r/DenverProtests

https://x.com/SSWorks/status/2056442455315165408?s=20

WHAT A POS

Never vote for this man again. Who's the next Colorado governor that is going to save our schools?

Now that it's completely legal to plug in solar with no permits can someone start a mutual aid that builds generators for families struggling to keep their power on? It's something I've thought about for a while and had no idea it was originally illegal.

Does anyone have a background in solar? Is this a stupid idea?

Growing up in Estes Park, I always thought Latino history here was pretty recent. In my head, Mexican presence in town started around my grandparents’ generation. People coming here for work, cleaning cabins, working construction, kitchens, housekeeping, and doing whatever work they could find.

But while reading a National Park Service history book on Rocky Mountain National Park, I found something that made me stop.

On PDF page 109, talking about the CCC camps near Estes Park during the Great Depression, the writer briefly describes the workers:

“An interesting lot, mainly from Denver, one Negro, twelve Mexicans, the rest ordinary Americans…”
— Battell Loomis

That’s it.

No names. No stories. Just “twelve Mexicans.”

Still, that one sentence says a lot.

By the 1930s, there were already Mexican men living and working in the Estes Valley. These camps helped build trails, roads, and infrastructure in Rocky Mountain National Park. The work was hard, especially at altitude, and this was during the middle of the Great Depression.

The same writer also said this about the men in camp:

“These aren’t panhandlers; they are the men we use to make wars, or revolutions, or crime waves. They’re husky, intelligent, clean-living youngsters.”

And then:

“You can build a new state out of men like these.”

Reading that nearly 100 years later, it is hard not to think about those twelve Mexican men.

We do not know their names. We do not know where they came from or whether they stayed in Estes. But chances are, they faced a lot of the same things many Mexican workers still face coming here. Arriving young, ready to work hard, trying to build something better.

The wording of the quote is strange to read today. The author separated the twelve Mexicans from the “ordinary Americans.” But in a way, maybe even he knew there was something extraordinary about them.

Young men, far from easy circumstances, working in the mountains during one of the hardest times in American history, helping build one of the most beautiful places in the country.

History only gave them one sentence.

But they were here.

And they are part of Estes Park history.

Source:
Rocky Mountain National Park Administrative History (National Park Service PDF) (PDF page 109)

Hey friends. Some of you might be familiar with the deportation data project, a FOIA litigation project by faculty of UCB Law School and UCLA; and/or of coldCounter, a database built by the No Concentration Camps in CO coalition off of what has been acquired by that project.

We are in the process of expanding the types of analysis we can produce via GIS. By geocoding the addresses of all the individual facilities represented in the deportation data project's detention schema, we can produce geospacial visualizations like this map.

Legend:

• Symbols on the map represent facilities encountered in the data
  • clicking on a symbol will show you statistics for that facility from coldCounter's analysis.
• The transparency and bloom of the symbol is weighted by average daily population.
  • this allows you to visually see detention population density.
• Symbols representing local and state carceral facilities only show detainee data from ICE's detention records, not local or state law enforcement. From ICE's perspective they are treating them as their detainee.

Are there other visualizations like this that you or your org would like us to produce?

disclaimer: I'm aware that the lat/lon geocoding is not as precise as it could be for the addresses if you zoom in far enough, im 1 week into a 3 week bootcamp, i swear ill fix them. I'm also not 100% confident in the co springs address but it does correlate with other FOIA documentation.