It may seem hard to believe, but there is a grocery store in Colorado that opened its doors before the first shot of the Civil War was ever fired. Colorado wasn’t a state until 1876 but when statehood arrived the Romero Family had already been serving the residents of the San Luis Valley for nearly
two decades.
In the 165 years that have passed, eight generations of Romeros’ have overseen the business. A few other things have happened in the ensuing sixty-thousand-plus days, as well: the first flight, a couple of moon landings, a Black president and enough events to fill a ten-thousand page history book. But the store’s last owners, Felix and Claudia Romero, were getting old and ready to retire. Shuttering R&R Market was a very real possibility, one that would mean a significant hardship for Colorado’s oldest town along with the residents of nearby hamlets that dot the San Luis Valley.
Closing the R&R would mean a two-hour round trip to Taos, New Mexico, or a forty-mile drive—one-way—to Alamosa just to buy food. In bad weather, the drive to either destination would add even more time.

For San Luis native Shirley Romero Otero and a few others, closing the store was unthinkable, but keeping it open was not as simple as one might think. Not unlike scores of others who’d followed similar paths, Romero Otero had left the valley for college. Following that, she would spend a career as a teacher in Grand Junction before returning. Home again, she knew that losing the store would not only challenge a lot of locals just getting food but erase an irreplaceable memory.

Romero-Otero’s group had a plan to not only maintain and preserve a legacy business and an important chapter of Colorado history but one that would recreate something that would elevate the quality of life in ‘El Valle.’
The R&R of Romero Otero’s early memories was more than a place to shop for food. Of course, it always had customers or people driving through buzzing around picking up this and that, but there was one special day each month that she remembered when the joint was really jumping. “The twentieth was the day when the old folks got their pension (check),” she said, and the best time to catch up with friends and neighbors. Different conversations, most in Spanish, the Valley’s original language, hummed throughout the store. To
lose something this special, she said, was unthinkable.

The store has closed, albeit temporarily, but like the phoenix, will rise again. Its planned grand opening is set for late summer. The new incarnation of the R&R will also have a new name, The San Luis People’s Market and will operate as a co-op with a flavor ‘puro San Luis,’ said Romero-Otero. By that, she means, the store’s offerings will include a lot of what’s grown locally; organic, healthy, legacy food, not the high sodium, high sugar, unpronounceable ingredient food sold elsewhere.
Romero Otero and her group’s plan is to run a store that offers a food selection that is throwback to the earlier days in the valley when locals both bought and sold what was grown locally. “This used to be the breadbasket of the town,” she said. “Then a lot of things happened,” not the least of which was a period when locals entered a protracted legal fight over hunting, fishing and grazing rights with nearby neighbors, outliers who fenced off what would be known as the Taylor Ranch. Some, but not all, of the historic rights to the land have been subsequently won back.
Coinciding with those days, people were leaving the valley, looking for better paying jobs. At the same time, other people with means, were moving in but instead of planting the things that had been harvested for generations, they were growing alfalfa—cattle feed—and doing what Romero Otero called, “corporate farming.”
Locals, instead of buying what had been local produce, were forced instead to buy ‘for-the-masses’ foodstuffs, things that contributed to a skyrocketing rate of diabetes. “Costilla County,” Romero Otero lamented, “is ranked as the number one unhealthiest county in the state.” When the new co-op is up and running, not only will healthier food options be available, but “we will also be providing nutritional classes.”

Work on the store would require a total facelift of the structure, both interior and exterior. To arrive at a store that would serve the community, said Romero-Otero, would be costly. Her group had to be both imaginative, resolute and determined.
“We were not going to start in the red,” she said. Her group, one that included Dr. Devon Peña, a former college professor and skilled grant writer, put together a proposal that was good enough to win a $1.5 million dollar grant from the Colorado Health Foundation. But just having the money did not mean the group could just pick up hammer and nails and begin the work. COVID had a say in that timetable. The group, she said, could also use more money to finish the project.
“We’re at the mercy of contractors,” said the retired public school teacher. A lot of locals that might have been easy to sign on pre-COVID, were booked. “Just getting a company to do the electrical work that needs to be done, they’re busy,” she said.

In time everything will get done, she said. When that happens, the whole community, including the young, will have a hand in the finished product. And a legacy will live on.

Women in March (IV of V)

It may be one of Charlotte Macaluso’s most disarming traits. The Pueblo educator is perfectly comfortable discussing a childhood that, very generously, could elicit sympathy. But Macaluso neither wants nor requires any. While raised with few creature comforts, including indoor plumbing, her parents made up for it in other ways.

