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Border Street: Warmth brings out new activity in neighborhood

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published March 15, 2007 at midnight

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The paleteros return to Border Street with the warmer weather and longer days. The bells on their popsicle carts are heard up and down the block. A hopeful sound. The sound of spring. A paletero walks by the empty house of the Mexican grandma and past Longtime Eddie's. Eddie is off somewhere, maybe playing pool or arguing with the bureaucrats who control his health care. He might be visiting a friend, a woman around whom he guards his heart because, at 67, he's still not too old to have it broken.

The paletero strolls through the welcome afternoon heat. This is the end of the block where people say, "things have gotten better" and "it's nice and quiet," where the Teacher's mother snaps together puzzle pieces and thinks about the places she'd travel if she could just get her husband to retire.

The paletero is a middle-aged man wearing a baseball cap and jeans, moving now toward the noisier and, for his purposes, more promising end of the street where the huge, extended family of a naturalized citizen gathered over the weekend. The citizen has lived on the block 10 years and he built a patio just for family gatherings. He painted the walls blue and orange and stenciled them with the Broncos' logo. The hours of noise still triggered the neighborhood phone tree. Neighbor calling neighbor: Let's call the police. Another rite of spring on Border Street.

Most of the children live on this end of the block, including the Construction Worker's daughter who turns up her nose at her mother's offer of a sandwich - "I want McDonald's" - and the three grandsons of the Patriarch who ride the bikes their grandpa fixes, not, he says, because he is talented, but because he is cheap, and the children of the American women who live in the subsidized apartments.

The women and their families come and go, but for the time they live on Border Street, they usually remain isolated. This is both by choice and circumstance. This neighborhood knows struggle and how consuming it can be. But, it is also a neighborhood where people define themselves by their response to that struggle, and amid the strong work ethic and belief in the power of the individual, the group of women symbolizes weakness, the consequences of bad choices. In the loose social hierarchy of Border Street, those dependent upon government and taxpayers often occupy the lowest rung.

The American Spouse is aware of their judgment. She does not confront it. Her circumstances shame her. When she moved to Border Street three years ago, it was the first time she entered subsidized housing. Her share of the rent is $23 a month.

"There are people living here who are not doing anything to better their lives and they give us all a bad name," she says. "I look at this as temporary. I am trying to pull myself up. My goal is to be in the medical field and off welfare."

She is a white woman, lovely, with freckles dusting her cheeks. She has been married to a construction worker, an illegal immigrant, for four years. They split up over the summer. He wasn't supposed to be living here anyway, she says. She began secluding herself and her children in their apartment. She was diagnosed with depression. She kept the windows covered, the doors closed. She left Border Street for a while to help her sister. She and her husband reconciled while she was gone. When she came back, she discovered someone had stolen her stereo speakers. But, she answers the front door with a smile. She says: Hello, I'm still here, I'm pregnant again.

The American Spouse is 25. She had her first child when she was 15. This baby will be her fifth. She says she has always wanted many children. This part of her life, a husband and children, she had imagined. The rest of it, she says and shrugs.

"I hate being here," she says. "It's not my kids that make my life hard. It's being a mother and competing with the environment here. The neighbor offered my 9-year-old a beer. Then, with the parties and people fighting, it's so discouraging to come home here. I can't do anything about that right now and that hurts me, knowing my kids deserve better."

She sits on a trundle bed in the living room. A television sits on the floor. There's no other furniture. She says she got rid of most of it after bedbugs infested the duplex. She's not replacing it until she moves, she says. She and her husband are looking at a place near her father's.

"I'm a survivor," she says. "I will survive. I will succeed in this life."

Her oldest son, the 9-almost-10-year- old, is now living with her father, a successful businessman who lives on a quiet, suburban street across the street from a park. It's a better environment, she says.

She says her son was shocked when he saw a Border Street friend on the front page of the newspaper. The boy, the Legal Permanent Resident's son, was pictured bare-chested, picking cacti in the Mexican village where he now lives.

The American Spouse read the story to her son. "He cried," she says. "It was sad to him how his friend had the life of a child here and now he's picking cactus. That was his best friend on this street. He didn't even say goodbye."

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