Avon – When the art gallery in the Chapel Place residential and retail complex failed a couple of years ago, the owners of the booming business next door knocked down a wall, expanded their shop and kept on working.
And so Carniceria Tepic, a butcher shop and cafe created by a family from north of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, came to include the adjoined Mercado Mexicano, a minimart below the exclusive Beaver Creek mountain resort.
Its owners say they are doing well because they see in the Vail Valley’s Hispanic workforce something else besides laborers – a burgeoning consumer group with specific appetites.
It’s a group that continues to grow across the state, particularly in the mountains and along the Front Range, according to figures to be released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Between the 2000 census and 2004, the Hispanic population in Colorado grew by more than 19 percent to 878,803, or 19.1 percent of the state’s total population. Colorado ranks sixth in percentage of Hispanic residents behind New Mexico, California, Texas, Arizona and Nevada.
The entire state population grew by 7 percent in the same period, from 4,302,015 to 4,601,403, according to the new estimates.
Eagle County’s growth in Hispanics is representative of many mountain resort communities – a 25.8 percent gain, to 26.3 percent of the total population.
Summit County, whose ski resorts rely on immigrant service labor, saw a 36-percent jump in Hispanics since 2000, from 2,306 to 3,147.
The numbers are climbing along the Front Range as well.
Douglas County saw a huge rate of growth in Hispanic residents – 66.7 percent since 2000 – but the estimate of 14,814 Hispanics is about 6 percent of the total population.
Denver is 34.6 percent Hispanic, a population increase of nearly 10 percent since 2000.
The very nature of the Hispanic community – a mix of legal residents and undocumented workers – makes it a difficult group to measure, said Miguel Barragan of LARASA, the Latin-American Research and Service Agency in Denver.
And the surge in Hispanics, especially immigrants, presents challenges for governments and human-service groups.
In Summit County, school officials are set to launch a new elementary-school bilingual program, and local agencies are trying to hire more bilingual employees, said Christina Carlson, executive director of the nonprofit Family and Intercultural Resource Center in Dillon.
“The schools are definitely working hard, and all the human-services agencies are, too, and the big employers value the immigrant labor force,” she said.
The owners of Carniceria Tepic, one born in the United States, the other an immigrant from Mexico, say they are profiting well from their venture.
“Anything in the Vail Valley, and probably in all of Colorado, that you can do for the Hispanic community, it will be successful,” co-owner Albert Ewing said.
Computer-assisted reporting editor Jeffrey A. Roberts contributed to this report.
Staff writer Jim Hughes can be reached at 303-820-1244 or jhughes@denverpost.com.
