‘We’re still here’: Displaced Conejos residents reunite to remember their lost Colorado Springs neighborhood
The historic Conejos neighborhood was more than a few blocks of houses on the edge of downtown Colorado Springs. It was a close-knit community whose residents saw each other as family.
The Conejos neighborhood reunion on Saturday at the Pioneers Museum celebrated the Conejos exhibit’s five-year-mark and the families behind the history — but it was much more than that for its descendants.
Families who once resided in the neighborhood that was torn down in the early 2000s and replaced by America the Beautiful Park gathered for a family reunion of sorts, greeting each other with tears and hugs, reminding each other of the community they once shared.
“It takes a village, and we had that. I wish my kids could experience it,” Berto Armando, a resident of Conejos from 1957 to 1983, said while choking back tears.
Armando, like many Conejos residents, was born and raised in the neighborhood. He recalled the names of every neighbor who lived on his block, though over 40 years has passed since he lived in Conejos. He said the neighborhood meant too much to forget.
Christine Garcia-Valdez shared a similar sentiment. She spoke of her youth in Conejos and remembered the love that community members had for one another. Garcia-Valdez’s parents met and fell in love in Conejos, she said, then their siblings, her aunt and uncle fell in love and married, too.
Garcia-Valdez says she finds peace in the fact that her children were able to experience Conejos before its fall in the ’80s.
“When my daughters were young girls, they would come spend the summer with my grandmother, so they got to experience the neighborhood,” she said. “Now they have memories of it themselves. (They saw) how important it was for our neighborhood to be such a knitted community.”
Though the memories will live on forever, Garcia-Valdez wishes more people would acknowledge their history. “We’re still here. We’re still around,” she said.
For the reunion, beyond teary-eyed reminiscing, a Mexican folklórico dance was performed and a mariachi band filled the Tejon and Vermijo square with life.
