Border Street: Longtime Border Streeter happy to 'live and let live'

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Thursday, November 2, 2006

Border Street is a hiccup of a block. From the air, it might appear as the shortest of a series of dashes strung out over several miles, interrupted by other blocks and streets and homes.

About 50 adults and 30 children live on the block. This is a rough count. The population changes so frequently that neighbors have a hard time keeping track and the straightforward question, "How many people are living across the street now?" is answered in a multitude of ways, including: "Two adults when they are not fighting with each other." And, "Two kids unless you include the weekends and then there's a couple extra." The Fed Up Neighbor would say simply: "Too many."

The street has more native English speakers than Spanish. This is primarily due to the taxpayer-subsidized apartments, which can be rented only to low-income, legal residents. Most American occupants of Border Street are second- and third-generation Hispanics, but it is also home to 11 whites - or as the Census Bureau would have it, non-Hispanic whites - seven of whom live in one 876-square-foot house along with one other adult relative and her child.

Their little house is not typically so crowded, but this is a family that believes in helping family and so room was made last August for a grown daughter, her husband and their three young sons. They'd run into some rough financial ground in the Midwest and came back to Colorado looking for work and a place to find their footing.

The sleeping arrangements have been arranged so that the patriarch and his wife have one bedroom, a niece and her little boy the other, and the three young sons share the third. In the evening, the daughter and her husband inflate an air mattress in front of the television on a plush living room carpet preserved by a house rule requiring shoes to be removed at the door.

One thousand dollars more to pay off and they'll be ready to look for their own place to buy, the husband says. Hopefully, he says, they'll find a first-time homeowner's deal with zero down.

The patriarch of the family moved into the neighborhood 28 years ago, when he was almost 30 years old, and he says he plans to die in the house, which is his way of telling all the Realtors and brokers and investors who stop by or send him offers that they are wasting their breath and his time. He likes it here. He always has, he says.

A wiry man with a wiry beard and hands toughened by work, he has been driving forklifts and front-end loaders for years, and before that he worked at Gates Rubber Co. and would come home with carbon on his shoes - hence the shoes-off rule.

His grandpa was a blacksmith in Denver and he taught the patriarch to value mechanics and independence and told him, "If you're going to do something, do it right," so the patriarch built the first bike he ever owned and repairs bikes now for the neighborhood kids.

The patriarch can fix most things mechanical and it is not uncommon to see him on Sunday with his head under the hood of one of the seven vehicles parked in his driveway and along the front curb and in the backyard. Three of them are classics: a '58 Ford Pickup, a '67 Mustang that belongs to his wife and a '77 Charger Daytona, which may not be the Charger's best year, but is nonetheless beloved.

They all run, more or less, but this has failed to impress neighborhood inspectors who over the last four months have cited the patriarch for parking too many cars on his property, among other things. This has not only led to the patriarch's growing annoyance - "In 28 years I've never been bothered so much" - but also to a $150 ticket. He paid the fine, but his wife got the name of three lawyers just in case it comes to that.

The patriarch and his grown daughter, who found a job as a correctional officer, keep their faces blank when greeting strangers in a way that suggests both reserve and suspicion. This first impression disappears in the face of their shared and enduring love of all things Mickey Mouse and the obvious delight with which the family erected their lavish Halloween display with its three fog machines and a skeleton dancing to Super Freak.

"We spent $100 this year on candy," the patriarch's wife says.

"I don't buy any candy I wouldn't eat," the patriarch says, adding that in the hours leading up to trick-or-treat he managed to consume an entire bag of miniature candy bars.

The patriarch's wife is eight years and two weeks younger than her husband. She is an engaging woman who fell for the patriarch when she was just a girl and he a young man whose grandparents lived down the street from her house in southwest Denver.

"Wait for me," she remembers telling him the day he married her cousin, but he took the long way to her and she to him, and 22 years and a couple of ex-spouses later, they finally found each other.

The patriarch's fondness for holidays – "Wait until you see Christmas" - extends to his periodic display of the American flag. The flag has been noticed by neighbors and has led some to assume that in these polarized times, the patriarch was not simply honoring his country but declaring, "This is the United States, not Mexico."

The patriarch greets news of this assumption with a snort and a shake of his head, as does his daughter who explains: "He's a Vietnam vet."

The patriarch and his wife are not particularly political: They don't vote; they don't even recall ever having a conversation with each other about illegal immigration. They both abide by the first rule of Border Street, the one established almost 80 years ago when it was still called Maggie's Place and was settled by the desperate and hopeful.

"Live and let live," the patriarch says, sipping an after-work beer and lighting up a cigarette. "People don't bother me. The color of your skin does not make a man. What makes a man is someone who lives up to his responsibilities, who does what he should for his family. I drink my beer. But, I tell you what, I wouldn't be drinking if I didn't have food in the house for my family."

In this way, they are like the other white families of Border Street, who appear to have adopted a relaxed attitude toward their Mexican-born neighbors, no matter what their legal status. The patriarch's daughter says she feels comfortable in this neighborhood, it's home to her and she doesn't like focusing on race.

"We all bleed the same color," she says. She sums up her Hispanic neighbors' discomfort with a blunt: "They think the Mexicans make them look bad."

Which holds some truth to it, though on Border Street nothing is ever as simple as it appears.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com