The Latinx experiences in western regions like Colorado and the Front Range are complex, especially after 1848, as both Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants maintained their cultural identity and traditions in a land increasingly dominated by predominately Anglo-American settlements, and in which they experienced increasing discrimination from their new neighbors. By the mid-twentieth century, Latinx people from other parts of the world, including Central and South American and the Caribbean, began migrating to Colorado as part of a more diverse Latinx diaspora across the United States. Their story is one of long-term community-building, perseverance, and resistance against systemic racism—a theme that is reflected in Latinx history across the United States, including western communities such as Fort Collins.

However, between 1910 and 1930, factors in both northern Colorado and in Mexico and the southwest United States compelled more Latinx families to move to Fort Collins. A civil war in Mexico, known as the Mexican Revolution, between 1911-1920 destabilized the country and compelled many Mexican families to move north to the United States. Jobs in the United States, frequently in agriculture and manufacturing, provided the hope of a more peaceful and prosperous life. Nearly a tenth of Mexico’s total population migrated to the United States during this period. Those that chose Fort Collins were drawn by available jobs for, and active recruitment by, the agricultural industry that was booming in northern Colorado at the time. One of the significant recruiters of Mexican Americans to Fort Collins was the Great Western Sugar Company which had purchased the beet sugar factory on East Vine Drive in 1904. Many Mexican families initially found work in the factory’s limestone operation at Ingleside, which became a sizeable lime quarrying facility for Great Western Sugar that supplied processing lime for most of the company’s operations throughout the west. As the community grew, they found jobs working at the factory itself and on the sugar beet in the region farms that supplied Great Western Sugar. Other families worked on area farms that were growing livestock or produce for the surrounding region. Fort Collins’ beet sugar industry had relied on labor from the ethnic Germans from Russia for most of the first decade of production, but the First World War cut off immigration from Europe, and the ethnic Germans moved on to less intensive and better paying work. This led to a labor shortage that Mexican immigrants filled. Approximately ninety percent of new migratory laborers Great Western Sugar brought to Larimer and Weld Counties between 1910-1930 were from Mexico.

 Early Latinx residents in Fort Collins were largely single men working as migrants on area farms and staying in farm shanties, bunkhouses, or hotels and boarding houses in town. However, as Mexican immigrants became a dominant source of labor for Great Western Sugar in the late-1910s, whole families moved to the area. The sugar beet work itself was intense, as sugar beet farming relied on hand laborers well into the 1950s, despite advances in agricultural equipment and technology. Similar to the Germans from Russia before them, Mexican families that relocated to Fort Collins to work in the sugar beet industry adapted to an economic system designed to exploit cheap immigrant labor. In order to keep the beet sugar industry profitable, companies like Great Western Sugar paid farmers to grow beets – farmers who typically relied on contract labor at per-acre prices. To make a living wage, most laborers would commit to tending more acres of beets than they could possibly work themselves. This often meant that full families, including children, were expected to work the fields alongside their parents. It also meant that farm laborers frequently were provided very simple dwellings in order to save on costs. Federal labor reports confirm that assumption, and Colorado’s child labor laws exempted agricultural work from the minimum age requirement.

 The Great Depression after 1929 made the situation worse, with wages dropping despite comparatively strong Colorado sugar prices. Living conditions deteriorating along with them, often with multiple families living in small shacks and other homes in predominantly Mexican American neighborhoods or on farms. Lack of municipal infrastructure, lack of jobs, and lack of quality housing meant that conditions for many Mexican American families were miserable. The economic crisis and competition for dwindling jobs also created public pressure around the country for Hispanic workers to return to their countries or region or origin. The 1937 Sugar Act helped regulate the market and improve conditions for sugar industry workers, but for many Mexican American beet workers, conditions remained poor well into the 1950s due to racism and discrimination in both labor and education. The Bracero Program, a cooperative agreement between the United States and Mexico between 1942 and 1964, attempted to ensure an adequate supply of seasonal laborers for the agricultural industry in the United States. However, this also drove down wages in the agricultural industry, perpetuating a cycle of poverty for many Hispanic workers across the country, including in Fort Collins. As the Great Western Sugar plant in Fort Collins scaled back and closed in 1955, many Latinx workers shifted to other agricultural and industrial work, service work, or joining the construction crews on the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, a massive project to divert Colorado River water to the Colorado Front Range, initiated in 1947 and lasting into the 1950s.

