Feature: The Resolute Shepherd

Published January 2010 Vol. 14 Issue 1

In the rugged hinterlands of Colorado, a Sheepherder has gone off the beaten path in a fight against one of Colorado’s lowest paying industries.

text and images by Jacob Ripple-Carpenter

Note: Employee names in this article were changed or omitted at their request for fear of reprisal.

Mentions of Western American culture conjure up images of corrals and Stetson hat-wearing cowboys with belt buckles the size of dinner plates riding broncos and bulls for eight seconds to the wild cheers of fans. You think of wide-open vistas, desert canyons, or mountains stretching as far as the eye can see.

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DV StaffFeature, H-2A Agriculteral Visa, Jacob Ripple-Carpenter, January 2010, shepherd
Local Buzz: Schooling Shelters

Published January 2010 Vol. 14 Issue 1

text by Michael Neary

photography by Adrian DiUbaldo

Living at the Salvation Army Lambuth Center in Denver, Luz Hernandez and her two children face some uncertainty about their future. But uncertainty and all, their lives clearly feel better to them than they did last spring.

About six months ago, Hernandez was holding down two jobs while the family lived in a Westminster apartment. The jobs—part of an effort to emerge from a deepening financial trench—left little time for Hernandez to spend with her daughter Lesley Velasquez, 13, and her son Adrian Velasquez, 12.

“I would hardly see them,” she said.

Hernandez, who spoke quietly, seemed to relish the time she could now spend with her children.

Hernandez talked about her move to the shelter as her son worked on lessons in a tutoring program begun this year by Denver Public Schools. Luz said her daughter, who wasn’t at the shelter that afternoon, would also be taking up the lessons. With wooden floors and modest but comfortable chairs, the shelter is an inviting place, and the moods of the families staying there seemed serene.

The children at the shelter are studying in ways they wouldn’t have been able to a year ago. DPS started the tutoring program where Adrian was learning with federal funds made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The ARRA funds are part of a big increase in federal dollars available to Colorado public schools to help homeless students this year—but the problem itself is growing at a daunting pace.

Adrian Velasquez, 12, works on a math worksheet at the Lambuth Center.

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DV StaffAdrian Diubaldo, January 2010, Michael Neary, homeless students
Local Buzz: Mentors instead of cell mates

Published January 2010 Vol. 14 Issue 1

Colorado Springs non-profits find alternatives to prison for juvenile offenders.

by Chris Bolte

Robert ran away from home at age 17, dropped out of school and couch surfed throughout the Colorado Springs area for four months. He was reluctant to talk about what, exactly, he did, so left it at he “got into trouble” and found himself in a treatment program through the Division of Youth Corrections. Through this program he was able to attain his GED and get started on a new path.

His circumstances are not at all uncommon.  Dropping out of school has ramifications for young adults; idle time, isolation and even being cut off from many services provided for those still attending school. It can be a recipe for bad decisions.

Minor charges specific to youth are things like truancy or running away from home, gateway crimes.  Some youth continue on this track to more serious crimes.  They can be sent to the Division of Youth Corrections or, even worse, adult prison.

From there, if a youth returns to the same peers upon release, the same temptations to commit crimes and return to the system all over again are all but inevitable.  This is what we have come to know as the recidivism problem.

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DV StaffChris Bolte, Colorado Springs, January 2010, TwoCor, local buzz
Feature: Suburban homeless (the travel trap)

Published December 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 11

text and images by D. Giles Clasen

For a Minnesota country-man, coming to Colorado meant becoming homeless, and inching ominously closer to the city every day.

Terri Schweppe does not belong in a city. His handlebar mustache, black cowboy hat and duster expresses clearly that he is a man more comfortable in a small town than downtown.

When he moved to Denver, it was a move full of both tragedy and hope.  He drove his unreliable van from Minneapolis, across the barren cornfields of the Midwest, to Colorado’s Front Range expecting to find open air and a job.

But Schweppe didn’t find the sanctuary he expected. Instead, he quickly became homeless.

It is one more setback for Schweppe, who moved after his identical twin, Larry Schweppe, died of a stroke in April. “I have been a little lost without him,” Schweppe admits.  “He was my compass.  I sometimes feel like when he died I lost my identity.  Now I have lost everything.”

The two had been roommates and best friends. Schweppe continues to carry Larry’s birth and death certificates.  He handles them gently and with great reverence when he shows them.  He pulls out his brother’s Minnesota driver’s license.  

"I only know how to do two things. I know how to work with the dirt and I now how to cook. I work hard and I’m honest. Those qualities don’t amount to much when you are trying to get a job.” — Terri Schweppe

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DV StaffD. Giles Clasen, December 2009, The Action Center, homeless
Feature: Man in the van

Published December 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 11

by Dwayne Pride

Undeterred by the loss of a job, Oregonian Aaron Heideman turns his van into a home to canvas America.

Artprize is a national contest for fine artists and emerging artists from all around the world. It is said to be one of the largest prizes that an artist can hope to win to get recognized for his or her craft. All of the winners are chosen by the public. The top prize is $250,000. For most, when they think of somebody that would be part of a contest like this they would not think of a poor man,  a homeless man, as one of its participants. Artist/ driver Aaron Heideman aka “The Man in the Van” proves this theory wrong.

“I don’t want to panhandle,” reiterates Aaron Heideman.

After losing jobs during the recession his life was more than just a struggle. He hit rock bottom. But he took a creative angle on his situation and found some freedom from a 9 to 5 with a road trip that would eventually take him through at least 30 States in America. His mission: to make an enormous tapestry of people’s experience of the recession. State by state, city by city, he collected words.

