Basalt’s Barrio

by Andrew Travers, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer

Heather Rousseau, Aspen Daily News Staff Photographer

The ecstatic salsa horn jangles of KPVW radio blare from open windows. Laughter sprinkles through Spanish-language banter. Men in work uniforms amble through groups of children jumping rope and kicking balls on the narrow paths of dust and rock between the trailers.

It’s a sunny Saturday at the Pan and Fork Mobile Home Park.

This trailer court on the Roaring Fork River in the heart of Basalt is home to 37 families. Most of them are from Mexico and many of them are living here without papers, but the majority consider this valley their home.

The park, along with the neighboring Roaring Fork Mobile Home Park, is the epicenter of the upper valley’s ever-growing Hispanic population. Some estimate that just 20 years ago the Hispanic population of the Roaring Fork Valley stood at around 2 percent. Today it is estimated at nearly 25 percent.

That ever-growing local sector has posed a moral challenge to the Roaring Fork Valley’s citizenry, who pride themselves on their cultural acceptance and lack of prejudice, but whose society — until fairly recently — remained homogeneously Caucasian.

The idea of a segregated shadow population does not sit well with most locals, who blanch at the idea that Hispanics here are becoming victims of the soft bigotry of community exclusion.

“I do feel like part of the circle,” says José, standing in his kitchen with a pot of pozole warming on the stove, filling his Pan and Fork trailer with the scent of cilantro. “Here in Basalt and in Aspen, too. Not in the middle of the circle, maybe. But in the circle.”

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