Coloradomtnman
Rational and proud of it.
Really........ I lived in Denver 13 years ago near 38th and Zuni, very Hispanic neighborhood at the time, now it has become quite yuppified. I got along with my neighbors because they heard me playing Santana a lot(one neighbor told me with a thick Mexican accent...."you know a lot about Santana for a white boy!". There were gunshots almost every night, I slept with a 357 under my pillow during the summer since the house had no ac (typical in Denver) and I had to keep the windows open. The house in front with 3 generations of Garcias, was shot up in a drive by. The Garcias, most on some form of welfare, had keg parties a minimum of 4 times a week in their backyard/my front yard. There was always plenty of weed available also. I enjoyed my time there because I made an effort to fit in, but, it was also a very scary place to live compared to my neighborhood now........ I don't think twice about walking down my street at 3 am to check my mail........ wouldn't of happened there.
One other thing, these people were easily the biggest racist I have ever been around, I am from the deep deep south and have never heard the word ****** used as often as in one conversation with the Garcias. They disliked all other races including the "wet backs" (their term) that were everywhere in the Denver area. When my ex-girlfriend living in the Liberal Republic of Boulder told me she wanted to visit Nepal to see another culture, I told her to save her money and stay in my neighborhood for a couple of weeks.......... she didn't, that wouldn't have given her any lib-cred. She was always quick to throw out the racist accusation even though she lived in a place that was overwhelmingly white......... they only allowed blacks in town to play football at CU.
That's weird, I work near 38th & Zuni, and I don't see any Yuppies at all. I don't see anything but Latinos. That itself is no problem, but 25 years ago, that area was known as "little Italy". What suprises me, that LEGAL Mexican immigrants are very uncomfortable around illegal aliens. That is something that rarely gets any attention. Illegal aliens put everybody off. And the reason is pretty damned obvious. They don't want to adopt the host culture, they want to ignore us. As if we didn't matter or exsist. That is something immigrants NEVER do. Which goes back to my original post. What do we do with these people? I don't know.
The last time I was there , about 3 years ago, it appeared that many young professionals were rebuilding the classic old homes in that neighborhood, I figured it would continue, you obviously would have a much better idea of what is happening there now.
Its true. The Highlands are being rapidly gentrified. There are blocks where the residents are hispanics, then across the street are blocks of young hipster kids, and then the next block over are old decrepit Victorian-era houses that have been remodeled into nice, expensive homes for yuppies. Kinda like Lodo and just north of downtown at Five Points and the Cole neighborhood, where I live at 36th and Williams, where upper-middle class young white couples are buying fixer-uppers and slowly changing the 'hood into the 'burbs. There's no way in hell I would've lived where I do now 10 years ago with all the gang violence that Denver was going through at the time, but things have certainly changed.
Now the worst places to live are Commerce City, Montbello, Saudi Aurora, East Colfax, West Colfax (Federal and west until you get to west Lakewood/east Golden) south Federal, and Sheridan and Wadsworth around 6th Ave. And those places aren't that bad.
Boulder isn't the liberal paradise it used to be. At least not genuinely so. There are the wealthy, psuedo-liberals that make up the most of the residents of the western side of town; then there are the real liberals who attend Naropa or who live in Nederland, and the rest of Boulder is far more conservative including CU. When I attended CU three years ago there was graffiti found on some of the buildings saying things like "******" or "Fag" and one of the professors, a lesbian, had received death threats. Ward Churchill, another psuedo-liberal, was kicked out of the school because of his little Eikman comment (not because he was a fraud - he won the suit recently. Don't get me wrong, he was a fraud but that isn't why he was fired). The student council and government were overwhelmingly Republican (which surprised me because I thought it didn't really matter when in college what polititcal party one belonged to if serving in student government) but the student body president made it very publicly known that he was a conservative Republican. Denver has become far more liberal than Boulder, culturally speaking, even if Boulder still retains a large liberal population and a liberal government. It won't last. "Times they are a changin'."