To contact us Click HERE
by Rudy Ch. Garcia
Three Chicanos who live and practice their arts in Denver: aretired factory worker, now artist and music aficionado; a former practicinglawyer turned novelist; a formerly employed bilingual teacher who sculpts hisgardens and fiction.
Thursday night we walked the blocks of what natives call theNorthside. The gentry, developers and transplants have taken out much of itsculture, much as they take out weeds from their yards and the characteristicarchitecture of the neighborhood homes to replace them with foo-foo plants andminimalist houses. So, we walk the blocks, commenting on our loss and deridingthe substitutions.
The second floor apartments on 32nd & Zuni where mexicanofamilies once could afford to live and send their niños to neighborhood schoolsto learn to read and write in their native language are now hundred thou condoswhere Spanish is much less heard, if at all. The former residents relocated tooutlying areas where rent is cheaper and instruction their kids receive now allin English.
The flat-roofed buildings that once housed bars where one ofour fathers and a father-in-laws drank themselves into alcoholism and exchangedstories of cómo era when they grew up in the San Luis Valley or crossed overlooking for more than just cantinas with cold beer and pool tables.
The old tequila bar that served the best chorizo con huevosbreakfast and where you could order obscure tequilas for less than half theprice of the yuppie establishments that sit there now with no Spanish speakersto speak of and food prices that make you wish you weren't hungry. The formerbar owned by relatives of a Jalisco distillery family who succumbed to a lavishpurchase offer that ousted one of the best places to compose fiction on aSaturday morning.
The Anglos passing by us, wondering quien sabe qué about us,some not daring to look up from the dog they're walking nor respond to a hello,no matter that the only difference between the three of us and gringo drunkswho'll later pepper the sidewalks are our physical features.
A plethora of restaurants/bars overloaded with customerswith too much discretionary funds, too much searching for identity and culturein an area they helped strip of the same.
Multi-stored structures marring the skies with the barenessof concrete and glass where once stood brick homes with families, children whowere sent to public, not charter or private schools, where the music ofquinceañeras and birthdays formerly rang out on weekends, and now thousanddollar bikes and BMWs mutely sit on patios or out front.
The old, Chicano bar-Italian restaurant still open. Stillserving cheap drinks and its neo juke box blaring oldies. A kitchen fire andfire alarm end a brief stay.
We walk the sidewalks, the three of us. Admitting somebenefits of progress, though much of that is limited to one day being in aposition to sell our houses for much more than we paid and then being in theposition of leaving what once was.
We talk of places and times and remember-whens; we drinkmore, but not enough. Celebrating recent individual accomplishments; wishingeach other well and future luck. We can't do the same for the old DenverNorthside. The name itself has been taken from us, regurgitated as a string of truncatedlabels more descriptive of the money entering the area, the overpopulation ofdrinking places, the higher income levels of the encroaching gentry.
We had a good time anyway. Because we know more andnotsimply about the history of thisarea. We experienced things here that stay with us, in our artwork and literaryworks. We still feel it. Live it. Lamenting the changes doesn't change that.
Es todo, hoyRudyG
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder