by Rudy Ch. Garcia
Three Chicanos who live and practice their arts in Denver: a
retired factory worker, now artist and music aficionado; a former practicing
lawyer turned novelist; a formerly employed bilingual teacher who sculpts his
gardens and fiction.
Thursday night we walked the blocks of what natives call the
Northside. The gentry, developers and transplants have taken out much of its
culture, much as they take out weeds from their yards and the characteristic
architecture of the neighborhood homes to replace them with foo-foo plants and
minimalist houses. So, we walk the blocks, commenting on our loss and deriding
the substitutions.
The second floor apartments on 32nd & Zuni where mexicano
families once could afford to live and send their niños to neighborhood schools
to learn to read and write in their native language are now hundred thou condos
where Spanish is much less heard, if at all. The former residents relocated to
outlying areas where rent is cheaper and instruction their kids receive now all
in English.
The flat-roofed buildings that once housed bars where one of
our fathers and a father-in-laws drank themselves into alcoholism and exchanged
stories of cómo era when they grew up in the San Luis Valley or crossed over
looking for more than just cantinas with cold beer and pool tables.
The old tequila bar that served the best chorizo con huevos
breakfast and where you could order obscure tequilas for less than half the
price of the yuppie establishments that sit there now with no Spanish speakers
to speak of and food prices that make you wish you weren't hungry. The former
bar owned by relatives of a Jalisco distillery family who succumbed to a lavish
purchase offer that ousted one of the best places to compose fiction on a
Saturday morning.
The Anglos passing by us, wondering quien sabe qué about us,
some not daring to look up from the dog they're walking nor respond to a hello,
no matter that the only difference between the three of us and gringo drunks
who'll later pepper the sidewalks are our physical features.
A plethora of restaurants/bars overloaded with customers
with too much discretionary funds, too much searching for identity and culture
in an area they helped strip of the same.
Multi-stored structures marring the skies with the bareness
of concrete and glass where once stood brick homes with families, children who
were sent to public, not charter or private schools, where the music of
quinceañeras and birthdays formerly rang out on weekends, and now thousand
dollar bikes and BMWs mutely sit on patios or out front.
The old, Chicano bar-Italian restaurant still open. Still
serving cheap drinks and its neo juke box blaring oldies. A kitchen fire and
fire alarm end a brief stay.
We walk the sidewalks, the three of us. Admitting some
benefits of progress, though much of that is limited to one day being in a
position to sell our houses for much more than we paid and then being in the
position of leaving what once was.
We talk of places and times and remember-whens; we drink
more, but not enough. Celebrating recent individual accomplishments; wishing
each other well and future luck. We can't do the same for the old Denver
Northside. The name itself has been taken from us, regurgitated as a string of truncated
labels more descriptive of the money entering the area, the overpopulation of
drinking places, the higher income levels of the encroaching gentry.
We had a good time anyway. Because we know more andnot
simply about the history of this
area. We experienced things here that stay with us, in our artwork and literary
works. We still feel it. Live it. Lamenting the changes doesn't change that.
Es todo, hoy
RudyG
1 comment:
I think this deserves a wider Denver audience - maybe to the Post or Westword....
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