During a recent exhibit opening at History Colorado in downtown Denver, people gathered to honor the past and reflect on how it still impacts the present.
Many walking through the halls, looking at and listening to images and footage from the exhibit, “El Movimiento: The Chicano Movement in Colorado,” had both sweet and sour memories. Some could see themselves or people they knew in photograph and video installations displayed along the walls; an older lady was humming a song she wrote that was playing in the background.
One person was watching the images with particular attention because a significant number of them were his.
“I always thought that they would have some sort of historical significance, because of the people that are in many of the photos are historically significant,” said photographer Juan Espinosa, who documented civil rights leaders like Cesar Chávez, Dolores Huerta and Reies Tijerina. “There was always the feeling that history was being made before your eyes.”
The feeling Espinosa had 40 years ago while documenting rallies will reach a new milestone Saturday: The legacy and struggles of Mexican-Americans who paved the way for a better life for new generations of Latinos living in Denver takes a giant step with the grand opening of the Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales Branch Library
at 1498 N. Irving St.
Although tension among the Latino community — some 700,000 in the seven-county metro area — is notable between those who identify themselves as Chicanos (Mexican-Americans born and raised here who share common indigenous roots) and new immigrants (most who came from Mexico and Latin America in recent decades), there’s no question that Gonzales’ struggles resonate with everyone.
” ‘The Movement’ paved the way, and I’ll tell you how, because right now if we didn’t have attorneys, if we didn’t have people that had education, if we didn’t have people that had fought and knocked down many of the doors through their blood, sweat and tears in the movement, we wouldn’t be where we are with immigration today,” said Ramón del Castillo, chairman and professor of the Department of Chicana/o Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
The History Colorado exhibit was produced in collaboration with “Chicano,” an exhibit recently opened at the Museo de las Americas in the Santa Fe Art District, which focuses on art produced inspired by the Chicano Movement in the 1970s.
“Think about it — we fought for the whole issue of Spanish for a long time,” said Del Castillo. “The Mexicano who is here doesn’t have to have that fight necessarily, because there’s a lot of people who laid the pathway and who said, ‘We believe in bilingual education, we believe that we have the right to speak a different language.’ ”
The Gonzales library will be the first named after a Hispanic person. (There is another co-named after Bernie Valdez and John Perry, the first an educator and the latter a local businessman who owned the land of the Valdez-Perry Library.)
According to Victoria Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for El Museo, the library is what the Hispanic community needs in west Denver.
“It’s a place where people go and can educate themselves, and it’s public, it’s available to anyone, it’s community,” said Gonzales, who describes her parents as Chicanos but herself as Latina or Hispanic or, more precisely, a Texan. “I think it’s going to be a great space for our community to come together, for our culture to connect with each other and to continue gaining knowledge and to move forward.”
Gonzales led protests across Denver during the turbulent civil rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But this honor is not for his political crusade. It is his poem “I Am Joaquín” that inspired a literary genre that is taught in universities across the nation. He also advocated for equal education access for Mexican-Americans in west Denver and opened Escuela Tlatelolco, a charter school his daughter, Nita Gonzales, continues to operate today.
She spoke of the pride the Gonzales family feels when it comes to the new library.
“Corky inspired compassion, humanity and action through his work as a writer, boxer, organizer, activist and leader,” she said in a statement released by Denver Public Library. “The new Rodolfo ‘Corky’ Gonzales Branch Library ensures that the works and history of his life and the Chicano movement will live on.”
Del Castillo goes further: “It also let the system know that we have the right to choose our own heroes. For the longest time, they’ve tried to tell us who our heroes were, and our heroes don’t happen to be the same heroes they believe in necessarily.”
Diego Aparicio: 303-954-3382, daparicio@denverpost .com or twitter.com/diegoap
Rodolfo “corky” gonzales branch library
When: Sat. Feb. 28, starting at 11 a.m.
Where: 1498 N. Irving St. (at Colfax)
Who: The public is invited to join Mayor Michael B. Hancock, District 1 City Councilwoman Susan Shepherd and other officials
