Multi-Cultural

| I don’t understand |

| No entiendo |

| 理解できない |

| Ik begrijp het niet. |

| En ymmärrä |

| Ich verstehe nicht |

| не разбирам |

| Δεν καταλαβαίνω |

How many languages have been spoken in the streets of Hotchkiss?

How many Ute place names

are still on our lips?

| Saguache |

| Uncompahgre |

| Weminuche |

| Tabeguache |

| Tomichi |

| Cochetopa |

| Yampa |

How many last names have changed since moving to Somerset?

Read through local newspapers from the teens & 20s, and you’ll read accounts of ‘aliens.’ They aren’t speaking of extraterrestrials – no, they just mean immigrants. That term – alien – does perhaps give a better sense of how different we all were back then. There was much concern about unassimilable cultures and of outsiders taking local jobs. Even geography has changed names depending on the political climate of the times:

What we now call Lamborn Mesa was first named German Mesa for the early German homesteaders who settled there. The name was changed to Liberty Mesa during WWI, but the name didn’t stick. Sometime after 1920 the name was changed to Lamborn.

The following from the Delta Independent – Volume 36, Number 39, October 11, 1918 – speaks from that wartime worry:

In peacetime, the main issue of race & culture was who would be hired to labor in the North Fork’s orchards & mines? For Somerset, like most mining regions, diversity was encouraged as a means of dissuading union organization. Strikes are far less likely if only a fraction of the labor-force speaks the same language. And yet, read the gravestones up at the Somerset Cemetery, & you’ll find Fins lying next to Yugoslavians.

The pressure to learn English has always been strong here, & so very few of the immigrant’s languages have persisted to the current generation. In the following audio clips, Marie speaks of growing up as a descendant of the Dutch Settlements of Fruitland Mesa.

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By the 1980s, migrant labor was essential.
The following clipping gives good context from both labor & the employer’s perspective.

Valentino Alverado

Western Colorado Report, Vol 1, Number 24, February 14, 1983

In 1906, a dozen Japanese workers deserted the Delta railyards & ventured to Paonia for a hand at fruit picking. A mob soon expelled them from town. When a Hotchkiss orchard hired a Japanese crew, some Paonians wished to draw an exclusion zone between the two towns. The racism in newspapers of that time was blatant. & yet, labor continues to be an unresolved issue in our era.