home, with its Mexican flag hanging in the living room, is host to a computer in each bedroom, won by the kids during a Dell summer camp. And on a television in Nidian’s bedroom, the boys gather to play a Simpsons game on GameCube.
“The culture shouldn’t be lost; it’s important to have both,” says her father, Erasmo Calzada, 52. “Let them learn English at school and the American way outside. We hold ourselves back if those who came first look down on those who came later.”
Erasmo Calzada works in housekeeping at Isle of Capri Casino in Black Hawk. He graduated from college in Mexico and taught history before immigrating. His daughters, he says, do not have to work if they attend college.
He is one of the more active immigrant parents at North, principal LeDoux says. She invites him to attend meetings and to bring other immigrant parents.
“In this country, many people become materialistic or they want to be more American, and they forget their race and the traditions and cultures,” Erasmo Calzada says. “I knew a family who didn’t want the kids to speak Spanish. We marginalize ourselves when we take (culture and language) away.”
Three-quarters of the way through the evening, 9-year-old Juan Calzada, Nidian’s brother, changes the cassette tape player from Mexican cebraditas and cumbias to OutKast so he can break-dance to the rap music for the captive audience.
As the child spins on his back and head and twists and turns, even his father’s head moves to the beat.
Still, Erasmo Calzada’s values are traditional to Mexico, and he says his girls cannot date until they’ve finished college and have a career.
Nidian Calzada calls him old-fashioned but happily went to the prom with her friend’s younger brother.
“Ideas … start at home”
Dina and Ramon Rodriguez stress the importance of family rituals and education to their children.
Danette Rodriguez’s bedroom in Montbello is clearly a teenager’s domain. Pictures of her and her boyfriend, John, from homecoming, from dances and family get-togethers are in frames around the room. Stuffed animals and North High memorabilia sit on the shelves.
Rodriguez eats dinner with her family most every day. It’s a ritual they take seriously, everyone pitching in to set the table and prepare.
The banter around the dinner table – with servings of beefy macaroni and cheese and a side of broccoli – is English only, and the children discuss school and family. They tease and laugh with dad Ramon at the head of the table, mom Dina to his side with younger sister Stefanie between them.
Dina and Ramon, young parents at 33 and 34, stress education to their children, pushing them to excel and go to college.
Academics usually take center stage during dinner. Danette’s brother Ramon Jr. is in a specialized computer program at North, and Stefanie is in the 21st High Tech Academy at Martin Luther King Middle School.
Lately the conversation has revolved around Danette’s upcoming move to CU-Boulder, where she has already won $13,900 in scholarships to study pre-med and Spanish. She wants to be an orthopedic surgeon. Her awards are part of the $2 million awarded to North seniors this year, LeDoux said.
“I wish we all knew Spanish, and I want them to learn it; it’s a value right now,” says Ramon Rodriguez, who works in shipping and receiving for a pipe- fitting company. “A lot of Hispanic families don’t push to know the history. Danette is learning it, and she is teaching us.”
The discrimination and attitude between Mexicans and Chicanos often begins in families, Dina Rodriguez says. She is embarrassed to hear Danette repeat her own frustrations about former immigrant neighbors who didn’t keep their yard clean.
“It has to do with the parents; their ideas about other people start at home,” she says.
Dina and Ramon, and by extension most of the longtime Hispanics in Colorado, grew up at a time when immigration into Colorado was happening more slowly.
They were the only Hispanic students in classes. They spoke English because they were taught at home or they were prohibited from speaking Spanish in school.
Ramon Rodriguez’s mother was told not to teach him Spanish because he would become confused and would not speak either language correctly.
He says he grew up break- dancing and was into hip-hop music. But not speaking Spanish didn’t keep him from getting into fights. He was the only Hispanic kid in his neighborhood and fought every day with Anglo kids who called him “spic” or “Indian,” he says.
Now, he says, immigrants are rude to him in the market and in public, never smiling at him or nodding in recognition.
“You ain’t good enough to be with your own people but not good enough for the whites either; it’s a big gap in our culture,” Rodriguez says. “It’s like Edward James Olmos says in the movie ‘Selena’: ‘We’re not from over there, and we’re not from over here.”‘
Still, Rodriguez defends the immigrants he works with because they do work that neither he nor Anglos want to do.
“They come from a poor, poor country, and they are trying to get the American dream,” he says more to himself than anyone else. “I can understand both sides of the fence.”
At prom, dueling playlists
The crowd on North High’s dance floor changes as the deejay shifts between hip-hop and Mexican music.
On a spring night, Nidian Calzada and Danette Rodriguez, separated by culture and language, both prep for the prom. One gets ready to go with her friend’s brother, the other with her boyfriend of a year and a half.
