7 NOVEMBER 2-8, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | In a crowded room at the Dayton Street Op- portunity Center, interpreters began speak- ing eight different languages every time one of the candidates on the November 7 ballot explained why they were fi t to run the city they all called home: Aurora. “I’m running for mayor because I want all of our residents, all of our immigrant and refugee community, to have an opportunity to have stable housing and to have an income to support their families, themselves and their version of the American dream,” said Juan Marcano, a Democrat on Aurora City Council who’s running to unseat incumbent Mayor Mike Coffman. As he spoke, interpreters translated his message into Pulaar, Wolof, Nepali, Karen, Spanish, Swahili, Burmese and Rohingya, all languages spoken by some of the eighty people in the room. The 2023 City of Aurora candidates’ fo- rum on October 26 got off to a rough start, as organizers worked out the logistics of having so many interpreters speaking at once. At fi rst, the room was so noisy that it was hard to hear Marcano, Coffman and a third mayoral candidate, Jeff Sanford. But as the night went on, the interpreters and the candidates struck a balance, with the inter- preters speaking quietly and the candidates loudly through the babel of translations. “We try to do everything we can to help our immigrant and refugee community and make sure they have every opportunity for success,” Coffman told the crowd, citing Aurora’s Natural Helpers program, “where we take leaders from respective immigrant communities, train them in how to access different services and get back into the com- munities to provide that information.” After Coffman spoke, moderator Whitney Traylor asked the speakers to “slow down a little bit” and the interpreters to “try to interpret as quiet as you can.” “This is how it works,” he added. “De- mocracy is not always clean and simple.” Aurora, Colorado’s third-largest city, touts itself as “the world in a city” because of its diverse population, the most diverse in the state. “Our diversity is a big thing. Our diver- sity is really unique. We are by far the most diverse city in Colorado. We’re one of the most diverse in the country,” says Coff- man. “We always try continued on page 8 EVAN SEMÓN Clementine Gasimba, a refugee from Congo, with her son, Victory.
