In a short stretch of East Colfax Avenue, Aurora’s position as the top destination for immigrants in Colorado — a role it embraces — comes into view.
Nestled at the intersection of Dallas Street and East Colfax Avenue sits Panaderia el Paisa, a bakery filled with colorful, sugar-dusted pastries. Jose Herrera, an immigrant from Mexico, has owned the business for seven years. The bakery sits near Senegalese African Hair Braiding and across the street, the window of L.A. Insurance Agency advertises “Se Habla Español.”
Bustling side streets are also filled with businesses — and places of worship too. On Dayton Street, Jesucristo es Rey, a Spanish-language Evangelical church, is just down the street from Manakamana Grocery, a “Nepali and Indian Bazaar.”
Prakriti Rai, 22, whose parents own Manakamana Grocery, said Aurora has been a welcoming place for her and her family to run a business.
“(We’ve had) mostly positive experiences,” she said. “We haven’t really faced racial discrimination.”
Aurora has been a landing spot for immigrants for decades: In 2000, 16.2 percent of its residents were foreign born, with that figure rising to about 19 percent in 2016. According to U.S. Census data from 2009, Aurora had the 16th-highest foreign-born population per capita among cities of at least 300,000 people.
And the city is embracing this diversity. Over the past three years, since unveiling its refugee and immigrant integration plan in 2015, the city has rolled out programs in nearly every major area of public and civic life to help immigrants and refugees integrate into the city.
Ricardo Gambetta, head of Aurora’s Office of International and Immigrant Affairs, said one of the city’s most prominent initiatives has been its Natural Helpers program, formed in conjunction with the Village Exchange Center, a nonprofit serving immigrants and refugees.
“It’s an excellent way to empower the local immigrant and refugee community,” Gambetta said. “It’s a great way to develop leadership skills and train those in the immigrant community how to help others navigate the system.”
Aurora is one of four cities in the country with the Natural Helpers Program. It has trained over 140 volunteers in various immigrant communities so they can help connect others to city resources.
Amanda Blaurock, director of the Village Exchange Center, said she believes the city’s initiatives have helped attract a large immigrant population in the area.
“They’re changing the dialogue from ‘These community members are bad’ to ‘We’re welcoming them and providing resources,’ ” Blaurock said.
The city has also worked closely with Community Enterprise Development Services over the past few years to promote immigrants’ small business endeavors and connect them with microloans. And it has put a special emphasis on naturalization efforts, with an annual naturalization ceremony and “citizenship corners” in its libraries to provide information about the naturalization process.
“Once you become a U.S. citizen, you have access to greater opportunity,” Gambetta said. “You have access to federal jobs, you improve your income, so we try to promote citizenship.”
But there are limits as to how far the city is willing to go. In 2017, over the objections of immigrant-rights activists, the City Council declared that Aurora would not be recognized as a sanctuary city. The city said it would not obstruct operations of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, as officials feared losing federal funds for operating as a sanctuary under the Trump administration’s definition of the term.
In terms of its integration plan, Gambetta acknowledged there is still work to do, but said he remains optimistic.
“Not everything is perfect,” he said “but we feel we are making progress.”
Nearly one in five Aurora residents is foreign born, with immigrants from more than 40 countries. The largest proportion of its immigrant population is from Mexico, followed by Ethiopia, El Salvador and Korea, according to city demographics.
Here, a few Aurora immigrants and residents discuss the factors that brought them to the United States and their journeys towards citizenship.
Lorena Zilo
Lorena Zilo was 13 years old when economic turmoil struck Albania, her native country. Concerned by the unrest and seeking better economic opportunities, Zilo’s parents took her and her sister to the United States Embassy, hoping to obtain lottery visas for the family.
When they arrived, there were 20 visas available.
“The first family that went in (to get visas) was a family of six, then the second was a family of five, so we kept counting how many visas remained,” Zilo said. “Everyone who went in got a visa, but wondering if we were going to get visas was stressful.”
Five years after arriving in the United States, Zilo became eligible for citizenship. After she passed the citizenship test and was sworn in, one of the first things she did was apply for a passport.
“I was looking forward to not having to apply for visas everywhere I went anymore,” she said.
Currently employed by the city’s IT department, Zilo has worked in different parts of the country, including Minnesota and Princeton. She also spent three years in Hong Kong working for a relocation company.
Had she remained in Albania, Zilo, now 34, believes she would not have been able to earn a college degree or travel as much as she has.
“Now I have a career,” she said. “There, I probably would have had a job.”
Roxy Hernandez
In 1983, Roxy Hernandez and her sister emigrated from El Salvador, after their mother became concerned that women were going to be recruited to fight in the country’s civil war.
“I didn’t see much of the armed conflict, we would just hear things,” she said.
Hernandez has lived in Aurora for approximately 13 years. But she first immigrated to Arkansas, where she had a hard time adjusting to a new diet, as much of it consisted of canned food.
“It’s like how can people eat this so often for a meal? It’s not a meal,” she said. “So it was kind of tough getting used to the different tastes.”
Now, Hernandez, 54, runs a catering company — Antojitos D’Cuscatlan — as well as a cultural dance company, Eco Folklorico Cuscatlan.
“I started this cultural dance group because in no cultural event did I see any Salvadoran roots, so I thought why not? Someone needs to start,” she said.
Preserving her cultural heritage has always been a concern for Hernandez, who said she hesitated when she first became eligible to apply for citizenship.
“I was still so Salvadoran that in my head, I was renouncing that, I was losing my roots,” she said.
However, after many conversations with family, Hernandez eventually changed her mind.
“My relatives’ questioning kind of did it, but I also saw things going on in this country that I thought, well, if I become a citizen, I can vote and have a say,” she said.
George Bannoura
George Bannoura, 40, comes from a family of Christians native to the Holy Land. He learned wood carving from his father, who learned from his father, in a tradition stretching back generations. In Bethlehem, located in the West Bank south of Jerusalem, he and his family own a farm of olive trees that are nearly 800 years old.
Bannoura and his family carved crosses and other religious items from the wood, relying heavily on money made from selling the items to tourists. However, with the unrest in the region during the early 2000s, tourism decreased drastically and Bannoura struggled to make a living.
“We almost had no income for three years, not just us, but the entire city had no income,” he said.
He and his wife decided to move to Colorado in 2003, where they had their first child and began selling hand-carved items from the Holy Land.
“To be honest, I had no idea where I was going to,” he said. “It was really, we saw hope for us when we made the decision. We saw the hope there to support our family and other families as well who are connected to us by carving.”
After several years selling through kiosks and in churches across the state, Bannoura opened Bethlehem Handicrafts, a store with nearly 1,000 items, in Aurora. He is also a recent citizen, having been naturalized in November 2017 after 15 years of working towards citizenship.
“It’s an achievement that I worked towards and I was so proud,” he said. “It was so emotional for both my wife and I to become U.S. citizens and I remember the first thing we did when we went home, we told our kids ‘Now we are citizens just like you guys.'”
Editor’s note: The story was updated on July 16. Due to a reporter’s error, Roxy Hernandez’ business, Antojitos D’Cuscatlan, was misidentified in the original version.
