Michael Brown and Eric Garner, both unarmed black men, are killed by police. The Academy Award nominations are released, and no people of color are nominated for acting honors.
A conversation about race relations has been taking place across America, a conversation punctuated by bullets, marches, riots and shouting. La Plata County has been rather silent on the subject, although relations between ethnicities and races often can be strained here, albeit with people of Hispanic heritage and Native Americans constituting the larger minorities.
It’s time for the conversation to begin in Southwest Colorado.
Not a new problem
Friction between different ethnic and racial groups is as old as Durango itself.
Whether it was the Chinese who arrived after helping to build the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad branch from Alamosa to Durango, Eastern Europeans and Italians who immigrated to homestead or work in the mines or smelter or the Hispanics and Utes who already had settled in the area, racism was alive and well in La Plata County from the earliest days, which was no different than America at large.
In the 1920s, La Plata County was even home to a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which had its own newspaper, The Klansman.
“They weren’t so much against blacks because we didn’t have a large population, but against foreigners, anyone not 100 percent Anglo-Saxon Christian,” said historian and Fort Lewis College Professor Emeritus Duane Smith. “As I look back, I think they might actually have been more against the changing times in the 1920s with all the drinking and carousing. It wasn’t like it had been in their youth.”
Professor Emeritus Leonard Atencio, who retired as a business professor from FLC, remembers a story about Durango in the first quarter of the 20th century.
“It was taboo to venture north of Sixth Street (now College Drive),” he said. “I remember my father-in-law telling me about being a paperboy. They told him to be sure he got to Haffey’s (at the corner of 10th Street and Main Avenue) before 5 a.m. to pick up his papers because otherwise, he could expect some problems.”
As recently as the late 1990s, tensions, particularly between two groups at Durango High School who were called, in student parlance, the “cowboys” and the “Mexicans,” have erupted into full-scale violence. In 1997, the school held a five-hour mediation session after four large fights, with some students armed with knives and pipes, broke out.
The Durango Police Department has 61 codes for anti-bias behavior, ranging from race to religion to gender to sexual orientation. In 2014, the DPD reported 10 crimes that included an anti-bias element, Sgt. Geary Parsons said.
“If someone spray paints a racial slur on someone’s garage, the original crime is criminal mischief,” he said. “But because what was painted was a racial slur, a charge of anti-bias is added.”
The La Plata County Sheriff’s Office didn’t report any hate crimes per se in recent years, spokesman Dan Bender said.
“But as part of American social structure, La Plata County residents are as prone to anti-bias against race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation as other Americans because we’re human beings feeling different human emotions about different issues,” he said.
The city of Durango has a relatively new Community Relations Commission, which has the mission of “promoting respect and acceptance for diversity within the city.”
Nancy Stoffer, who also is the diversity coordinator for FLC, sits on the commission.
“We do not get a lot of complaints, but one reason, perhaps, is that we’ve only been around a few years, and I’m not sure how much of the general populace knows about it,” she said of their group. “It comes out mostly in the midst of day-to-day workings,” she said of racial conflicts.
African-American in Durango
Every person’s journey is different, and no one person can speak for everyone in a certain group. But experiences can be telling examples of what it can be like to be Asian, black, Hispanic or Native American in our community.
Blacks constitute 12.6 percent of the U.S. population but only 0.5 percent of La Plata County’s population.
“This is definitely not a hub of African-American culture,” said Alex Blocker, a black student at FLC who hails from the South Side of Chicago. “Have I experienced racism here? Sure. But what that looks like here is different.”
Natambu Obleton came to Durango to attend FLC in the mid-1990s. He has gone on to have a career in technology, first as the senior system administrator at Brainstorm Internet and now as a senior network architect for FastTrack Communications, where he plans fiber-optic projects.
Mostly, his experiences in Durango have been positive.
“I’ve been black a long time,” he said with a laugh, “and at 270 pounds and 6 feet, 4 inches, I’m not a little person. I would say at least half a dozen times a year, someone follows me around at a business, and I’m looked at more closely.”
Early in his career, he and two white system administrators were performing service upgrades at 2 a.m. at Brainstorm.
“As we’re moving to another room, we’re greeted by two police officers who said an alarm went off somewhere on the block,” Obleton said. “They asked if I had permission to be there and proceeded to question me. ‘Does anyone know you are here?’ And I said, ‘I can be here anytime I want.’”
The police insisted on calling Alan Klein, Brainstorm’s president at the time.
“I will say that sometimes it starts at an escalated level where it doesn’t need to be,” Obleton said. “I’m often around expensive equipment late at night and always have my credentials with me, but it’s still my word against theirs.”
For nine years, Obleton, a Rotarian, has managed the beer garden at the La Plata County Fair.
“One time, I was leaving at about 1 a.m., walking home down the Animas River Trail with about $20,000 in cash from sales,” he said. “A Caucasian woman was walking alone toward me, and when she saw me, she clutched her purse tightly. I wanted to say, ‘Lady, if you only knew, you’d be taking me down.’”
Sometimes being black works to his advantage, he said. He’s noticed more, and that can result in additional service at restaurants and shops.
Subtle racism almost can be more difficult that blatant racism, Blocker said. And many people don’t recognize their own biases.
“They say that they have Mexican friends and black people as friends, so that means they’re not racist,” Blocker said. “So they think they’re OK, even if subconsciously they think they’re culturally superior.”
Hispanic in Durango
Atencio grew up on his family’s farm near Marvel after his father came to the area in 1905. A Hispanic man in a professional position surprised the community’s white leaders when Atencio started his teaching career at the college in 1968.
