Nuestras Historias maps Latino and Chicano Denver through places

For a long time, Denver’s preservation map left out a great deal of the city’s Latino, Chicano, and Mexican American life. Nuestras Historias set out to fill that gap, treating that history as worth marking on the same map as everything else.

The work came from people, not just records. Community Planning and Development staff teamed up with local historians, collected oral histories, and held public outreach to find the places and themes that carry this heritage. The themes run wide: religion, education, labor, commerce, politics, the Chicano Movement, arts, and the texture of neighborhood life.

That breadth is the point. A mural, a school, a church, a commercial strip, a park, or the room where a neighborhood gathered to organize can hold history that older landmark lists, focused on grand architecture, never fully captured. The meaning lives in what happened there as much as in how the building looks.

So when a Denver place seems to hold more than its plain brick or stucco would suggest, like a corner store that anchored a block or a hall where a movement took shape, Nuestras Historias is the place to look. It was built to connect culture, memory, and real locations, and to keep that connection on the record where the next generation can find it.