I arrived in San Luis, Colorado about two hours before sunset on Friday, July 25^th, 2014. I was invited by an activist friend to the culmination of a month-long program called Move Mountains, a program designed to empower and enrich the lives of the local youth in this community. The program works to train young people to bridge the gap between their contexts and those of their elders in the community, find common ground, and take their rightful places as their elders hand the keys down to the next generation. As one of the oldest Chicano communities in Colorado, San Luis’s history and flavor provide a richness that many small towns lack. I had the chance to interview Miguel Huerta, the man responsible for organizing the Move Mountains Project. (Click here to access audio file.)

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Miguel: Do you want to go to those benches over there?

As we walked to the benches in the distance at the edge of a sports field, I told Miguel about my context. I’d observed the culmination of the program, the art festival, Santa Ana, and I’d already talked to both Miguel’s mentors earlier that day. They have vast and beautiful visions for the future of their communities, and they’ve been fighting battles like the one in San Luis for a long time. 

Lindsay: A lot of people are in that position of being disheartened, maybe like there’s not enough hope in what they’ve been doing their whole lives, that they’re not seeing enough change.

Miguel: Uh-huh.

Lindsay: And they feel like they’ve done everything for nothing. Sometimes I get that. Just seeing how, with just a little bit more energy from our generation coming forward to them, how that has reinvigorated their dreams. That was powerful for me.

Miguel: Yeah, I think that Shirley retired and wanted to come live a quiet life here after decades of struggle, and she tried putting the battle down. Then she told me that she realized she was at the stage where she wanted to be mentoring, and it was time to pass on those things that she had learned. Then, as far as the disheartened factor, my uncle, who you also met, I remember very clearly him apologizing to me for his generation and the fact that they failed in changing things the way that the social movements in the ’60s tried to and the ’70s also.

Lindsay: I think the thing that I keep on coming back to when I have those conversations are that, you know, “You guys didn’t fail! You started this battle, and it’s something that takes longer to finish than one generation.”

Miguel: Definitely.

San Luis artist Tom Lockhart, “Clouds Forming on Handkerchief Mesa”

I sat next to him on the cool metal benches at his gesture. For a brief moment, I looked out across the beautiful valley before me, the mountains blue in the distance, and the inspiring man beside me. The vista seemed more colorful, more vibrant than any I’d seen, like a dream, one you remember for years upon waking, and I realized suddenly why Miguel and his friends keep coming back here. Something moves in the air like the breath of a live thing, like a pulse felt through feet-soles. Maybe it’s the spirit of the land. I felt its thrumming beneath my feet, breathed it in with my lungs, and pulled it down deep into my belly and held it sacred. For a moment, I imagined the spirits of a long succession of ancestors, and I thought they must have left part of themselves intentionally to protect such a place. Then, I looked at Miguel, smiled, and began the official interview.

Lindsay: So, this is Lindsay Deen, with US Represented, and I am here with Miguel, and what’s your last name?

Miguel: Huerta. H-U-E-R-T-A.

Lindsay: Miguel Huerta. Did I say it right?

Miguel: Yeah.

Lindsay: Okay, good. So. Move Mountains. How did it start?

Miguel: Through my connection with this place, San Luis, and my mentor, Shirley Romero Otero. It was an idea at a dinner table in 2009, and since then, I have been coming back to San Luis, just really kinda hanging out, spending time with Shirley.

Since I’ve been in Philly, I have helped form an artist collective called Get Lucid, which is an amazing family of artists and activists in various mediums and causes who are really dedicated to displaying their art in intentional ways and provoking people and having it be, you know, art for social change or expressing issues of oppression and those things. In April 2012, we had our first dance party fundraiser, and since then we’ve had eight events. We bring a lot of people together and throw fun parties with different kind of music, different kind of art, poetry, and all of that.

We just really cultivated a very special community of people there. [Move Mountains came] out of that, and also out of working as a social worker in Philly, seeing the struggles there–especially of the black community, the African Americans. The level of poverty and segregation there is a lot more extreme than I was familiar with in Denver. And continuing every summer to see the social problems here in San Luis and how they manifest in such a small, tight-knit community and really how it’s been an assault, too. There’s a very coordinated effort to eradicate this community, and the methods that are being used are the same that are being used on young black kids in Philly.

So connecting people that work with youth and to this place was a really special opportunity, and so Move Mountains is a collaboration between the local people here and the county, and the city, and the school district, and Shirley and her people with me and my network, basically. So as a result of the economic and political exclusion in San Luis, there are really big gaps in the ages here, and that separates the young people from the elders.

There aren’t many young mentors in this community. Gabrielle Aragon, one of our partners, is one of them, and Carlos Martinez, but there are very few, and that’s because there aren’t opportunities here, so the young people come up in school just waiting to leave. They don’t see the value of this place, and they don’t understand the history of struggle for the land and what the land means, and why things are the way they are here, and how that relates to the land.