In 1990, the former director of the Urban League of the Pikes Peak Region, John Stokes Holley, published “Invisible People of the Pikes Peak Region,” a history of the Colorado Springs African American community. The title of his book was completely appropriate. Black folks were mostly overlooked in every account. They received little credit for their contributions in the story of General William Palmer, our founder, and were hardly recognized among the thousands of diverse people who contributed to the growth and success of our town at the foot of America’s mountain. The notable exception to this, of course, is the great Fannie Mae Duncan. How I wish that we had a hundred more like her to remember.

Now that we are 150-years old, with close to a million people living in the Metro area and cosmopolitan in character, we should remember another overlooked community: the Hispanics, the Latinos, the Mexican Americans, or as I like to say, the Chicanos. It is a gross oversight in a celebration like the Sesquicentennial to ignore a huge number of people who live here. The usual stereotyped Mexican dancers in the downtown parade, while nice to see, do not represent the working people we need to remember. We forgot somebody. The last I checked, there are over 160,000 mostly working-class Latinos/Chicanos living here.

We admire General Palmer, the enlightened Philadelphia blue-blood whose spirit still guides us. At least we hope that it does. In spite of his Quaker beliefs, Palmer fought heroically in the Civil War with the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry and earned the Medal of Honor.

We still cherish military service in our town. as we do business acumen. Gen. Palmer built his railroad, the Denver and Rio Grande, south from Denver through Colorado Springs. His track layers, rock blasters, bridge builders and laborers were Irish, Italian, and Slavic immigrants. Joining the European immigrants were Black workers and a great many Spanish-speaking people, from southern Colorado, New Mexico, and Mexico. But these humble, hard working people, Blacks, Euro Americans and mestizo Mexicans, never receive any credit for building the railroads, without which there would not be a Colorado Springs. Let’s be very clear about this. What is our Sesquicentennial if not a hollow triumph if we don’t acknowledge the thousands of workers who built the railroads and worked in the mines? Even in the early days they were invisible. The general put his workers in a railroad camp, out of sight and sound of his genteel Little London. He chose a site along Monument Creek in what is now America the Beautiful Park. It was called Conejos, after the Conejos River in the San Luis Valley where the DRG ran its trains. Conejos was mainly a Mexican “barrio,” along with the other Mexican “barrio,” the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad camp along Lower Shooks Run. When I first settled here, fresh from my tour of duty in Vietnam and working for the Human Relations Commission, these areas had a distinctive “barrio” feel to them.

Poor people are always the first to suffer from environmental pollution. When the city built the coal-fired Drake Powerplant, Conejos became polluted with mercury, lead and other toxic metals from the smoke and coal dust. As I recall, the EPA demanded a clean-up. In the early 1970s my job with the Human Relations Commission involved going door-to-door in the Conejos neighborhood telling elderly Chicanos, descendants of Palmer’s workers, that they had to move out of their bungalows and shotgun shanties because the City was going to knock everything down, scrape the topsoil away and haul it off to a toxic waste landfill.

The point is that no history of our town is complete until all the people and their lives are accounted for. In this vein, we should remember other Mexican “barrios” in Colorado Springs and the poverty and neglect that characterized them. In the ‘70s the heavily Hispanic Midland area, original home to the Golden Cycle Mill workers, still had many houses without indoor plumbing. When the Human Relations Commission was tasked with canvassing the neighborhood prior to the federally-funded urban renewal project that has improved conditions there, I visited homes with outhouses in the backyards. This was the recent past, not some long-ago dark age.

Joe Barrera, Ph.D, is the former director of the Ethnic Studies Program at UCCS. He is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War. He teaches U.S. Military History, Mexico and U.S. Border Studies, and Southwest History and Culture.

Joe Barrera