Latino Colorado: The Struggle for Equality in the Centennial State

Mexican Americans and other Latinos make up more than 22 percent of Colorado’s population, play a vital role in its major economic sectors, and are becoming a political force to be reckoned with. Yet most official histories of the state mention them only in passing. Latino Colorado fills this gap in the literature by examining the multifaceted experience of Latinos in Colorado from the nineteenth century to the present, from the old Hispano families of southern Colorado to the new arrivals, and from metro Denver to the state’s rural areas of the Western Slope and Eastern Plains.

Author Ernesto Sagás also explores the ways in which Latinos--as a racialized, subordinate group--have historically interacted with Colorado’s Anglo society in carving out their own spaces while struggling for social and legal equality. He presents a demographic and socioeconomic profile of Latinos in Colorado based on field research and the latest US Census data to dispel common stereotypes while also pointing out areas of concern for state policymakers.

Latino Colorado sheds light on this marginalized community and advances the understanding of the state’s racialized dynamics. It is about everyone in the American West--Anglos, Latinos, and others--and how they interact with and continue to (re)define one another in real and imagined ways in the most mythologized of American regions.

Ernesto Sagás is professor of ethnic studies at Colorado State University and a political analyst for Univisión Colorado. In 2022 he was a Fulbright US scholar in La Paz, Bolivia. He is the author of Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic; coeditor of The Dominican People, Dominican Migration, and Dominican Politics in the Twenty-First Century; and author of several articles on race and politics, democracy and authoritarianism, and immigration policies, among other topics.