On a chilly March afternoon, a white Jeep sat parked in a lot on Denver’s Auraria Campus, marking the spot where Rita Gomez’s grandparents’ house once stood.
Looking across the lot, Gomez pointed to the Campus Arts building. A faraway expression fell over the 67-year-old’s face as the college students bustling around her faded for a moment.
“That was the old pickle factory. And over there was the corner store,” Gomez said, her finger trailing across the college yard as she outlined a bygone era of Denver history.
Since the 1970s, the 150-acre urban campus — home to the Metropolitan State University of Denver, the University of Colorado Denver and the Community College of Denver — has been a downtown landmark where hundreds of thousands of students have learned, grown and earned degrees.
But its presence came at a steep cost: the destruction of a working-class, largely Latino community and the displacement of hundreds of Colorado families, including Gomez’s.
As the 50th anniversary of the disbandment of Denver’s oldest neighborhood approaches, Colorado historians are eager to capture the stories of the people forced out of that community while they’re still around. And with the recent expansion of the full-ride scholarships available to the displaced and their descendants, those whose families were uprooted are keen to spread the word about the free educational opportunities — restitution after all these years.
During her recent visit, Gomez — who now lives in Thornton — stood on the porch of her childhood home at 1050 Ninth St., one of the few remaining original houses in the middle of the Auraria Campus that were spared the wrecking ball. More than 300 homes in the Denver Westside community were demolished. The building that once housed Gomez and her seven siblings now serves as CU Denver’s English Department.
Gomez’s eyes brimmed with tears as she hugged the porch column overlooking what used to be her front lawn, absorbing a view so familiar yet entirely changed. She thought of her grandparents’ home down the street, skipping rope and rollerskating.
She remembered the fear, the tears in her mother’s eyes, when their family was told they had to leave the only home they knew.
Because of the financial impacts of the displacement on their family, her brother Gregory Gomez quit school in eighth grade to care for his siblings while their mother worked.
“That was a scary time for us all,” Rita Gomez said. “But the nostalgia of this place — oh, it brings back so many beautiful memories. Memories you can’t replace.”
Denver’s oldest neighborhood destroyed
Bordered by Colfax Avenue, Speer Boulevard and the South Platte River, Auraria — derived from the Latin word for “gold” — was established in the 1850s by a group of miners. The area is the oldest Denver neighborhood, predating the city’s establishment, said Annie Levinsky, executive director of Historic Denver.
Auraria was a dense, tight-knit neighborhood for working people, Levinsky said, with a large immigrant population that grew to be a predominantly Latino neighborhood known as the Westside. Residents walked everywhere, Levinsky said, fostering the kind of community where everybody knew everybody and looked out for one another.
“It’s that kind of neighborhood that doesn’t exist as much in our cities anymore,” Levinsky said.
Displaced Aurarians
To learn more about the requirements and application process for the Displaced Aurarian Scholarship Program, visit the three institutions’ websites:
University of Colorado Denver
Metropolitan State University of Denver
Community College of Denver
If you’d like to become involved in the memory workshops, email History Colorado’s Marissa Volpe at marissa.volpe@state.co.us.
The neighborhood along with much of Denver’s Westside suffered from redlining during the 1930s, Levinsky said. Redlining is a discriminatory practice in which federal programs providing government-insured mortgages for homeowners shirked giving aid in neighborhoods where property values were most likely to decrease — largely low-income areas where people of color lived.
Then, in 1965, a major flood hit the neighborhood, Levinsky said, damaging property.
“The flood spurred this idea the neighborhood was blighted and should be redeveloped,” she said. “That was the era of urban renewal zeitgeist. The general thinking was this was how cities were going to evolve — clear all this old stuff away and build gleaming new things.”
By this time, the city of Denver already was planning to displace the community, said Lucha Martinez de Luna, associate curator of Latino heritage and culture at History Colorado. The concept of a three-campus higher education hub was buzzing, and the city wanted to uproot the Auraria neighborhood to make it a reality, she said.
“If it was an affluent neighborhood, they would have thought twice,” Martinez de Luna said. “They felt like they had every right to do that to a redlined community and, obviously, the systemic racism at that time was pretty rampant.”
According to MSU Denver, the school — then a college, not a university — received $12.3 million in federal urban renewal assistance in 1968 to fund the acquisition of the Auraria land and pay for the relocation of its hundreds of residents and nearly 250 businesses.
A local effort to stop the displacement swelled, said Virginia Castro, who attended MSU Denver in 1969 and became an activist for the Westside. Castro went door to door educating neighbors about the situation, but opposition efforts were rebuffed. In 1969, Denver property owners passed a $5.8 million bond issue, which paved the way for state funding toward the Auraria campus.
Families were told they had to go. Thirty-six square blocks of the Westside neighborhood were demolished beginning in 1972.
Jogging distant memories
The buildings may be gone, but the memories couldn’t be pulverized. Dawn DiPrince wants to make sure they stay pristine.
What is it like to help a community write its memoir? DiPrince has experience.
The History Colorado executive director has led memory recording workshops across the state, from Pueblo to the San Luis Valley.
The first Saturday in March, dozens of the people displaced by the Auraria Campus and their descendants gathered inside one of the neighborhood landmarks still standing, St. Cajetan’s Church, to share and record their community’s history.