A Mexican American family in Fort Collins faced stark segregation in housing and discrimination in employment and services. Migrant workers on area sugar beet farms lived in poorly constructed shacks that were prone to fires, resulting in many deaths. Work in Great Western Sugar’s limestone quarry was dangerous, killing other workers including a notable explosion at Ingleside in 1908 that killed five Mexican American and three Japanese workers. Families often struggled to acquire or rent property outside of prescribed neighborhoods. Sometimes, local law enforcement enforced these intangible boundaries. Even the construction of Holy Family church in 1929 was a result of tensions in the primary Catholic church for the town, St. Joseph’s at the northwest corner of Howes Street and Mountain Avenue. The Mexican American contingent first established a small church in the former Westside Presbyterian Church building that used to stand on the northwest corner of Cherry and Whitcomb Streets. It later built the Holy Family Catholic Church due to the tiny church’s inability to host the hundreds of Fort Collins Latinx residents seeking Spanish-language services and community in a welcoming house of worship. 

Racism against Mexican Americans was overt in the Fort Collins community. Many Anglo Americans in the city considered all Mexican American residents to be immigrants, despite the fact that many, especially early arrivals, were born in the United States and were from families that had lived in the American southwest since the 1600s. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, discrimination in public places and businesses was a common practice. Businesses  frequently placed signs in their windows reading “white trade only,” “no dogs or Mexicans allowed,” or “no Mexicans allowed.” Mexican American residents were usually barred from downtown lunch counters, had to sit in the balcony at movie theaters, and deferred to whites on city streets, similar to the Jim Crow laws that applied to Black Americans throughout the country at the time. Some stores notably refused these rules, including Nash’s Drug Store on Linden Street, but with the majority of businesses refusing service, accessing basic needs outside of their own neighborhoods and businesses was fraught for Mexican American families. In Tres Colonias, two stores, one in Andersonville and one at 100 E. 1st Street in Buckingham provided local alternatives free from the specter of segregation. 

Educational discrimination was perhaps the worst, imposing multi-generational disparities in access to economic opportunity for Fort Collins’ Latinx families that is still experienced today. The economic advantage of having children working the sugar beet fields meant that they were not in school – a 1923 report showed that children of sugar beet contract workers were absent a quarter of the school year. Even when time allowed Mexican American children to go to school, the schools were often too far to walk to – Fort Collins schools were clustered near downtown in the early 1900s with limited transit options. In 1908, the school district built the Rockwood School in Andersonville to serve Germans from Russia, and later Mexican American, students which provided a nearby opportunity. However, high school remained in downtown Fort Collins, and after Rockwood closed in 19xx, the various elementary schools were simply too far away. Harassment and discrimination from white students and parents made the experience for Mexican American students who could attend classes difficult. The Catholic Church began offering classes out of Margaret Murray’s home at 315 N. Whitcomb Street in 1928, and later out of the church’s former wood-frame building after the 1929 brick church was built. Murray was soon assisted by Margaret Linden and Jovita Vallecillo, the first Mexican American graduate of Colorado Agricultural College (now Colorado State University). By 1934, they were teaching 85 students with four additional nuns as instructors. In 1948, the City condemned the school building and forced classes to move to the new parish hall south of the main church. However, lack of funding forced that school to close at the end of the 1968-1969 school year. 

Environmental racism was prevalent as well, as Latinx neighborhoods were located close to sources of noise, air, and water pollution, including the Great Western Sugar factory, the Colorado & Southern Rail facilities on the northwest side of downtown, and the city dump which used to be located near the Light & Power Plant on North College Avenue, near the small Hispanic neighborhood along Linden Street north of downtown. While the City of Fort Collins annexed Buckingham in 1906, it provided limited public services, and did not annex the other two neighborhoods of Andersonville and Alta Vista until 1974. The City’s investments in public infrastructure made in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods did not extend to these neighborhoods. The sewer line did not reach Alta Vista until the early 1970s and street paving was delayed until 1980. The City had operated sewers south of the Poudre River since the 1880s and began paving streets south of the river in the 1920s. 

