Losing Ground: Changing Economy

EVRAZ Pueblo formerly CF&I

Buildings at the EVRAZ Pueblo steel mill are reflected in the window of a building near the former Colorado Fuel and Iron plant on the southern end of Pueblo. In the 1960s, CF&I was the economic engine and racial equalizer for Colorado’s southernmost major city.(Joe Mahoney/The I-News Network)

Once lucrative manufacturing jobs in Colorado have declined sharply since the 1980s as employers such as CF&I Steel, Samonsite and Gates Rubber have cutback employment or closed shop.

An I-News Network analysis of 60 years of U.S. Census data and other information reveals how the decline in jobs that were an entry to the middle class has hit minority workers disproportionately.

Disappearing pathway to middle class

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In the 1960s, the giant CF&I steel plant on the southern end of Pueblo was the economic driving engine and racial equalizer for Colorado’s southernmost major city.

Former Pueblo city council president Ray Aguilera, in his early 20s during the mill’s last heyday as a large-scale employer, recalls wives dropping their husbands – Latinos, Italians, Slovenians – at the tunnel entrance leading under the roadway to the 7,000 lucrative jobs on the other side. The work often did not require college degrees or even high school diplomas.

Former Pueblo Ray Aguilera tours Pueblo talking about the city's manufacturing past.

Former Pueblo Ray Aguilera tours Pueblo talking about the city’s manufacturing past.

“Why would anybody want to go college when you can go out to the mill and make (today’s equivalent of) $60,000, $70,000 a year,” Aguilera said.
The towering steel mill stacks and their billowing clouds of smoke were symbols of a unique prosperity, one in which the smelter was a melting pot in more ways than one.

When the city’s soldiers, sailors and Marines returned from War World II, they all expected a fair shake from Pueblo’s major employer. Soon, the mill’s segregated showers for whites and Latinos disappeared. Show more text →

In 1970, one in four black workers either was employed in manufacturing or by the federal government. By 2010, that had dropped to one in eight. Among Latino workers, more than one in three held manufacturing or federal government jobs in 1970. That had fallen to fewer than one in four by 2010.

— U.S. Census Data

Colorado's economic landscape shifted precipitously away from good paying blue-collar jobs of the 1960s and 1970s to much lower current levels especially at employers like the former Colorado Fuel and Iron Corp., in Pueblo. “It was terrible,” Ray Aguilera, former Pueblo city council president said. “The thought of losing all those jobs and closing this plant was absolutely a nightmare, the way the community felt.” (Joe Mahoney/The I-News Network)

Colorado’s economic landscape shifted precipitously away from good paying blue-collar jobs of the 1960s and 1970s to much lower current levels especially at employers like the former Colorado Fuel and Iron Corp., in Pueblo. “It was terrible,” Ray Aguilera, former Pueblo city council president said. “The thought of losing all those jobs and closing this plant was absolutely a nightmare, the way the community felt.” (Joe Mahoney/The I-News Network)


Losing Ground Charts

Latino and black residents of Colorado are falling further behind the state’s white residents in some of the most important measures of social progress. An I-News Network analysis of six decades of U.S. Census data shows that the gaps between the three communities narrowed somewhat during the years surrounding the civil rights movement, but have widened in the decades since.


Burt Hubbard is the editorial director of I-News. Burt is well-known in the journalism world for his data analysis skills. His numerous awards include two prestigious Best of The West awards, a national education award for investigative reporting, and Reporter of the Year in Colorado.

He also was a top-10 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting for the Rocky Mountain News and is enshrined in the Scripps Howard Journalism Hall of Fame. Burt has taught computer-assisted reporting and internet research to graduate students for 11 years at the University of Colorado School of Journalism and Mass Communication. For the past three years he has led research symposiums for journalists and citizens throughout Colorado on behalf of the university. Burt recently left the Denver Post to join I-News.


  • Richard Iron Hammer

    How sad it is to see such a trusted and respected
    organization as PBS do a critical and seemingly in-depth piece on disparities
    only to completely ignore the most disparate of populations, the
    “Minority’s Minority”, American Indians.

    In almost every category, this segment of the population
    continues to show the most disparate rates in health, infant mortality,
    poverty, high school and college graduation, and home ownership. And yet, even
    this study has seen fit to marginalize these people right off the page.

    I am made to feel that these people are not considered
    worthy of being counted. It almost seems; that this never was their land; that
    they never existed; that they don’t exist today or; that they do not deserve to
    exist.

    Shameful!

    Still, I suppose it should not be a surprise, being that we
    live in a State where people still celebrate the name of a baby-butchering
    terrorist like Chivington by fixing his name to streets, sites, and various
    other locations, honoring a man who avowed that Colorado Indians, “have to be
    roundly whipped — or completely wiped out”(1).

    (1) http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/chivington.htm

  • Jack Frost

    Why are we not surprised that our regional PBS would step into class/racial problems by advocating
    government solutions to what might very well be natural, unchangeable differences.  Unless children are conceived by two responsible
    and committed-to-each-other adults who will raise those children in an environment that encourages and rewards
    learning and effort,  share with those children the warm, joyful, and uplifting rewards of love and respect, and
    hold before them the challenge to push themselves to their limits of learning and achievment then what we now have is what you get.  As my father used to tell us back in the Great Depression “It’s no disgrace to be poor but it is a disgrace to remain poor.”

    Richard Iron Hammer’s (is he a real American Indian or a Churchill convert?)  comments are interesting but need some in-depth context.  I grew up long ago between the Navajo and Apache Indian Reservations (my grandfather was a small off-reservation trader) in Northern Arizona on what became Route 66.  I often heard tourists comment on our environment after driving through the Navajo Reservation between Grants, New Mexico and Flagstaff, Arizona.  ”How terrible for the US Government  to put those poor Indians out in such non-productive desert land.”   Growing up there I often wondered the same thing.  Later in life I read  a copy of the “TREATY BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA & THE NAVAJO TRIBE OF INDIANS / WITH A RECORD OF THE DISCUSSIONS THAT LED TO ITS SIGNING”  (published by KC Publications, Flagstaff, Az. 1968).  I highly  recommend that every responsible, thoughtful citizen  who is being asked by PBS  to support its interpretations  of  contemporary social, educational, and financial issues  to please read it.  Then I suggest a drive through that Reservation between, for example, Farmington and Shiprock, New Mexico during the growing season and notice the difference in what’s growing on the East side of the Reservation Line and the West side, both of which have the same land and water rights from the San Juan River, but the Navajo farms on the west side were neglected and barren compared to the profit-motivated farmers on the east side.  Another read I suggest are comments  by John Greenway, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado (Boulder) back in 1969, regarding “guilt-ridden, history-distorting paleface.”

       

     

  • jbholston

    This is an awesome piece of work.  Thanks for doing it.  Sharing it everywhere.