National Image's Peno may have "no idea" as to the center's possible tenants, but according to the Hispanic Chamber, the Latin American Education Fund has signed on in addition to the Hispanic Chamber and National Image. Flores says he's also received verbal commitments from the Asian Chamber of Commerce, the Colorado Native American Chamber of Commerce and the Denver Minority Business Development Center to move into the building that should be completed later this year. "Our Latinos used to be processed there and put in jail," says Flores. "Now we've turned it into a positive. I've spoken with a lot of Latino groups. The vast majority are totally behind the project."
CHAC's Sandoval is optimistic that the building will open eventually. "I believe it probably will, and I hope it becomes some kind of healing mechanism," he says. "I'm pleased Bob and Linda [Alvarado] have stepped forward to act as some kind of catalyst. Until we see some visible evidence that the project is moving along, the community believes it's an open sore."
Cable ready? The old Denver DA's building at Speer and Colfax.
Anthony Camera
Mi casa es su casa: Scott Flores, chairman of the Denver Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, looks forward to a new home in the old DA's building.
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But the lingering dispute over the old DA's building continues to obscure a largely unknown part of that community's heritage -- the fact that Denver's Hispanics were supposed to have their own cable-TV channel before last year ran out. "Most people don't know that was part of the franchise," says LeRoy Lemos, who also works for NEWSED. "I think if people knew, they'd be angry the information wasn't put out there."
Far from losing out on a cable channel, Vigil counters, in the years since the franchise was written, Spanish-language stations Univision and Telemundo have come into the market and now serve Denver's Latino community. (Black Entertainment Television does the same for African-Americans.) "We have coverage," says Vigil. "I absolutely support those two stations."
But those stations don't provide the range of local programming that the HEC might have. (Univision does provide local news, but the programs are all Spanish -- which not all Hispanics speak.) And while the Hispanic market was considered a small niche back when HEC was conceived, that's far from the case now. The purchasing power of Colorado Hispanics in 1998 stood at $6.5 billion, says Yrma Rico, the general manager of KCEC Channel 50, the Denver affiliate of Univision. Rico has been in Denver for eleven years and remembers the days when major advertisers inked month-to-month deals. Now most are signing up for at least a year -- a sign that advertisers have seen the growth of the Latino market and realize it can no longer be ignored.
Still, city officials are happy with the deal. The cable provider tried to do a Hispanic channel, they say. It didn't work, and that's life. "There are casualties in business," says Smits. "We viewed it as a business casualty."
An intentional casualty, says Curtis, who's now a television producer in Lakewood. Mile Hi saw the Hispanic channel deal as an "anvil" it was always "trying to get out from under. They could have been far more generous with the minority community."