As Latinx residents built community among themselves in spite of racism, they created a vibrant social life centered on largely Hispanic traditions. Holy Family Church remained the center of many of these events, including fiestas for various religious and cultural holidays, and quinceañeras for young family members. Among the largest celebrations were Cinco de Mayo, a celebration of the Mexican Army’s defeat of French forces on May 5, 1852, and Mexican Independence Day on September 16. Historically, the Independence Day celebration included a parade on College Avenue, speeches, bands, and other festivities and at one point was one of Colorado’s largest. Other holidays like el Dia de los Muertos on November 1 and the Feast of Our Lady Guadalupe on December 12 were also notable, if more somber, occasions throughout the year.

Holy Family Church became both a religious and social anchor for Latinx residents on both sides of the Poudre River, but it also took on social and economic justice issues on behalf of its congregation. Most notably, Father Juan Fullana became the pastor for the church between 1937 and 1950 and provided leadership in pressing for improvements for Latinx residents. In response to rampant discrimination in the community, Father Fullana established a store and entertainment venue in the church to serve Latinx residents. He opened a cooperative grocery store and often rented a local theater for Spanish-language screenings of films and operated a mop factory out of the basement of the church to help employ out-of-work residents. He left the church in 1950 and moved to Mexico; his life ended tragically there when he was murdered by thieves. In 1975, the neighborhood named its new elementary school Juan Fullana Elementary in his honor (now called the Fullana Learning Center).

 While Holy Family remained the center of the Latinx community, other churches served the needs of the city’s Latinx residents as well. Both Westside and First Presbyterian Churches offered Spanish-language services. The Unitarian Church campaigned against “white trade only” signs in downtown businesses advertising business owners who sought to exclude Mexican Americans, Black Americans, and Native Americans from their establishments. Andersonville hosted a congregation of the Templo Betel Assembly of God, also known as the Spanish Assembly Church, built in 1960 and ministered by John and Orpha Vega starting around 1970.

 After the Second World War, Latinx pressure for better working and living conditions became stronger. eventually leading to the formation of their own American Legion post at 9th and Vine Streets. The G.I. Bill for veterans helped many Latinx families begin accessing better housing and job opportunities that had not existed before. With better jobs and pay came more time to advocate and organize on behalf of the community. In the mid-1960s, Latinx residents formed a chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) as a non-political entity but opened the door to more political action groups in the years that followed. Lee Martinez served on the City’s Human Relations Committee and he and John Romero actively sponsored voter registration drives to get Fort Collins’ Latinx residents to the polls.

 However, younger activists pressed for more radical action to improve conditions. After 1965, Fort Collins area advocates joined with the national United Farm Workers union established by Cesar Chavez to improve working conditions and continue pressing for better access to community services. Students at Colorado State University formed the Mexican American Committee for Equality (MACE), which joined with the Black Student Alliance to pressure university officials to end discrimination both on and off campus. In the 1960s and 1970s as part of a larger national movement for Chicano civil rights, also referred to as El Movimiento, Fort Collins Chicano activists protested the harassment of Chicano men by the Fort Collins Police Department, frequently demonstrating in front of the police headquarters between the 1970s and 1990s.

 This advocacy secured both concrete and symbolic commitments from the City and the school district. The earliest gain came in the form of education. The 1969 closure of the Holy Family parish school and the 19xx closure of the Rockwood School meant that the only elementary school facility for Latinx students was the deteriorated Laporte Avenue school. In 1969, thanks to door-to-door advocacy by Latinx leaders, a bond issue passed to provide funds for a new school in the Holy Family neighborhood. When the school board sought to re-allocate the funds for a new building in a new, white neighborhood in south Fort Collins, the advocates fought back hard. Leveraging the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund Association, and with representation from Frederico Peña, the future mayor of Denver, the neighborhood compelled the school board to reverse the decision. In 1975, the new school named in Father Juan Fullana’s honor was built on the former location of the LaPorte School, now known as the Fullana Learning Center. Despite the success, Latinx student drop-out rates remained high as making Latinx culture more visible and accepted in the school district and broader community has continued to be a challenge in the Poudre School District.

 In the early 1980s, community advocates successfully halted a road-widening project on North Lemay that would have divided the Alta Vista and Andersonville neighborhoods. A new proposed bypass skirts the neighborhood and intended to move heavy traffic off the neighborhood streets near Alta Vista  and Andersonville. In an important moment of symbolism in 1975-1976, local leaders renamed the streets of Tres Colonias from their former, simplistic lettered street names to names that recognized the history and leaders of the neighborhoods. In 1999, the City acquired the former John and Inez Romero house as a city park and museum to tell the story of Latinx history in the city.