Dear Mexican: I’m curious as to the meaning of the term “Viva la raza,” which I have often heard expressed by my friends and family. I know what it translates to, but I don’t know why we say it. I happen to be what some call a “half-breed,” and therein…
Our January 10 issue featured a caricature of Colorado’s Secretary of State on the cover, along with the headline “Scott Gessler Is Always Right.” Gessler liked the article so much that he used it for a campaign fundraiser, promising to give an autographed copy of the issue to “anyone who…
When Mayor Michael Hancock delivered his third State of the City speech on July 15, he skipped the clunky slogan that has echoed in so many other mayoral talks: “Delivering a world-class city where everyone matters.” But apparently he was just giving it a brief rest, because the phrase was…
Dear Mexican: I had a conversation today with an eighteen-year-old female Mexican co-worker that completely blew me away. She has a three-month-old baby with her nineteen-year-old (also Mexican) unemployed boyfriend. They have just found out that she is pregnant again. After listening to her sob about it, I asked her…
What’s the most dangerous stretch of road in Colorado? After the slaying of an airman in LoDo last Saturday, some people might say 15th and Market streets. Anyone who’s gotten stuck on the mean streets of Cherry Creek might suggest First Avenue. But our nomination this week is Marksheffel Road…
Fire up! Expect a packed house at 8 a.m. today, when Denver’s Independent Audit Committee will be briefed on the “eagerly anticipated audit” of Denver’s Medical Marijuana licensing and regulation process. For the audit, the Denver Auditor’s Office assessed the policies and practices of the Department of Excise and Licenses’…
Dear Mexican: I walked into Carl’s Jr. the other day and gazed at the dozen middle-aged women of Mexican descent hustling and bustling around the kitchen. A flawless performance, yet I couldn’t help but think of my days as a youth and the responsibility I learned from my first job…
“No exercise groups of any size permitted in this area.” Those signs started popping up around Denver parks this year, discouraging groups of early-morning runners and mid-morning mommies pushing strollers in syncopated workouts. The city’s crack-down on organized exercise seems so ludicrous that it even rated a story in the…
Dear Mexican: I live in La Habra, and I’ve noticed that the local Mexicans have a real affinity for palm trees — the more, the better. Some houses have more than fifty planted in a 10’x20′ front yard, so many you can’t see the house. What’s up with this? Is…
Jaxine Bubis was feeling the heat last week, after it was revealed that the would-be Republican challenger of embattled Senate president John Morse in his recall election had written erotica under the pen name Jaxine Daniels, including 2004’s Beantown Heat. El Paso conservatives were shocked — shocked! — by some…
This diamond is really in the rough. By now, Homeless Diamond — the summer softball league organized by real-estate developer Joe Carabello whose players are homeless men — should be well into its third season. But the Denver Department of Parks & Recreation decided to do a major, and needed,…
No matter how sensitive the University of Denver is these days, it keeps getting spanked. First, the school got bashed by boosters of Denver Boone, the onetime Pioneer mascot. Then some loyalists griped about a commission to investigate the role of John Evans, the territorial governor who founded the school,…
For the past eleven years, Colorado Inside Out, the weekly public affairs roundtable on Colorado Public Television, has taken an annual trip in the Colorado Time Machine. The show’s reported on current events of 1912 (last year’s show, when I played Margaret “Molly” Brown or 1951 (the 2011 episode, when…
Dear Readers: My columna a couple of weeks ago about whether Aztec savagery influences violence in Mexico today drew muchos responses, both bueno and malo. Here are two: Dear Mexican: I enjoy reading all of your replies and was thinking about the last reply you wrote about the violence/Aztec blood…
It could have been worse: The University of Denver could have been stuck with the Exterminators instead of the Pioneers. “Exterminator” is the label that Major Edward Wynkoop slapped on then-territorial governor John Evans after he endorsed “the destruction and killing” of “all hostile Indians” — an endorsement acted on…
Will Guy didn’t set out to minor in civics when he transferred to the University of Denver. He just wanted a good education in design. “On my first tour,” he recalls, “I just out of curiosity asked what the mascot was. The tour guide gave me a puzzled look and…
“I’m a welder and a family man, and I tell you, that feels pretty great,” says Seth Lee. It sounded pretty great, too, as this welder/family man stood before a crowd gathered today in the Capitol to talk about how far he’s come since that day in 1998 when he…
Don’t haul out the peanuts and Cracker Jack just yet: The opening of Sonny Lawson Field has been delayed from today to let the new sod take hold — and that means the first game of the Homeless Diamond’s third season has also been pushed back, to 9 a.m. Tuesday,…
Baseball has always been big in Five Points; in On the Road, Jack Kerouac described going to a game on Welton Street one night among “all humanity, the lot.” That game was on a field renamed Sonny Lawson Park in 1972, and it’s still home to one of the most…
Dear Mexican: I’m a U.S.-born Mexican who spent part of my life growing up in Tijuana. Why do Mexican-Americans from Santa Ana and South Gate always think they’re harder than the rest of us Mexicans, yet their neighborhoods are like a hundred times better than the colonia I grew up…
The half-life of plutonium is 20,000 years — and it looks like books about plutonium have a long shelf-life, too. When Kristen Iversen decided to write about growing up in the shadow of Rocky Flats, she “wasn’t sure it would get published,” she says, even though she’d had earlier success…
Judge Herbert Stern will decide on Friday whether the city’s swap of eleven acres by Hentzell Park to Denver Public Schools in exchange for a DPS facility at 1330 Fox Street can go through — or will instead go to a vote of Denver residents on the November ballot. Meanwhile,…
