A Celebration of Community Leaders for Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month
Discover the inspiring stories of Hispanic and Latinx leaders in Northern Colorado.
In Northern Colorado, countless Hispanic/Latinx leaders have shaped Northern Colorado communities. Celebrating the accomplishments of leaders in the community includes recognizing these individuals faced discrimination, challenges, and hardships unknown to those outside the community.
From “white-only” and “no Mexicans” signs on businesses in Old Town Fort Collins well into the 1950s, to segregated movie theatres and classrooms, to housing and employment discrimination, to breaking through glass ceilings, the individuals featured below (and many others) persevered through remarkable challenges to forge paths for other Hispanic and Latinx individuals in Northern Colorado, contribute to vibrant communities, and create lasting legacies.
You may have been to Lee Martinez park but do you know the story of the man it was named after? Libarado (Lee) was born in 1889 and came to Fort Collins with his family in 1906. He would go on to become a well-respected leader devoted to the Spanish-speaking community. He served in the U.S. Army’s 36th Infantry Division in France during WWI and voted in every election since 1910. Lee also helped in the construction of the Holy Family Catholic Church during a time when people with Spanish surnames were segregated in church services. He also established a scholarship in honor of his son Alonzo Martinez who died in WWII which to date has provided over $300,000 to Hispanic students seeking an education at Colorado State University.
All five of his sons served in the U.S. military. When they returned to Fort Collins, they were excluded from serving in the American Legion Post (a veteran’s organization) and from entering many businesses due to segregation. Lee would fight for their inclusion in the American Legion and became a very active member of the organization. He also served on the City of Fort Collins Human Relations Commission which sought to improve cultural understanding between communities in the city. In 1970, the City of Fort Collins named a beautiful parcel of land near the Poudre River after Lee, some of his descendants continue to call Fort Collins home.
John Romero’s hand-built adobe home is now known as the Mueso de las Tres Colonias and is the only house that remains of original adobe structures from the area of Fort Collins known as Andersonville – part of the Tres Colonias neighborhood. As a strategy to sustain the amount of labor required to harvest sugar beets (also known as “white gold” during their peak harvest) the Great Western Sugar Company would have employees sign 5-year contracts that promised them the materials to build adobe homes after finishing their 5-year tenure.
John and his wife Inez first came to Fort Collins in 1927; John worked for both the railroad and in the sugar beet industry. He was very well known in the Tres Colonias neighborhood even being elected as their mayor unofficially as the neighborhood was not incorporated into the City of Fort Collins until the late 1970s. Together, John and Inez shared seven children. John worked throughout his life against the discrimination faced by the Hispanic community in the City of Fort Collins; up until the late 1940s, most of the restaurants Downtown bore “white only, no Mexicans, no dogs” signs. To this day, John and Inez’s house is a gathering place for the Hispanic community and a center of education.
Charles and Margaret Martinez were beloved Fort Collins power couple. Both were community builders and leaders who came to Northern Colorado at young ages with their families. They married in 1927 and spent the next decade moving houses while they worked for the Great Western Sugar Company farming sugar beets. They later purchased their home from the company in 1937 in the historic Alta Vista neighborhood, an area originally built by the Great Western Sugar Company to house workers and their families.
Charles Martinez was elected as the mayor of Alta Vista multiple times by its residents; the Alta Vista neighborhood was not formally incorporated into the City of Fort Collins until the 1970s despite its close proximity to the central part of the city. The Martinez’s would make the area a community by working to form strong bonds among Hispanic and Latino families through heritage, tradition, and time spent together. They had seven children and attended Holy Family Church, the first church in Fort Collins to have mass in Spanish and a central gathering place of the Holy Family and Alta Vista neighborhoods. Long after the purchase of their home, their street known formerly as “B Street” was renamed “Martinez Street” in honor of Charles and his efforts to connect his community.
One of Jovita Vallecillo Lobato’s personal philosophies was “Tie your wagon to a star. Otherwise, you might not get anywhere.” Jovita Vallencillo Lobato was born in Fort Collins in 1908 – her parents were sugar beet farmers and encouraged both of their children to attend public school and college.
Jovita is the first known Mexican-American to graduate from public school in Fort Collins (in 1932) and became the first Mexican-American student to graduate from CSU (in 1936) with degrees in economics and sociology. Undeterred by societal barriers, Jovita would go on to earn a master’s degree in psychology and teach in schools in Colorado, New Mexico, and New Jersey.
Sixty years after she graduated, she and her brother Salvador were honored at the CSU El Centro Achievement Awards. Over 1,000 Hispanic and Latinx students were enrolled at CSU that year, following in Jovita footsteps.