Danette’s hair is pulled away from her face in an upsweep, showing off her copper and blond highlights. Her pink- accented-black Jessica McClintock dress is strapless, exposing the tattoo between her shoulder blades. It’s the sign of a Leo.
North’s prom has been a tradition in Danette’s family. Her aunts and uncles are graduates, as are her grandparents.
As she sits at the kitchen table, everyone watching, Danette’s aunt applies eyeliner, and Dan- ette tells everyone she applied a bronze self-tanning lotion to her exposed skin.
“You look like a border- jumper,” jokes Dina.
The room is filled with banter and jokes in English, with a few Spanish words tossed in. The closest this family gets to Spanish is Spanglish, mostly English with a few slang Spanish words or phrases tossed in.
Danette and her boyfriend, John, meet up with Dina and Ramon Rodriguez at the dance. The parents are chaperoning; it’s their first prom.
They dance together, near where Danette and John are dancing, but only to the English songs.
The playlist includes both English and Spanish music. The disc jockey came to school during lunch to take song requests. Mexican cumbias and merengues and American hip-hop and love songs alternately filter through the speakers.
“If we don’t have a lot of Mexican music, the Mexicans get mad,” Danette says.
With each new song, the crowd on the dance floor changes. Chicano and Anglo students move off as a wave of Mexicans, many wearing cowboy hats and Mexican suits, take the floor to dance to the Spanish rhythm.
Some stay and try their dance moves on the music, including Danette and John, who try moving their feet to merengue. Danette learned it last summer at a precollegiate program at CU-Boulder. John let her lead.
They whispered quietly to each other about the upcoming announcement of king and queen of prom. They were nominated and hope to win.
But the odds are not in their favor.
They are up against Rafael Zubia and Leticia Hernandez, both popular immigrant students who won kudos in the senior yearbook – him for best eyes, and her for most athletic and most talented.
“The Mexicans really like them, but we think both groups like us,” Danette says while they wait for LeDoux to make the announcement.
Danette and John embrace when the names read are not theirs.
The campaigning that Nidian Calzada has done for Rafa and Letty, as they are known around school, paid off. She made fliers and encouraged her friends to vote for the pair. Letty is her friend from the soccer team.
A bilingual graduation
Pride beams from the Rodriguez and Calzada families as Danette and Nidian get their diplomas.
The two families sit close to each other at graduation. Both arrived early enough to rush into the theater as the doors opened.
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| Post / Cyrus McCrimmon |
| 17-year-old Nidian Calzada lines up with her senior classmates before North High School’s graduation ceremony at the Temple Buell Theater.
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Erasmo Calzada sits in the front row on the aisle. The Rodriguez clan sits in the second row near the other aisle. Each is there to see their girl graduate.
In purple cap and gown, with a baby-blue honor sash representing the National Honor Society around her neck, Danette Rodriguez welcomes the crowd, reminding them that she and her classmates were all born in 1986 or 1987, have never lived without a remote control and always have had microwave popcorn.
She speaks in English, with each word translated into Spanish for the audience – and some of the graduates – by one of her classmates.
The National Honor Society members sit in the first three rows of students. With her straight A’s, Nidian Calzada was invited to join the society but couldn’t make the meetings, which are held before school.
So she sits farther back, waiting for her name to be called, both in honor of the Principals Scholarship she won and for her diploma.
Her father watches with a proud grin plastered on his face. He does not wear his everyday cowboy hat; instead, his hair is gelled flat and to the side.
After graduation, each family leaves the theater proudly, Danette surrounded by grandparents and her family, Nidian with her three sisters, two brothers and her dad. Each off to dinner.
Nidian flips her hair around. It is lighter than it has been and shorter. For graduation, she for the first time has had her dark brown hair layered and highlighted with copper and blond strands. But after graduation, as she prepares for summer vacation in Mexico, she has second thoughts.
“I don’t like the color in my hair; I wanted it to be more brown and less guero (light),” she says. “I’m going to have it changed in Mexico.”
Elizabeth Aguilera can be reached at 303-820-1372 or by e-mail at eaguilera@denverpost.com .
Defining cultures
This series uses various terms to describe the people it chronicles – Latino, Hispanic, Chicano, immigrant, Mexican-American. A debate rages nationally about which term is most appropriate and in what context the terms are most proper.
In the West and Southwest, Latino tends to be the preferred term. Hispanic, according to some sources, is in widest circulation nationally, although some people object to that term as inaccurately referring to Spain and the Spanish language, as opposed to a true country of origin.
Chicano, meanwhile, is a term that, for some, connotes political activism. There are others who use it as a means to identify multigenerational Colorado families, and in some cases this series uses it that way.
In these stories, The Post primarily uses the terms that sources and subjects use to describe themselves. Where we refer to the community, we use the term that seems most proper to the time, region or context of the events being described.
But The Post does not seek in this series to advance any term over the others as the most appropriate to describe the broader community.
