At Raíces Brewing Company, a sea of festival-goers — many wearing the yellow soccer jerseys of the Colombian national team — braved the summer heat on a July afternoon. With cumbia music pounding over the speakers and cold cocktails in hand, they celebrated their culture at Denver’s eighth-annual Colombian Festival.
Attendees visited vendors selling fresh Colombian coffee and arepas, or stuffed corn cakes. Near a stand hawking raspados — refreshing shaved ice — Chantel Baumgard remarked on how much her community has flourished in recent years.
“We came to this same event three years ago, and it was just one food truck out here,” said Baumgard, 29, whose mother is from Bogotá, Colombia’s bustling capital. “This year, it’s huge.”
Denver has taken in tens of thousands of migrants from Venezuela since late 2022, with the community rallying together to organize shelters, gather food and integrate children into local schools. But a smaller influx of newcomers has arrived from Colombia, Venezuela’s South American neighbor.
Their reasons for leaving have differed at times, though the political strife in Venezuela has impacted Colombia by proxy. As Colombians try to settle down in Denver, they often feel overlooked.
“Within that wave of newcomers, yes, (the) majority were Venezuelans, but a lot of our community — Colombian community — kind of feel left out,” said Xiomara Sanchez, the president of the grassroots organization La Fundación de Colombianos en Colorado. “Some of the Colombian population feel like some of the resources, or the stuff out there (for Venezuelans), is not necessarily for them.”
Recent arrivals from Colombia say they want to secure jobs and build better lives for themselves here. Colombian immigrants who had lived near the border with Venezuela cite another reason: to escape conflict.
Decades of violence in their own country, tied to civil wars and drug trafficking — with the repercussions still felt today — also convinced some Colombians to say goodbye to their home country.
But when they land in the Centennial State, some aren’t sure where to turn for help, including housing assistance, employment services and access to health care providers. Often, their status as undocumented immigrants poses challenges. And much of the community messaging in the last two years has been directed at Venezuelans, who have been the focus of significant spending by Denver city government and nonprofit groups, especially during a period at the start of the year when daily busloads were arriving from Texas border cities.
Denver Human Services spokesperson Jon Ewing noted that “we made zero distinction in regards to country of origin” when providing migrants with city resources, such as support in applying for work authorization.
Both populations have weathered similar challenges in broad strokes, including unemployment, financial hardship and fears about safety. However, the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Venezuela has created dire conditions, so many of its migrants have been granted specific protections in the U.S. as they’ve sought asylum at the border.
“The resources allocated to Venezuelans and Venezuelan organizations are due to the current political situation in Venezuela,” Sanchez said. Still, “not everyone knows what is available and who qualifies.”
The number of Colombians in the U.S. — both foreign-born and American-born — has steadily risen from about 500,000 in 2000 to 1.4 million in 2021, the Pew Research Center reports. In 2022, Colorado was home to almost 7,700 foreign-born Colombians, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
The size of the state’s Colombian population has become notable enough that, in May, the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced plans to open a consulate in Denver.
The political instability in Venezuela is still among the factors spurring Venezuelans and Colombians alike to leave for other places like Denver. Since Venezuela’s presidential election took place on July 28, civilians have protested claims by President Nicolás Maduro that he won reelection over mounting evidence that his challenger, Edmundo González Urrutia, received the most votes.
Ties that bind Venezuela and Colombia
The turmoil in Venezuela isn’t solely affecting its citizens. As Sanchez, 42, has worked with Colombian immigrants in Colorado, she’s noticed that more are arriving in Denver after leaving the Santander department near the Venezuelan border.
“A lot of the people that you see here now are from the border, and that’s because they were affected by the whole situation,” she said. There, “things are ugly.”
The Migration Policy Institute notes that a large swath of Colombians are opting to cross into the U.S. from Mexico without proper documentation. More than 126,000 Colombians were recorded at the border over the first eight months of the last fiscal year, up sharply from two years earlier.
“Many (Colombians) also cross the border and have nothing when they arrive,” Sanchez said.
In Colorado, Sanchez said, some inquire about seeking temporary protected status, which protects beneficiaries from deportation and grants them work authorization. Sixteen countries’ citizens are currently designated for TPS, including El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela — but not Colombia. And for now, only Venezuelans who have resided in the U.S. since July 31, 2023, can apply for TPS as first-time applicants.
“Seeking asylum is one of the paths some Colombian immigrants take, but it is not necessarily the most common route for all Colombian immigrants,” Sanchez said.