“I was invited to tea at the president’s house and was introduced to someone who was a mover and shaker in Durango, and he said, ‘Gee, you guys take really good care of the grounds, and the buildings are always so clean,’” he said. “I didn’t know how to say I was on the faculty.”
He recalled numerous instances when he would walk into a store and be told he didn’t belong there, or he’d be discouraged from eating at a nice restaurant. Atencio is disappointed that it hasn’t gotten much better almost 50 years later.
“My grandson, who plays sports at Durango High School, said some guys got in his face and called him ‘spic,’” he said. “Some kid up in Palisade yelled at him that he should go back where he came from. ‘You don’t belong in the United States,’ he said.”
Students often are offended by things faculty and staff say, said Shirena Trujillo Long, the director of the Centro de Muchos Colores at FLC and the only trained facilitator for the Anti-Defamation League on the Western Slope.
“Mostly, they’ll roll their eyes and get together afterward to talk about it,” Trujillo Long said. “And then they go on.”
Native American in Durango
Southwest Colorado is home to the only two Native American reservations in Colorado, the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute Indian tribes. Ignacio is the heart of the Southern Ute Indian Reservation, and FLC is one of two colleges in the nation to offer free tuition to qualified Native Americans, no matter where they’re from. For these reasons, the Native American population is 6.6 percent in La Plata County, while it’s only 0.9 percent in the United States.
One place Native American students go when they’re experiencing problems is the Native American Center at FLC.
“When a student tells me their story, I try to go to the next person who needs to hear their story,” said Yvonne Bilinski, director of the center and a member of the Navajo Nation. “Cultures often collide in the classroom, especially when students from very traditional backgrounds are approaching faculty about death or family issues.”
Other than conflicts on campus, students have reported being followed around in stores and having things they’ve touched checked, as though they might have gotten them dirty, she said.
Asian in Durango
“Honestly, the only real racism I’ve experienced was from Asian people against me elsewhere,” said Shane Lee, who is Chinese and white in heritage. “I’m really the only one who ever brings it up here, and it’s usually for jokes, but I’ve never felt ‘other’ here.”
Barbara Balaguer, who has a Filipina/Chinese heritage, has found Durango very welcoming.
“I’ve been surprised at how little I’ve been made to feel my ethnicity, but I do hear things out there,” she said. “A lot of factors weigh into that, and part of that is living in a different time. As children, my brother and I were called names in school.”
No easy solution
“The people I’ve been talking to wish this area were more diverse,” Lee said. “They’d rather see us as more colorful rather than one singular color.”
Easing racial tensions and arriving at a more equitable American society and La Plata County community will not result from a one-time conversation but a continuing dialogue.
Trujillo Long said just learning what our biases are can help adjust what we say and do.
“It’s important for us to recognize when the bias in our head is taking over and becoming the prejudice in our hearts, then becoming action in discrimination,” she said. “The goal is to get to the place where we’re pretty aware of our biases and truncate them before they reach the top of the pyramid of hate.”
abutler@durangoherald.com
This story has been clarified to reflect that Chinese immigrants helped build the Denver & Rio Grande from Alamosa to Durango. They were driven out of Silverton and not allowed to work on the Durango to Silverton Narrow Gauge portion of the route because of racism.
Brochure for Community Relatio (PDF)
If you go
The Embracing Diversity Initiative meets with the Prejudice Elimination Action Team from 4 to 5:30 p.m. on the third Thursday of the month at Durango High School. The group is creating trained adult-youth partner coaches to facilitate diversity and cultural competency workshops for community businesses and organizations.
For more information or to join, contact Lauren Patterson at lauren.evaluation@gmail.com or 259-1247.
From 8 a.m. to noon March 14, the initiative will hold a workshop at the Durango Public Library, 1900 East Third Ave. Everyone is welcome.
The Community Relations Commission meets at 4:30 p.m. the fourth Thursday of the month at the North Conference Room at City Hall. A brochure and comment form are available at http://www.durangogov.org/DocumentCenter/View/3537.
Herald Staff
Meanings matter
Terms used in the race-relations discussion can be confusing and technical:
The U.S. Census Bureau considers Hispanic an ethnicity, for example, a matter of cultural heritage and not a race, so it’s possible to be black and Hispanic or Hispanic and white. It includes more than 30 variations under the Hispanic header, based on the country and culture of origin.
“Native Americans are identified based on federal guidelines,” said Yvonne Bilinski, the director of the Native American Center at Fort Lewis College. “If you count students who have Certificates of Indian Blood or can trace a relationship to a family member living on a reservation before 1934, we have about 24 percent Native Americans in the student body. If you count those who self-identify as Native American, it’s more like 30 percent.”
The year 1934 is important because it refers to the Indian Reorganization Act, which secured certain rights to Native Americans. Being identified under the federal guidelines as Native American is valuable at FLC because it allows students to take advantage of a tuition waiver resulting from a land swap between the federal and state governments in 1911.
“That can be a big bone of contention right there,” Bilinski said. “Many students don’t understand why Native Americans get a free ride.”
Asian also is a broad category, covering a region from China and Japan to India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Southeast Asia and “the ’stans” – the six countries that comprise Central Asia.
There’s some linguistic difference between the terms bias, discrimination and prejudice.
According to Webster’s New College Dictionary, bias is “a mental leaning or partiality.” It can be both explicit and implicit, so even the most well-intentioned people may carry negative stereotypes in their heads. Discrimination, according to the dictionary, is “partiality or bias in the treatment or a person or group, which is unfair, illegal, etc.” Prejudice is “suspicion, intolerance or irrational hatred of other races, creeds, social classes, etc., or injury or harm resulting from such judgement.”
Herald Staff
