It is just another day in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. In Alamosa, the hub city of the Valley and home to some of Colorado’s most magnificent vistas, breakfast joints open and the sounds of dishes clinking compete with conversations in both English and Spanish. The two tongues, while different, are also symbiotic in the Valley.
Among the Spanish speakers are men and women who’ll be heading out soon to either supervise, ‘work the line,’ or hit the fields that dot the region. One of the area’s biggest employers, of course, is potatoes. But the Valley’s mushroom operation is also a steady job for a growing number of workers.
Many of the men and women holding these jobs are immigrants and well known to Flora Archuleta, a lifelong Valley resident and Executive Director of the San Luis Valley Immigrant Resource Center.
“They stop me all over the place,” said Archuleta who says she runs into new and old clients in restaurants, at the Walmart, Safeway or anywhere she happens to be in the town of just over 9,000 residents. They’ll introduce new children to her or because she’s known them so long, even show off new grandchildren. Archuleta’s relationship with clients, new and old, is generational. She says she tries to keep track of some of the now grown children who once accompanied their parents to her office. One, she said, is working on a Ph.D. at a California college. She says she always has time for an old client.
Archuleta says her work involves renewing work permits, doing family petition paperwork or helping clients complete documents that are often complex and confusing but essential for staying on the right side of immigration law. In a telephone interview, the affable Archuleta said that her office also helps immigrants in completing necessary forms related to political asylum and amnesty.
Much of her job involves helping people from Mexico or Guatemala, the two dominant immigrant groups in the Valley who work the ranching and farming operations dotting the 8,000 square mile region. Completing the paperwork for some clients, said Archuleta, can sometimes take up to “four or five hours” and require more than a single visit. But her clients have come to trust her, thus the annual visits.
One client who now lives in Fort Collins, she said, makes the nearly five-hour trip to Alamosa to get his paperwork done. Archuleta says he tells her, “I wouldn’t go anywhere else.” Another, she said, makes the trip over Wolf Creek Pass from Durango to complete his forms. In this valley, agriculture needs an immigrant workforce as much as immigrants need the work. It’s generational symbiosis, a fact of life in the Valley.
Despite its nickname as ‘the icebox of the nation’ because of plunging and arctic-like winter temperatures, the Valley, which sits at 7,600 feet, is one of Colorado’s most fertile and productive agricultural regions. There are an estimated 1,600 farms and ranches scattered across the Valley and slightly more than one in four jobs is connected to agriculture.
While potatoes, barley and wheat are the ‘big three,’ the region also has big yields in carrots, alfalfa, lettuce, broccoli, canola and cauliflower. So far this season, weather has cooperated, and harvests are expected to be at or near seasonal norms.
Of course, any moisture would be welcome. The region, like so much of Colorado. Luckily, there’s still has enough stored water to reach projected crop yield.
The right weather, hot days and cool nights, rich soil and an ability to make every drop of water count, are all contributors to a $214 million potato crop. Barley, essential in beer production but also a feed crop, is also a growing money crop in the Valley. It’s estimated that 80 percent-85 percent of all the barley grown in Colorado comes out of the Valley.
Archuleta’s two-decade contribution is also another factor in crop yields. Without her help making certain that the Valley’s immigrant workers are cleared to work, crop yields might be an entirely different picture. She and her tiny staff have met nearly every seasonal workers in the Valley and helped them with paperwork, keeping them legal and allowing them to remain and work.
But without season workers, it would be a far different story.
