Wherever Ken Salazar goes, the former U.S. senator, Interior secretary and most recently ambassador carries decades of cultural and political history with him. When he arrived at the History Colorado Center in downtown Denver early last week, he brought the receipts.
Salazar stood in an exhibit space before a table of objects attesting to his family’s centuries-old connection to Colorado’s southern borderlands, that historic region of many overlapping nations and cultures. He pointed to a genealogy reaching back centuries; photos by the late John Fielder of his family’s sprawling property in the San Luis Valley; the flag that flew over the U.S. embassy in Mexico City until his posting ended last year.
Salazar, now 70, may have stepped away from public life, but he also has stepped up to help preserve the story of historical and cultural fusion on a landscape that played a significant role in defining both Colorado and the nation. The museum announced his contribution of more than 350 boxes of papers and artifacts from his extensive political career and his family’s legacy in the area to expand the ongoing project called Borderlands of Southern Colorado.
“I can’t think of a better time in history to really lift up the real story of the Southwest and the real story of the border,” Salazar said. “And to recognize that history, in terms of its pain and its reality and its promise, helps us look ahead, especially in these times of great division in our country.”
The infusion of new material builds on a concept brought to life in 2017 by Dawn DiPrince, the current History Colorado president and CEO who at the time served as director of the El Pueblo History Museum in Pueblo.
Since its inception, the initiative has included exhibits at sites across the state, including the El Pueblo History Museum, Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center and the Trinidad History Museum as well as the flagship History Colorado Center. A speaking series, teaching syllabus and dozens of volumes offered at the museum’s bookshop have augmented the exhibits.
Salazar’s donation represents a significant boost to the project.
“Part of me is just marveling over this,” DiPrince said, “because I didn’t know it was gonna even live this long. And it’s one of those things that just keeps growing and growing, partially because it’s so inherent to who we are as a state. And it’s also inherent to how so many families who live here understand their identity as Coloradans.”
DiPrince added that the Salazar collection offers “infinite possibilities” that go beyond traditional museum exhibits and includes resources that could prove useful in development of public policy.
Far beyond our lives, people are going to be doing research from this.
— Dawn DiPrince, History Colorado president and CEO
“The riches,” she said, “are that this will just be valuable information for generations and generations of people. If you really think especially about his time as Secretary of the Interior, if you’re doing policy work around natural resources and land management, there’s vast knowledge in those documents that could be really good public policy research.”
Other new elements of the museum’s initiative, including collaborations that share materials across state lines, will launch later this year. For example, the Fort Garland Museum in the San Luis Valley will team with the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico, on an exhibition centered on adobe structures of the American Southwest.
History Colorado has said it will build on the initiative each year until at least 2050.
“Far beyond our lives, people are going to be doing research from this,” DiPrince said. “And we don’t even know what they’re going to be able to come up with from it. I find that very exciting.”
A historic date
Salazar noted that his gift was being announced Feb. 2, the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 that ended the Mexican-American War and literally reshaped the map of what became the American West by adding massive lands to the U.S. and designating the Rio Grande as the new southern border.
To fully understand today’s issues around migration, he said, it’s helpful to grasp the story of all those mixing and often conflicting cultures that played out in the region where the international border once was marked by the Arkansas River, long before the Rio Grande.
“Part of what has gotten us, in my view, to this point of great division in our country, is a lack of understanding of that history,” Salazar said. “And so there’s no better way of getting an understanding of the history of the United States and its diversity than to lift up the story of the borderlands.”
The Salazar family history is rooted in farming and ranching in the San Luis Valley, a history that would later inform his work in Congress. He and seven brothers and sisters all became the family’s first generation of college graduates, with Ken earning a degree in political science from Colorado College in 1977 and four years later a law degree from the University of Michigan.
His work life, aside from his role in a family partnership for more than 30 years at El Rancho Salazar, cut a wide swath through public service and politics. From serving as chief legal counsel in Gov. Roy Romer’s cabinet and heading the Colorado Department of Natural Resources to two terms as state attorney general, the Democrat’s star rose steadily.