The three Gallegos brothers grew up in Fort Collins in the 1940s and 50s in the area of the city known as Andersonville, part of the Tres Colonias neighborhood; their parents, Edward and Tina Gallegos first brought their family to Northern Colorado from the San Luis Valley seeking greater opportunities on the Sugar Beet farms. In an interview with the City of Fort Collins, Jerry recalled seeing “white-trade only” signs over businesses in Fort Collins as a young boy and all three of them expressed memories of working the fields through their childhoods.
Their successful company, Gallegos & Sons Sanitation was founded in 1959 when Edward Gallegos and his sons Art, Jerry and Rudy formed a mowing and hauling business that would grow to become a 70-truck fleet of trash and recycling trucks serving the Northern Colorado area and Southern Wyoming.
They were the first to introduce automated garbage collection like the arms we see on our trucks today, the first to bring rolling trashcans to the area, and continually innovated their recycling practices as well as reduced the company’s carbon footprint by purchasing more fuel-efficient vehicles before they sold the company in 2020.
The Gallegos family served Northern Colorado for 61 years. Today, the brothers are still very active in the community and continue to enjoy retirement surrounded by their children and grandchildren.
Guadalupe Salazar came from a family of farmers and grew up working in the sugar beet fields across Colorado. She vividly remembers moving around with her family and living in temporary migrant camps while her parents sought better opportunities for their family of ten to thrive. Guadalupe’s father would encourage her throughout her life to continue her education and thought Fort Collins would be a wonderful place to settle his family; when looking for real estate to buy in the city, he was told that Mexican families could purchase only in Buckingham, Andersonville, or other Spanish colony areas that at the time, which were located outside of Fort Collins city limits. Guadalupe would end up dropping out of school in 7th grade after she stood up for herself against a white student in her class for race-related bullying and was suspended.
She would go on to marry at age 15 and had four children by the time she was 23 when she returned to school for her GED. She continued on to the University of Northern Colorado and double majored in business administration and Spanish and later went on to get her Ph.D. in Education and Human Resources. She later served as the director of CSU’s El Centro for over three decades helping guide Hispanic and Latinx students, some with stories similar to her own. In an interview with CSU’s Source magazine one of her colleagues, Kathy Sisneros, assistant vice president for Student Affairs at CSU, said of Dr. Salazar, “(She) has supported thousands of students over the past three decades, and directly contributed to the success, persistence and a countless number of Latinx students who have graduated from CSU.”
Betty Aargon-Mitotes has spent nearly her entire life in Fort Collins and continually dedicates herself to the preservation of Hispanic and Latinx history, traditions, and culture in Fort Collins. Aargon-Mitotes moved to Fort Collins as a small child from Trinidad, Colorado; her family settled in the Buckingham area of Fort Collins, part of the Tres Colonia’s neighborhood. In her adulthood, she co-founded the Mueso de las Tres Colonias in the Romero family’s original home (another Hispanic/Latinx leader featured in this campaign) and is the founder of the local non-profit Muerjes de Colores which seeks to empower women and children through education.
Her non-profit led the initiative to build “The Hand that Feeds” sculpture at Sugar Beet Park in Fort Collins which is meant to commemorate, preserve, and honor the history of the Hispanic and Mexican people who came to work in the sugar beet fields in Larimer County. Betty has also participated in the creation of two grass-roots films highlighting Hispanic life in Fort Collins, one centered on gentrification in the Tres Colonias neighborhood, and one focused on the hardships faced by undocumented immigrants through the COVID-19 pandemic. Betty is also well known in the Tres Colonias neighborhood for her Christmas Posada traditions and was recently selected as one of 48 notable featured women for Living Her Legacy’s public art exhibit.
Earlier this year, a rare and special thing transpired in Fort Collins at Parklane Mobile Home, now known as Nueva Vida or “New Life” Mobile Home Park. For the 7th time in state history, the residents of a mobile home park rallied together to preserve the land beneath their homes from an owner who was looking to sell the land. Parklane (now Nueva Vida) is home to over 300 adults and children, many of whom have called it home for more than twenty years.
With the help of The Genesis Project and The Matthews House, two neighboring non-profits who had long worked within the community, a new non-profit was formed called Vecinos Unidos or “United Neighbors.” The group purchased their mobile home park under Colorado’s Mobile Home Park Act of 2020 Opportunity to Purchase legislation, outbidding the investor who sought to purchase it originally. The community is creating a resident governance model and now chooses their destinies for themselves, their homes, and their new life.
There are more stories of leaders like these incredible individuals that we are unlikely to ever hear. Many Hispanic/Latinx stories and leaders will go unrecognized in the annals of history. Community members like Betty Aragon-Mitotes and teams like the City of Fort Collins Historic Preservation seek to share and uncover the untold pieces of the past to preserve the ongoing legacy of the Hispanic and Latinx community. The celebration of these stories is not only during Hispanic and Latinx Heritage month, but everlasting for the many generations to come.
