8 APRIL 11-17, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | graduate fl uent in both languages, are “very popular” across the state, Polis notes, with about 41 such schools teaching kids in grades K-12 across sixteen Colorado school districts. Elementary schools where the majority of the students come in with Spanish as their fi rst language “are not just in places like Denver,” he adds. “They’re everywhere, from Garfi eld County to Boulder County to Colorado Springs.” Six of the thirteen members of the current Denver City Council are Latina, including President Jamie Torres. Latinas are in pow- erful legislative seats, too: Yadira Caraveo is a U.S. representative, and Monica Duran is the Colorado House majority leader. Not all Latinos speak Spanish, of course. But Colorado’s two U.S. senators, its governor and the mayors of two of the state’s biggest cities all do — even though none of them have Latino roots. “I never really realized it before,” Polis says. “But I guess you’re right.” Movies and Music in Spanish: How Jared Polis Learned the Language Polis started learning Spanish in elementary school when he was growing up in Boulder, then continued studying it in high school when he lived in La Jolla, California. He also learned German, which he says he gets to use occasionally. “Every now and then, I get to positively delight a nice old German lady by whipping out my German,” he says. “I think I win a few votes that way.” But he’s never stopped practicing Spanish. In 2003, when he was serving on the Colo- rado Board of Education, Polis started Cin- ema Latino, a movie theater company that showed fi lms in Spanish, “so I spoke Spanish in a business setting,” he says. Cinema Latino went bankrupt in 2020, a year after Polis took offi ce as governor. Before that, he’d served fi ve terms as a U.S. representative in Congress; for part of the time, he was chair of the congressional U.S.-Mexico caucus. “It never got dusty,” he says of his Span- ish. “There were always periods of days or weeks where I would speak largely Spanish because of my business work or offi cial work, and even now it comes up regularly.” In a mix of English and Spanish, Polis explains that nowadays, “I can converse in Spanish. I would never say I’m fl uent, but I’m conversant, fully conversant in Spanish.” Sometimes too conversant. Over the holidays, Polis belted out a few lines of “Fe- liz Navidad” in Spanish for a social media post. The video went viral, and drew sharp criticism as an insensitive move when about 40,000 migrants, mostly from Venezuela, had come to Colorado over the previous year. But Polis weathered the storm. From Principal to Alcalde: How Mike Johnston Learned the Language Mike Johnston, who grew up in Vail, started learning Spanish in high school, but credits his time as a school offi cial with making him far more fl uent. “I had learned it throughout my career, but when I really spent the most time at it was when I was a school principal,” Johnston says, referring to his time at Mapleton Ex- peditionary School of the Arts in Thornton from 2005 to 2009. “Those were four years of a lot of Spanish practice,” he adds. “The majority of my kids were from immigrant families, from either Mexico or Guatemala.” Johnston co-founded the school, which teaches college prep and public service to kids grades 7-12, because he was “in part at- tracted to that community because I spoke some Spanish. I thought it would be helpful in building bridges to the neighborhood, and they took me from novice to conver- sational,” he recalls. “I spent a lot of time talking to their par- ents, talking to students. That was my best practice. I did study it in school, but really, the chance I got to practice it every day was as a school principal.” Johnston left MESA to serve in the Colo- rado Senate from 2009 to 2017. He was one of the few Spanish speakers in the legislature and, for a time, the only Spanish-speaking state senator, making him the go-to for certain interviews. “It meant if there was ever any piece of legislation that Spanish-language media wanted to talk about, I was the one they’d go to,” he says. “I got to know a lot of the anchors and a lot of the reporters pretty well.” When Johnston won his election on June 6, former mayor Federico Peña, who grew up in Brownsville, Texas, came up to him and said, “This is a big deal. This is only the second mayor in Denver history who speaks Spanish after me. And it’s been forty years.” Not quite. When current U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper became mayor of Denver twenty years before Johnston, he was work- ing on mastering the language. Geology, Cerveza and Honeymoons: How John Hickenlooper Learned the Language Both of Colorado’s U.S. senators use Spanish publicly. Michael Bennet has spoken Spanish in radio interviews and attack ads. Hickenlooper, who grew up in Penn- sylvania, says his fi rst experience with Spanish came in 1975, when he was 23 years old and drove to Costa Rica in his $360 Volkswagen Fastback for a ten-month geology work program. On his way to Costa Rica, he stopped in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and attended one third of a six-week Spanish course. After he left the city and was passing through the Altiplano Mexicano, or elevated plains of Central Mexico, Hickenlooper was stopped by the federales, who noticed a pile of junk covered with a blanket. “They thought it might be a machine gun or something,” Hickenlooper recalls. “They thought I was a drug dealer originally, then they thought I was a gangster with a machine gun. They cocked their weapons.” Instead of shooting, though, they lifted the blanket and “they saw it was a banjo” on top, Hickenlooper says. “The captain had a guitar in the pickup truck — they had a Land Cruiser — so we played several Mexican folk songs.” Laid off from his job as a geologist, in 1988 Hickenlooper co-founded the Wynkoop Brewing Company, Colorado’s fi rst brewpub, and “at that time I was doing restaurants and renovating old buildings and kind of doing redevelopment. A lot of that was tied into the Spanish workforce; a lot of Spanish was being spoken,” Hickenlooper says. So after he got married, he and then-wife Helen Thorpe went on a honeymoon — he calls it their “luna de miel” — to Oaxaca, where they spent three hours every morn- ing in a Spanish class. He wasn’t thinking that the language would come in handy if he went into politics, he says; he just had a fascination with Latin America, “our best political partner.” He regrets not studying the language sooner. “I love Spanish,” he says. “I just love it. I never studied [it]. I studied Latin just because the guy who taught Latin loved soccer, and I was a good soccer player. It’s one of my many regrets from high school.” Hickenlooper was elected mayor in 2003, left offi ce at the end of his second term to run for governor of Colorado, and after two terms in that offi ce became a U.S. senator. (He also made a presidential bid.) He says his Spanish has “been useful everywhere.” These days, Hickenlooper travels with a translator to help him out on Senate busi- ness, but he’ll still take questions in Spanish — though he usually answers in English. Mayor of the “World in a City”: How Mike Coffman Learned the Language The Colorado politician who works the hardest at improving ¿Hablas Español? continued from page 7 continued on page 10 “AND THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS IT’S JUST HARD TO DO THROUGH TRANSLATION. WHEN SOMEONE’S IN TEARS AND TELLING YOU THEIR STORY, IT’S HARD TO TURN TO A TRANSLATOR.” BENNITO L. KELT Y BENNITO L. KELT Y Governor Jared Polis can speak, and sing (sort of), in Spanish; Mayor Mike Johnston studied the language as a school principal.