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He won election as Colorado’s 35th U.S. senator in 2004 and became a leader in forging the renewable energy economy. Salazar was confirmed as Secretary of the Interior in 2009. He served as ambassador to Mexico from 2021-25. Today, he divides his life into three “buckets” — family, ranching and working on a book, though he also keeps an office as senior counsel at WilmerHale.
That book, given the working title of “Borderlands,” explores both the history and future of the United States and Mexico, “really punctuating the importance of diversity as a superpower of America.”
But Salazar recalled that growing up, he didn’t know the region’s history because schools focused on an east-to-west migration originating in Europe, with Colorado history beginning with the gold rush and settlement from the north.
“By the time the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, my family and my ancestors had been here for 250 years,” he said.
Salazar noted that he didn’t really begin to realize the broader history of the region until he enrolled in an institution that, in the early 1970s, was taking students’ diverse histories seriously.
“Colorado College,” he said, marking the time when his family’s past began to have meaningful geographical context for him.
He went there to play basketball. But along the way, he met a group of Mexican-American students from Pueblo and one from the town of Manassa, near the New Mexico border, who became his best friend.
They introduced him to a program under the rubric of Southwest studies, coursework that focused on the history of the region right up to the burgeoning Chicano movement. He also got involved with a student-led organization advocating for both student and faculty diversity at Colorado College. Before he arrived, Salazar said, the student body had perhaps four students of Mexican-American heritage. He saw that number shoot over 100 before his graduation, and now it’s “an even larger number, a percentage of a very diverse campus.”
Affirmative action, he added, was sweeping the country in higher education over the last decades of the 20th century and giving opportunity to students outside the mainstream. And that led him back to the role that institutions like History Colorado play in telling the region’s story from all angles.
“Part of what I hope is one of the outcomes of the Borderlands initiative is that people will have that understanding of the history of where we come from, where we are today,” Salazar said, “but also use it as a point of unifying our country.”
Borderlands in microcosm
The history of southern Colorado’s borderlands continues to be written. Political borders change, but cultures often remain embedded in the soil.
One enduring example: A 100-square-mile stretch of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains known to locals since the 19th century as La Sierra — the mountain — marks overlapping claims to an edge of the San Luis Valley that has been argued, fought over and litigated for decades. The parcel known in the 1980s as the Taylor Ranch has since then been owned by a succession of wealthy individuals, but heirs to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant of 1844 enjoyed access for traditional uses like hunting, wood gathering and grazing.
Yet the land still invites conflict to this day.
“It punctuates and it gives momentum to the whole concept of borderlands,” Salazar said. “It’s something we’ve worked on for a very long time. I was in the valley (recently), meeting with some people, and we were talking about the old Taylor Ranch. And there’s a long history with that.”
Salazar was, for a time, right in the middle of it. In 1993, he was chairman of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant Commission, which produced a report recommending purchasing the Taylor Ranch and making it a state heritage area as well as a conservation project, while also recognizing the historic use rights of the local community. The plan was never implemented, though more than 32 years later Salazar maintains that the idea still has merit.
“That report is as good today as it was back then,” he said. “There’s still a lot of conflict around the ranch. And I think it would be worthwhile for someone to explore the implementation of those recommendations from 1993.”
Part of what I hope is one of the outcomes of the Borderlands initiative is that people will have that understanding of the history of where we come from, where we are today, but also use it as a point of unifying our country.
— Ken Salazar
Origins of an initiative
DiPrince credits Gloria Anzaldúa’s book “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,” as her inspiration for the Borderlands of Southern Colorado project. The book’s jacket presents a borderland “not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.”
In Pueblo back in 2017, DiPrince convened a Borderland symposium that attracted scholars from all over the country to dig into that idea, and advance the notion that borderlands represent, as she says, “the coming together of cultures and also the collisions of cultures.” In contrast to borders, which divide, borderlands bring together, she added.
