Displaced Aurarians finally gain control over what remains of their Denver neighborhood

After nearly five decades of advocacy, Frances Torres will finally get the chance to exert some institutional power over the Denver land from which she and her family were forcibly evicted.

On Wednesday, the board of the Auraria Higher Education Center — the downtown campus that is home to the University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and the Community College of Denver — approved a master plan for the coming years.

That planning document outlines the future of Auraria’s development, beginning with a hard-earned concession to the displaced residents and their descendants who sacrificed their homes in the largely Latino neighborhood that the city razed in the 1970s to build the campus. to build.

A strip of about a dozen Victorian homes, now called the Ninth Street Historic Park, was saved from destruction through grassroots organizations and still stands on campus today. But who gets a say in what happens to Ninth Street has been a point of contention for years, as displaced residents fight for more control over the land they used to call home.

In a resolution adopted Wednesday alongside the master plan, the Board of Directors established the Auraria Historic Corridor on the 150-acre campus, an area that includes the Ninth Street Historic Park and St. Cajetan’s Church. The designation acts as a boundary around what remains of Denver’s former Westside neighborhood.

And a new nine-member committee – with displaced Aurarians and their descendants holding the majority of seats – will oversee the planning and use of the historic corridor. Plans for art, good educational signage and a medicinal garden, among others, all fall under the remit of the new committee.

Nolbert Chavez, an elected CU regent who helped renovate Ninth Street, called the resolution “a very big deal.”

“Nowhere else in the country has a community ever been displaced and then given back this kind of genuine commitment,” said Chavez, who studies displaced communities as part of his doctorate. work at CU Denver.

“The purpose of the Auraria Historic Corridor,” the resolution states, “is to celebrate and honor the history and legacy of the people and places of Auraria before the founding of the campus.”

The resolution also created two reserved parking spaces for displaced Aurarians in the Juniper Permit Lot at Seventh and Curtis Streets.

“Thank you from my displaced Aurarian heart,” Torres said Wednesday during the board meeting in the campus’s Tivoli Student Union. “If my parents were here, Phillip J. and Petra Torres, they would be so proud of everything we have done. Growing up, we weren’t even allowed to play in this building, the Tivoli. I stand here now and think how happy they would be if we could say we have a stake in this campus.

“But most importantly,” she continued, “I think our relationship is much more positive, and the healing process we’ve longed for is beginning.”

In February, dozens of displaced Aurarians showed up at a campus board meeting with a list of demands that amounted to more say in what happens to Ninth Street.

Virginia Castro, an activist who has fought alongside the displaced Aurarians since 1969, told JS that enough people had come to finally prove they were not retreating.

“Ultimately, we had to show those in power that it wasn’t just a few of us wandering around,” Castro said. “There are a lot of people and if you experience trauma, it doesn’t just go away. You deal with it and put it somewhere and people still want to talk about it.