St. Cajetan’s no longer serves as a house of worship, but there was reverence in the way attendees spoke about their lost neighborhood. DiPrince asked them to draw floor plans of their homes or special spots in the neighborhood. She asked them to write down sounds, smells, songs, tastes or tactile memories that surfaced.
“All that social and cultural history — the experts of that are the people who lived in these places,” DiPrince said.
Elders and their children sat around tables in the former church many were baptized in, etching their bedrooms and neighborhood blocks while trading breathless stories of their youth.
DiPrince’s calls for volunteers to share their work began with one timid hand raised after much prompting and ended in a line at the microphone, where speakers shared their family names, their old addresses, their favorite places to eat and play, where they worked, and what mischief they created.
History Colorado hopes to continue their memory work with the displaced Aurarians and amass enough material — old photographs, oral histories — for a collection that tells the community’s story and is accessible to them, too.
“Oftentimes when we do historic preservation work, we think a lot about the buildings and the architecture, but I always wanted to know the stories of the people who lived in the buildings,” DiPrince said. “The things that can often get lost in more official archives are the stories of day-to-day existence: somebody’s sacraments or who’s the midwife and where were the babies being born, how are the kids playing with each other.”
Ninth Street’s 8-year-old mayor
The memory-jogging workshop was more of a marathon for 66-year-old Eric Lozano, who boasts a self-described elephant’s memory.
Days after the workshop, Lozano returned to 1033 Ninth St., home to MSU Denver’s Honors Program — and, decades ago, Lozano’s grandparents. His childhood house across the street was among those demolished. A campus bike rack stands in its place.
Lozano, who now runs a construction company, was an altar boy at St. Cajetan’s. He went to school at St. Elizabeth of Hungary Roman Catholic Church, which still stands and operates as a campus ministry. As a boy, he shimmied up pipes on his neighbor’s houses to scale their rooftops and throw snowballs at passersby.
He spent his youth sprinting through the defunct Auraria neighborhood alleyways, getting up to no good in nearby junkyards and forging lifelong friendships with the kids on his block.
“I was just a kid, but I knew everybody and everybody knew me,” Lozano said. “People used to say I was the mayor down here. Then they split us all up.”
Lozano was 8 years old when his family was forcibly moved from their Denver Westside home, but the neighborhood is so important to him that he visits what’s left of it a few times a year.
The Ninth Street Historic District — the strip of 14 original Victorian-style homes built between 1872 and 1906 — was saved with the help of a grassroots community effort and the backing of Historic Denver in the 1970s. They’re used as campus buildings now.
Lozano’s favorite crabapple tree near his grandparents’ house still towers, and he makes an annual trip to savor its fruits.
“It’s got this distinct, pungent taste that I’ve always liked,” said Lozano, who even brings his kids and grandkids to show them their roots.
“I’d probably still be here if they didn’t make us move,” Lozano said. “I wish they hadn’t. This was our home.”
Lozano watched as students shuffled between classes and hoped more took an interest in learning the history of their institutions — or at least appreciated the crabapple tree when it’s in season.
Scholarship for displaced, descendants
Lauren Mondragon heard the lore of her family’s upbringing on Ninth Street so often that the 18-year-old MSU Denver student wanted to check out the famed house for herself.
One day last semester between classes, the exercise science major sat on the porch of her great-great-great grandma’s house — now Auraria Higher Education Center office space — and bumped into Judy Montero, the campus’s chief of staff.
Mondragon asked Montero what the house was used for now. When Montero learned the student’s connection to the building, she invited her and her family inside for a tour.
“You go inside, and it looks the same as the pictures my family has,” Mondragon said. “It’s crazy cool and old.”
Mondragon’s generational connection to the campus earned her a full ride through the Displaced Aurarian Scholarship Program, a promise from all three schools originally to pay for the education of any residents who were forced out and their children and grandchildren.
The scholarship was expanded his spring so that all direct descendants of people who lived in the Auraria neighborhood from 1955 to 1973 will be eligible for free undergraduate or graduate programs — in perpetuity.
Since the scholarship was established in the 1990s, the three schools have spent $5.4 million to cover the cost of higher education for more than 1,000 of the displaced Aurarians and their offspring, according to the Auraria Higher Education Center.
At the memory workshop, some attendees said they didn’t know about the scholarship or had found out about it too late, but hoped family members down the line could use it.
Lozano and Gomez paid for their degrees — Gomez took out a second mortgage on her house — but some of Lozano’s children are using the free educational opportunities. Gomez, who worked for the U.S. Post Office from 1978 to 2018, hopes others in her family can, as well.
“I want better for my kids,” she said.
Gomez was devastated to watch her family, who lived houses away from each other, get torn apart in the name of higher education institutions neither she nor so many of her neighbors had the opportunity to attend. While she didn’t earn a degree on the Auraria Campus, her upbringing in the neighborhood taught her life lessons she’ll never forget, including that it takes a village — or a neighborhood — full of love and support to raise a child.
“I love that it’s a college,” she said. “Maybe it’s a chance to study the neighborhood we grew up in.”
Now that Mondragon is familiar with her great-great-great grandma’s home, she swings by often to eat lunch on the porch between classes.
“Every time I go, I’m like, ‘Hi, Great Grandma,'” Mondragon said. “Sometimes I go visit just to feel that connection. It’s cool to be where your family used to be. Having this scholarship pushes me to graduate and actually finish school and make my family proud so nothing goes to waste. Since they got moved out, at least our family gets something in return, you know?”