The original El Pueblo trading post, built in 1842 near the banks of the Arkansas River, was intentionally located on that borderland between Mexico and the United States, a hub of commerce and migration. So the symposium’s location was already immersed in history and quickly created what DiPrince calls “the scholarly backbone” for exhibits, lecture series and other work.
In partnership with the National Archives, the museum brought to Colorado for the first time original pages from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Much like Monday’s announcement, the 2017 symposium took place around the Feb. 2 anniversary of the document’s signing. In fact, the treaty was the centerpiece of a ceremonial procession that began south of the Arkansas River and ended at the museum, just north of the river.
For DiPrince, who grew up in southern Colorado, the cultural, political and geographical significance of the borderlands was ingrained in everyday life, chapters of history that reflected the coalescence of many Indigenous peoples — the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Apache and Comanche — as well as Spain, Mexico and the United States.
She recalls one scholar referring to the region as “the overlapping of empires,” which she found a powerful way to think about this part of the world.
“Borderlands can be these generative and dynamic and energetic spaces that create new things,” DiPrince said. “And that is part of what we wanted to really explore. Because if you look at southern Colorado, it is such a unique culture that really just doesn’t exist anywhere else. And part of it is defined by these kinds of borders and the unique culture that is birthed in the space of these borders.”
A history passed over
But for many who have lived in the state for years — and certainly more recent arrivals — the southern borderlands remain a historical blind spot, a significant era whose cultural repercussions resonate today.
“I just think for so many people, strangely in Colorado, they don’t understand,” DiPrince said. “They don’t know this part of Colorado’s history. If you’re in southern Colorado, families know it in a really deep way. But then there’s a whole swath of the state that doesn’t know it at all.”
The announcement of the addition of Salazar’s papers from his long career in public life, as well as his family’s history in the San Luis Valley, injects new life, and a more expansive view, into the Borderlands initiative.
“And so, in some ways, connecting his life and legacy through his papers helps us to expand some of the ways that we have been thinking about our initiative — to keep it tied to Colorado, but expand the geography as well,” DiPrince said.
She looked forward to including the wide variety of Salazar’s materials in the initiative — everything from notes on public lands issues to historic preservation to his service in the Senate. And even images like the photo of him playing basketball with President Barack Obama and, a particular favorite of hers, the portrait painted of him as secretary of the Interior. Although the original still hangs in Washington, D.C., Salazar said he will donate prints to History Colorado.
DiPrince, a Pueblo native and fourth generation descendant of ancestors who settled in the region, said she gets emotional when she thinks about that painting.
“Oftentimes when people do these kinds of portraits, they have a singular figure,” she said. “But in Secretary Salazar’s portrait, it is him and his family, and you can tell southern Colorado is in the background of the photo. So oftentimes what you see in these materials is that he’s doing this incredible work across our nation, but he is bringing southern Colorado with him when he goes.”
Understanding the historical forces that shaped the nation carries particular importance now, Salazar said, amid efforts by the current administration to rewrite and even delete portions of the national narrative. He described those efforts by the Trump administration as “antithetical to everything that my life has stood for and antithetical to what I believe most of the people of Colorado and most of the nation want.”
As Interior secretary, he said, he dealt with historic preservation organizations for all 50 states, and judged Colorado to be “at the top of that.” Now, more than ever, he sees these institutions filling an important need.
“The states have a special role,” he said, “to tell the story of their people — and Colorado has a very special history. In a time when there’s very little help on our history and diverse heritage programs, and it’s being attacked at the federal level, it’s a good opportunity for the state to step up.”
While politics “only looks at things for the minute or for the year or even for a term of a president,” he added, History Colorado’s commitment to the Borderlands initiative through at least 2050, at locations in Denver and across the region, guarantees the state an enduring role in the preservation of a complex, sometimes contentious and always fascinating history.
“It’s been a life journey of learning for me,” Salazar said, “which is why the Borderlands initiative here at History Colorado is so important. To be able to tell that story to everybody, so we can all understand that everybody’s history is important and everybody’s entitled to know that history, that’s what brings, in my view, respect for each other.”
