The Fed Up neighbor of Border Street is a Hispanic woman who is a Colorado native. She would like to see an immigration-enforcement law similar to Arizona’s passed here. I suspected this would be the case. There’s a reason I call her the Fed Up neighbor. “We don’t live on a farm, ‘jita,” she once told me after watching the Mexicans down the street string wet laundry along their chain-link fence.
I met her in 2006, and for those of you not acquainted with Border Street, it’s a short block, a hiccup of asphalt, in southwest Denver. It is occupied by citizens, by lawful permanent residents who have not yet become citizens, by illegal immigrants. Some houses hold a mix of all three. For this reason I have never revealed the true name of the block or its residents. Doing so would make the block an attraction for the curious or a target of the vindictive.
Border Street is the sometimes intersection and sometimes wall between cultures and languages and legal statuses.
Unlike many, perhaps most, people in this state, the residents of this block have first-hand experience with an immigration system I would call a joke were not the consequences of its dysfunction so often tragic. Border Street is, then, a window into a world most of us do not see. And when one reads, as we did this week, that a poll shows most Hispanic Coloradans say the state should pass an immigration law similar to Arizona’s, well, it’s time for a visit.
The street in summer is vendors hawking mangos sprinkled with red chile powder and kids running up and down the block and men and women sitting on resin chairs in their front yards enjoying the evening cool. It is the Fed Up neighbor coming home after another 10-hour workday, tired, and tired of being tired because she is 64 years old and she has worked hard her whole life to make a home for herself and the four children she raised alone.
She tells me most of the people I once knew have moved and two of the families still here illegally have since had children, baby citizens. This is a street that churns, movement from which there is no respite. More than half of the property is occupied by renters. Many are Spanish speakers, and Longtime Eddie, another Hispanic-American on the block, says, “You can go to almost every house here and find one person who is here illegally.”
The Fed Up neighbor tells me that, with some reservation, she supports the Arizona law — the most controversial parts of which were blocked by a federal judge. “They went to the extreme, but I understand why,” she says. “We should have taken care of this 30 years ago, and I think they have a right now to enforce the law. They just need to make sure they stop people for a reason and not because they’re brown.”
She tells me she believes most people here illegally don’t want to work hard or respect the law. She tells me she’s fighting to get her 21-year-old disabled grandson health insurance and she believes it’s harder for her as a citizen to get help than it would be for someone here illegally.
But, she says this, too. She would never call immigration to report neighbors. Why not? I ask. She speaks of a particular family on the block. “They both work hard. Their kids seem to be good kids.” She says: “I feel bad for their children because it’s not their fault, but I get angry because I have to help my own.”
The Denver Post/9News poll found 58 percent of Colorado Hispanics support a law requiring local police to arrest and detain those they have stopped in the line of duty and whom they have reasonable suspicion to believe are here illegally.
It’s a result that runs contrary to national polling of Hispanics, the most recent of which is a CNN-ap Research poll showing 71 percent of Hispanics are opposed to the law.
A closer look at the Colorado result shows that of the 971 registered voters asked about the Arizona law, 82 percent were white and 13 percent were Hispanic, which is how voter registration breaks down in the state. With such a small sample of Hispanics, 123 individuals, the margin of error is 8.9 percentage points. Nevertheless, the percentages are on track with the pollster’s previous results and so cannot be discounted as an anomaly.
I search for an explanation on Border Street, and I find what I have always found there: complexity, contradiction. I find resentment tied to competition for resources and anchored in the belief that some of the neighbors here illegally are disrespectful of community values. I find compassion because illegal immigrants on this block are not faceless and they are not invisible.
They are the 13-year-old neighbor who has been here since she was 7 and wants to become a lawyer. They are the playmates of Longtime Eddie’s granddaughter and, he tells me, “How could I go against their families?”
I find a woman so frustrated with inaction that words pour from her and as the sun sets she does not pause even to turn on the lights. So, we sit in her living room in near darkness and she says of her block that the road was recently paved for the first time in at least 30 years, but other than that, nothing has changed, nothing ever changes, and how long is a person supposed to live with that?
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
