Happy Colorado Sunday, friends. I hope your week was better than OK and that the days ahead seem filled with promise.
Honestly, it’s sometimes hard to see what’s good, or interesting, or safe on the horizon, or to pick a path that gets you just a little closer to your goals. I speak from recent experience. The Sun in December converted from a public benefit corporation to an employee-directed nonprofit. Even with the support of a team of sophisticated and dedicated advisers, and the steady hand of the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center on the till, the conversion has been at times confusing and scary.
That’s why this week’s cover story by Tracy Ross is particularly compelling to me. She has been following along with another of the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center’s clients, the newly formed Sand Dunes Mushroom Co-op, to learn how a tiny group of San Luis Valley migrant workers with few connections and even less money is moving steadily toward the dream of controlling their own economic destiny.
Senior Editor
The Cover Story
Migrant workers growing where they were planted
Readers of The Colorado Sun may recall a story we did about the Alamosa-based Colorado Mushroom Farm in January 2023. The farm had closed and filed for bankruptcy, leaving hundreds of vulnerable migrant workers scrambling to pick up the pieces.
In my experience documenting the second chapter of their story, to call what they faced in the aftermath of the closure a fight for their survival isn’t exaggeration. Many of the workers originated from a part of Guatemala that was embroiled in civil war from 1960 to 1996. Their parents found their way to Colorado — and the farm, and some financial stability — after it opened in 1985. Multiple generations have followed since, and many of the challenges they’ve faced — leaving home, making the arduous journey, working for the farm’s former owner Baljit Nanda, and attempting to create better lives for themselves here — are little changed. (I recommend you read the original story for context before reading mine this week.)
Mine, I hope, is a happier story, one that shows what can be created when the right forces combine for good.
In the aftermath of Nanda’s farm closing, hundreds of workers who relied on him for employment were left trying to figure out what to do next. Many, suddenly without an income, lost their ability to cover even their basic needs. A southern Colorado humanitarian crisis could have ensued. But amid the struggle, a host of local and state organizations stepped in to help a small band of former workers realize a different future. Read on to learn about the newly formed worker-owned Sand Dunes Mushroom Co-op, which, if it’s successful, could be a whole new paradigm for migrant workers in Colorado.
Tracy Ross | Reporter
The Colorado Lens
In case you missed it, we’ve curated our own visual feed to catch you up. Here are a few of our favorite springtime snippets of everyday moments from all corners of Colorado lately.
Olivia Sun | Staff Photographer
Flavor of the Week
Hanging out in Vance Kirkland’s studio
The quirky Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art may not have the size of its neighbors, but the collection can’t be fully absorbed in a single visit. Earlier this month, a day after the announcement that it would merge with the Denver Art Museum, I found myself circling the rooms and finding new items I’d missed the first or second time.
Named after Colorado artist Vance Kirkland, the museum features a room filled with examples of Kirkland’s works over time as well as his original three-room studio, where he taught other artists. In between are six rooms filled with art and objects from different eras — arts and crafts, art nouveau, Bauhaus, art deco, modern and postmodern.
There are plenty of paintings focusing on not just Kirkland but other Colorado artists. But the museum also features a blend of furnishings and decorative arts. The main room of the old studio — hauled to the museum district from Capitol Hill in 2016 — reconstructs Kirkland’s work area, complete with straps he used to suspend himself over his large canvases as he painted.
The Kirkland is at 1201 Bannock St., and general admission is $12. Starting May 22, the museum hosts the special exhibition Vanity & Vice: American Art Deco through Jan. 12.
Sandra Fish | Data Journalist
SunLit: Sneak Peek
“Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown” begins with words from a follower who dodged disaster
EXCERPT: Author Annie Dawid begins her work of historical fiction, a Colorado Book Awards finalist, with a haunting radio interview with someone who got sucked into the cult of charismatic Jim Jones, but somehow dodged the mass deaths that took more than 900 lives in 1978 at the cult’s outpost in Guyana. His words hint at the complexity of the hold Jones had over his followers.
THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: Dawid tells the fascinating origin story of her interest in writing about Jonestown and also the 16-year effort to finally see her novel published. The author relates the genesis of her obsession with Jonestown, but also her struggles over how to create the characters who ultimately would tell the story from multiple perspectives. Here’s a slice from her Q&A:
SunLit: Tell us about creating this book. What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?
Dawid: I knew I wanted multiple protagonists to tell such a complex story, but it took a year or more to figure out who they would be and how many. I was well informed by all the research, which included listening to many cassette tapes of Jonestown meetings and music, reading everything I could find, and changing my mind often.
READ THE INTERVIEW WITH ANNIE DAWID
Kevin Simpson | Writer
Sunday Reading List
A curated list of what you may have missed from The Colorado Sun this week.
🌞 Apprenticeships are a typical route to many careers, but now districts having a hard time filling classroom teacher slots have begun to use the concept to create their own pipeline of educators. Erica Breunlin explains how apprenticeships are working in the St. Vrain Valley School District and three other districts with an uncomfortable number of vacancies.
🌞 We hear a lot about the ease with which law enforcement officers with troubling professional records can move between departments. But now the problem has been identified among social workers. Jennifer Brown reports how child welfare officials are trying to slow the roll of caseworkers who falsify records from one county to the next.
🌞 Lawmakers moved the needle — a lot — during this past session, an achievement some attribute to deft governing (as opposed to politicking). That got Jesse Paul wondering what the next session might look like, when there will be zero Democrats in the statehouse who have ever served in the minority and the odds of Republicans regaining any ground are low. It was a topic of conversation in our legislative wrap-up event, too, which you can watch if you missed it IRL on Wednesday. There’s plenty more post-leg coverage to catch up on and you can browse it here: POLITICS
🌞 Just when we’ve caught our collective breath, the campaign season has kicked into high gear. Expect a lot of debate over Initiative 89, the ballot measure that asks voters to codify the right to abortion in the state constitution. There is already plenty of action for the primary, which is about a month away. Our crew picked the 11 spiciest races to keep an eye on.
🌞 There was a supersized amount of wildlife news last week, including an explanation by Olivia Prentzel of why wildlife biologists are worried about the impacts of the U.S. 50 detour on threatened Gunnison sage grouse. We also learned that a yearling male wolf released in December in southwestern Grand County was found dead in northern Larimer County in April. It was apparently killed by a mountain lion. And Jason Blevins looked at a plan to restore wolverines in Colorado’s high country and learned how very different it is from the voter-directed reintroduction of gray wolves.
🌞 The sales of electric vehicles have dropped, which in theory puts a pretty big hitch in the giddyup toward having 940,000 clean vehicles on Colorado roads by 2030. Michael Booth reports that some marketwatchers are writing off the slide to confusion over available tax credits and how many can be stacked up for savings on a purchase.
🌞 Speaking of clean energy, when President Joe Biden inked a ban on uranium imports from Russia last week, that woke up a lot of sleeping miners in Colorado. Jason Blevins checked in with some, including the very optimistic owner of a mill just over the border in Utah.
Dana Coffield | Senior Editor
We hope the rest of your day is great. And remember, if you’ve got a friend you’d like to bring to the Colorado Sunday adventure, please share this link and encourage them to join: coloradosun.com/join
— Dana & the whole staff of The Sun
Corrections & Clarifications
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