Prominent members of Greeley’s Latino community push for the city’s inclusion in Colorado’s new Eighth Congressional District

By Trenton Sperry

Many speakers Saturday -- a handful of Weld County’s Republican elected officials among them -- expounded on Weld’s status as an agricultural and oil and gas powerhouse in the state and urged state leaders to consider those industries as they draw up Colorado’s new Eighth Congressional District. 

But subsequent speakers, including prominent members of Greeley’s Latino community, made clear their belief that a key part of those industries is being ignored.

“You will hear a lot about our farming and history,” said Rhonda Solis, a member of the Greeley-Evans District 6 school board and Latino Coalition of Weld County. “You won’t hear a lot about the workers that do this work.”

More than 50 people signed up to speak in person and via video conference before the Colorado Independent Redistricting Committees as the commissions and their staff traverse the state gathering feedback on proposed congressional and legislative redistricting maps.

In June, the commissions released their preliminary maps for what congressional and legislative districts will look like for the next 10 years. The federal government is required by the Constitution to conduct a census every 10 years and then reallocate seats in Congress based on population, and each state is given leeway to draw up its own maps.

Colorado is gaining a seat in the House of Representatives because of a population boom, and one of the commissions is tasked with determining where to draw the lines for that new seat. 

So why do Latinos feel ignored?

Under the new congressional map proposed by the state commission, Greeley and Evans remain in the Fourth Congressional District, which contains the entirety of the Eastern Plains and now much of southern Colorado, including Pueblo. The proposed Fourth CD -- currently represented in Congress by Windsor Republican and former Weld District Attorney Rep. Ken Buck -- would give Republicans a massive 26-point edge over Dems. That district, historically, has been represented by officials who ignore the interests of Latinos, speakers said. 

“CD 4 has not represented Latino interests for the past four decades,” said Stacy Suniga, president of the Latino Coalition for Weld County and a former Greeley city councilwoman. “We would love to be included in and have a new start in the Eighth CD. CD 4 regularly votes against interests that really support Latinos. Our representative needs to be in tune with all of the people in this community, and not just corporate interests or people with means.

“My great-grandfathers, when they came to work in agriculture and followed the agriculture here, they weren’t allowed to live in Greeley,” she said. “They had to locate to a place known still today as the Spanish Colony. There is an exclusion of community that remains.”

Solis noted that, despite the monetary contributions to the state’s economy made by Weld’s agricultural and oil and gas extraction industries, they aren’t the largest industries in the county by workforce. That title belongs to JBS, a meatpacking and food processing plant in Greeley which employed more than 4,000 people across various entities in July 2020 -- many of whom are Latino or refugees from other countries.

The largest non-retail employer in the county, however, is the Greeley-Evans School District, which employed about 2,900 full-time workers in the 2020-21 school year.

“Our school district is 50% Latino (students),” Solis said. “The kids and families in our districts need to be represented.”

Latino leaders urged the redistricting commissions to take into account the community’s interests on issues of immigration, employment, employee rights, trade, education and public health. And they noted these stances don’t just pertain to the Latino community.

“Newcomers (like refugees) tend to (experience the same) challenges that people of color already in the region for a long time face,” said Solis. “We see them, work alongside them and live alongside them. (Our issues are) access to grocery stores, businesses and affordable housing. Communities of color, we really do share a lot of the same customs.”

Kathleen Ensz, a former French professor and study-abroad coordinator at UNC who has lived in Greeley for more than 50 years, echoed Latino leaders’ points and noted that redrawn state legislative district lines break up communities of interest in Greeley, including the university.

Currently, Greeley is represented in the state House with two districts: House District 50, which contains the city’s northern, central and eastern neighborhoods, as well as most of Evans; and House District 48, which contains Greeley’s western and more affluent neighborhoods, plus Johnstown, Milliken, Platteville, and half of Windsor.

Solis, Suniga, and other speakers urged the commission to maintain some semblance of the current HD 50 in the new map.

Ensz also voiced support for including Greeley in the Eighth CD, saying she believes Greeley and Fort Collins should share congressional representation given the counties’ shared interests in water, transportation, and other federal concerns. She urged the commissions to note the rapid growth in Greeley and Weld, and to take that into consideration when determining what communities are grouped together. She received some pushback, however, from one member of the legislative redistricting committee for that stance.

“Why would we push the envelope, probably impacting another community, in order to meet, respectfully, your parochial push to take into account the future?” asked John Buckley III, a Republican representing the current Fifth CD.

The response to his question came from Emperatriz Lugo, who works with the Latino communities of Greeley, Evans and other smaller cities in Weld.

“Any map, any resolution we do needs to be very careful about representing the Latino community in one voice,” Lugo said. “If we don’t do it at this moment, we’re going to be waiting for 10 more years. And our community cannot do that.”

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