At times, Colombia’s and Venezuela’s respective histories have overlapped. For a brief period in the 19th century, the two nations were even part of the same state — Gran Colombia — which also included Panama and Ecuador.
Oliver Kaplan, an associate professor at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, described the Colombian system as traditionally conservative-leaning, democratic and stable. But because of its disparities in wealth and services, “Colombia is known as one of the most unequal countries in the world,” he said.
For over two centuries, civil wars rocked the nation. The latest armed conflict, which lasted five decades, ended in 2016. Many Colombians fled the fighting. In the 1980s and 1990s, they largely took shelter in neighboring Venezuela, which was a thriving country at the time.
In turn, “the Colombians have done really this heroic effort to take in and absorb and provide services for a massive number of Venezuelans” as that country has been destabilized, Kaplan said.
During President Hugo Chávez’s socialist rule of Venezuela from 1999 to 2013, its wealthy residents primarily relocated to the U.S., although some moved to Colombia.
“There were a few with a lot of money,” said César Caballero Reinoso, the manager of Colombian polling company Cifras & Conceptos S.A. “We received them with open arms.”
A Denver Post reporter met with Caballero in Bogotá while traveling in Colombia in late July. As he nursed a lemonade drink in the penthouse of a business club in the upscale Zona G neighborhood, he recounted a brief history of his country’s modern relationship with Venezuela.
After Maduro was elected president of Venezuela in 2013, Caballero said, the nation’s masses left, too, with many opting to walk west through Colombia. Initially, they were met with solidarity from Colombians, who passed out food and gave truck rides to migrants.
“You don’t see that now,” Caballero said.
Xenophobia increased as more Venezuelans resettled in Colombia, with locals blaming migrants for security threats and added competition for jobs — although the situation has since calmed, Caballero said.
Family, opportunities draw people to Colorado
Denver resident Mayra Regalado has seen both perspectives. The native of Calabozo, Venezuela, resided in Bogotá for nine years with her husband Huila, who is from Colombia’s Tolima department. There, Regalado noticed Colombians were moving abroad after feeling the squeeze of unemployment and inflation.
At age 31, she decided to make the trek to the U.S. with a small group of people, including her son. For three months, they traveled alongside Colombians, Panamanians and even Asians.
“I know a lot of Colombians, and they are hard workers,” Regalado said in Spanish while sitting in the courtyard of her north Denver apartment building this summer. “On the trail, they’ll help you with the luggage, with your bag, with your kid.”
She was deported twice from Mexico after officials caught her riding atop a train moving toward the U.S. Regalado eventually completed her journey and has made ends meet for nine months in Denver by cleaning houses.
When asked if she feels more stable in the U.S. than in Venezuela and Colombia, she answered: “Un poco mejor.” (“A little better.”)
Among Colombians, several of the reasons they choose to emigrate are homegrown, including safety concerns.
“You might own a little bit more than your neighbor, and you already are a target for kidnapping,” Sanchez said. “Like every nationality, there’s always going to be good people and bad people.”
Colombia’s dearth of employment is another factor that’s consistently driven Colombians to other countries, Eliana Vásquez said.
“There are not many opportunities here for work,” said Vásquez, 70, in an interview with The Post at a shopping center in Medellín, Colombia, last month. “I feel that’s always been the case.”
After Vásquez made the decision to leave Colombia, she lived in the U.S. for 44 years. She originally came to learn English, but stayed for several reasons, including job prospects. Vásquez spent the last two decades working in administration at Stanford University in California before returning to Colombia in late 2023.
So, how can her nation retain its people, particularly its youth? “If young Colombians who are going have a reason to stay here,” Vásquez offered.
Many Colombians have been drawn to Colorado by “chain migration,” in which people leaving home join relatives who already live here, Sanchez said. Her younger sister is among them — she arrived in Colorado about three years ago, spurred to leave by the lack of opportunities.
Cristian Plazas, 21, also followed a sibling to Denver, resettling from Colombia’s Antioquia department two years ago. “I had a brother that came, and he invited us to come,” Plazas said in Spanish at the Colombian Festival last month.
Sanchez’s organization has stepped up to build a network for newcomers by donating clothes and connecting them with professional and volunteer opportunities.
As her community grows, she sees glimmers of her homeland in Denver.
“Twenty years ago, we couldn’t find anything that really reminded me of my country,” said Sanchez, who hails from Cali, Colombia, and moved here 23 years ago, at age 19.
Now, she said, “Colorado’s home.”
Originally Published: August 20, 2024 at 6:00 a.m.