His project started out in Medford, which he calls home. Driving through places like Portland, Fresno, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Denver, he met all types of people and had them share their experiences from a sagging economy and what it has done to their lives.

People wrote their individual stories on rolls of 50-foot waterproof, tear-proof white tyvek paper.  All he asked them was,  “How has the recession affected you?”

“There is No Recession”

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DV StaffAaron Heideman, December 2009, Dwayne Pride, Man in the van
Art Feature: Sterling Crispin

Published December 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 11

interview by Travis Egedy

Twenty-three-year-old Sterling Crispin is one of Denver’s most unique and exciting up and coming artists. Primarily working in video and digitally manipulated photography, his work explores many ideas on society’s current entanglement with technology and where we are headed as both biological and artificial organisms in the future.  A graduate of Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design fine arts department, and a current artist in residence at Redline Studios, Crispin is part of a loose-knit group of radical young artists who are interested in pushing the Denver art community forward into a new era. These young artists are part of a new avant-garde for the recession generation, working with found materials, holding art shows in converted warehouses and critiquing the status of art in both Denver and the world.  I was able to sit down with Sterling to eat some burritos, pet a cat and discuss the inevitable fusion of man and machine.

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DV StaffDecember 2009, Sterling Crispin, Travis Egedy, art
Feature: Where is 'Away'?

Published November 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 10

by William Hillyard

photos by Guillermo Arias

Tanker truck delivers water in Tijuana neighborhood

At low tide, you could walk to Mexico, around the crusty palisade of the border fence, without even getting your shoes wet.  The thinnest can slip between the stakes, as kids do, dashing into America—‘look at me, mom!’—and slipping back again over the line.  The Pacific’s relentless waves and salt spray have long ago eaten the fence’s metallic flesh, leaving a disheveled skeleton of rusty spikes, 12 feet tall, like the broken and bent teeth of a giant scaly comb.  Dogs wander back and forth, around the pickets of steel—sections of railroad track actually, driven endwise into the sand—and sniff the cluttered beach, crossing the invisible line, the abstraction of the international border.  

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DV StaffGuillermo Arias, Mexico, NAFTA, November 2009, William Hillyard, environment, labor
Art Feature: The Leslie Spit

Published November 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 10

text by Ross Evertson and photos by Ross Evertson and Davin Risk

 

In any city it is incredibly easy to take for granted—or be ignorant entirely—of the things that are happening beneath us. Transportation and sewer systems, fault lines and lagoons—modern, ancient and natural catacombs of all sorts functioning and hiding below our cities.

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DV StaffDavin Risk, November 2009, Ross Evertson
Profile: Cafe Options: A new way to bake a living.

Published November 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 10

text and photos by D. Giles Clasen

Women working at Cafe Options

The word non-profit rarely carries thoughts of pizzazz.  When the word is combined with restaurant, our minds may drift to something more akin to a soup kitchen than a fine cafe. But Cafe Options is a delicatessen downtown that has managed to combine non-profit with fine-food.

The restaurant, located at 1650 Curtis St., is a place where customers receive smoked meats, pickles and mustard all prepared from scratch. They give downtown diners a different option than many of the chain eateries along the 16th Street Mall.  It also provides the opportunity for a small staff of low-income women to develop precious job experience as well as job skills as prep cooks.

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DV StaffD. Giles Clasen, November 2009, nonprofit food
Freature: Magazine Crew - Human trafficking may have knocked at your door.

Published November 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 10

by Margo Pierce
photos by Adrian Diubaldo

 Some of the 27 million people worldwide who are bought, traded or are unwitting victims of human trafficking live and work in Colorado. It could be the person in the fields you drive past or on your doorstep telling you about a magazine offer. It’s not clear if Jose Garcia was a victim of human trafficking. He had one of those jobs that operates in a grey area. But one thing is certain: he is one of the lucky ones who was able to escape that possibility.

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DV StaffAdrian Diubaldo, Margo Pierce, November 2009, homeless youth, human trafficking
News Briefs: No Camping: Rough Sleepers Get the Boot From Boulder

Published November 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 10

by Sarah Eckhoff

photo by Adrian Diubaldo

A woman rests outside the Carriage House in Boulder.

Jon Garrett carries his home on his shoulders. Every night he hopes to find a place where he can lay his head away from biting wind or cold rain. And at least four times in his almost two-year stint of homelessness, he has been wakened by law enforcement ready to convict him for this illegal activity.

Boulder Revised Code 5-6-10, Camping or lodging on property without consent, states that “no person shall camp within any park, parkway, recreation area, open space, or other public property” without first obtaining permission from the owner, supervisory officer or city manager. This means that from sunset to one hour after sunrise, any person carrying out “daily activities” such as eating, sleeping or seeking protection from the elements in a way other than clothing can be arrested.

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DV StaffNo Camping, November 2009, Sarah Eckhoff. Boulder
Beyond Denver: Turning Junk Mail into Art

Published November 2009 Vol. 13 Issue 10

by Alecia D. McKenzie

PARIS, France - Like everyone else, Barbara Hashimoto hated the junk mail coming in through the door. Until she decided one day that it could be transformed into art and lessons about the environment.
Hashimoto, a U.S.-born, Japanese-trained artist, has created “The Junk Mail Experiment,” in which huge quantities of unsolicited advertising mail are shredded into temporary installation art and eventually into sculptures. The “Experiment” is currently on view in Paris and in Chicago.

“I was working in a firm and was amazed at how much junk mail we received,” says Hashimoto, a slim dark-haired woman who speaks passionately about her work.

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DV StaffAlecia D. McKenzie, November 2009, art, junk mail