Agapito Vigil (1833–?) was a delegate to the Colorado Constitutional Convention in 1875­–76, representing Las Animas and Huerfano Counties, and a member of the state’s First General Assembly, representing Conejos County. At the constitutional convention,…

Colorado, “the Centennial State,” was the thirty-eighth state to enter the Union on August 1, 1876. Its diverse geography encompasses 104,094 square miles of the American West and includes swathes of the Great Plains, southern Rocky Mountains, and the…

The Hispano farmer and sheep rancher Don Felipe de Jesus Baca (1829–74) was one of the first settlers of the Purgatoire River valley, one of the most important developers of Trinidad, and a member of the Colorado Territorial legislature. He is the…

Adobe buildings in towns such as Trinidad and the remnants of plazas or villages attest to early Hispano settlement along the Purgatoire River in southern Colorado. Today, Hispanos—descendants of Mexicans who lived in what became the US southwest after…

Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales (1928–2005) was a prominent figure in the Chicano Movement in Denver in the 1960s and 1970s. He also had ties to the greater Civil Rights Movement. In addition to his activist work, Gonzales had multifaceted careers in boxing,…

There is no shortage of labels used to identify members of the population that share a Spanish language heritage and/or whose ancestry is from one or more Spanish-speaking or Latin American countries. These many labels include but are not limited to …