“Poverty was an issue,” Macaluso said in a recent telephone conversation as she prepared to join staff for a trip to Denver and the state basketball finals. (Pueblo had two high schools in the 4A Final Four.) “We might have been financially poor, but not in family structure,” she said. Her parents, a steelworker father and stay-at-home mother, encouraged education and nourished Macaluso and her siblings with love, attention and respect for education.

“I enjoyed school,” said the Pueblo Superintendent of Schools. “I was a bookworm,” and regular customer, she said, of the bookmobile that made the rounds to her ‘Dogpatch,’ community. ‘Dogpatch,’ for those who may not catch the reference, was the mythical home to the long ago comic strip character ‘L’il Abner’ and his hill country friends and family. Today the community, with many of its residents still living modestly, has been rechristened Eastwood Heights. To the lifelong educator, it’s still the loving, nurturing community she knew as Dogpatch.

Becoming superintendent was never part of the plan for Macaluso. But education, as her parents stressed, was. After graduating from the University of Southern Colorado, now CSU-Pueblo, she was assigned to Spann Elementary School, coincidentally the same school where, as a first- grader, she was selected to read to the principal. It was an honor reserved for only the best readers. It was also an experience not altogether what a precocious and voracious reader expected.

“I sat on her lap,” Macaluso remembered. When she finished reading the story and closed her book, the compliment she anticipated for reading so well, fell somewhere beyond empty. “Not too shabby,” were the words she heard. “I thought, ‘that’s horrible!’ When I’m principal, I’m not going to say that…I’m going to tell kids ‘what a great job!’” Coincidentally, many years after being a student at Spann, and later a classroom teacher, she became its principal.

Returning to Spann, Macaluso crossed paths with a couple of her own long ago and impactful teachers, Mr. Alvarez and Miss Kirton. “It was the best experience ever,” she said, “to be able to acknowledge them and the positive impact they had on my life.” Alvarez and Kirton, she said, taught with love for their students and left her with “wonder- ful memories.”

As her career progressed, she found herself once again in the classroom of the same middle school, Risley, that she and her siblings had attended. While it was a positive experience for her as a student, the school’s academic standing had fallen dramatically over the years. Far from being on life-support, the school was, very generously, in poor health.

“Very early on when I first went to Risley, I felt that there needed to be an entire shift in culture and philosophy,” she said. “Students were not being afforded standard-based curriculum.” She likens her step into her old middle school, more like “an intervention.” “The first thing that needed to change was having high expectations for students,” expectations, she said, they weren’t being afforded.

Macaluso has held a number of other administrative positions in southern Colorado’s largest school district. She has also racked up a number of honors for her excellence in teaching and educational efforts. She was selected as District 60’s superintendent in 2017 and immediately began applying everything she learned in her roles as both classroom teacher and school principal.

Macaluso’s approach to education is a mixture of tough love, ‘get the job done,’ along with the same lessons stressed many years before by her parents. “They encouraged me by telling me that education was important,” she said. They set in place a road map enabling her “to navigate my way through.” She also got lucky having teachers who “advocated for me.”

Pueblo, as other cities, still struggles keeping all of its students in schools. But slowly, things are pointing in the right direction. The state’s latest figures show that Macaluso’s District 60 graduation rates of 82.6 percent exceed the state average. Dropout rates in Pueblo also bettered the state average. That’s good, said Macaluso, but not good enough nor anywhere near where she wants it to be.

“Kids drop out for a reason,” she said. “Access and opportunity,” Macaluso firmly believes, are vital to a successful educational experience. Her checklist for excellence is both simple and achievable. Kids, she knows from years of classroom experience, need all their needs met—academic, social and emotional. Beyond that, Macaluso said, “insti- tutional racism” needs to be identified, acknowledged and addressed. “I’m thankful that there are things that have brought it to the forefront.”

Risley, Macaluso’s long ago middle school, has recovered. And while still not ideally where she would like it to be, the school has found new life and the student experience has been restructured; failure is no longer an option. But resuscitating and saving one school is far from a full stop for the Pueblo educator. Whatever transformation her old middle school has experienced, Macaluso believes is also something that needs to be directed at all Pueblo schools. Each—even the best—can do better. All students walking into the classroom each day deserve the best education they can get, she said. For her, that is job one and as superin- tendent, she also wants it to be job one for her classroom teachers.