Chapter 4: Immigrants

Italians

Only a sprinkling of Italians settled in Denver before 1880, when the census taker found a scant 86. In the following decades the railroads, mining companies and other industries recruited Italian labor and the 1890 census listed an Italian population of 999. By 1920, their population had climbed to over 3,000 and the North Denver neighborhood of Highland became known as "Little Italy."

One of the first Italian families to arrive in the early 1870s were Mary Anne and Angelo Capelli. They opened a fruit stand and diner on Wazee Street near Union Station, saving enough capital to build the Highland House on 15th and Platte Streets. The Capellis treated both their countrymen and non-Italians to pasta dinners on Columbus Day, when they draped their business with American and Italian flags to celebrate Italian-American solidarity.

Like the Capellis, many Italians started out in the Bottoms, the slummy area bordering the Platte River and the railroad tracks. In this dumpy flood plain, these former peasant farmers found water and good soil. Soon the river bottoms were checkerboarded with Italian vegetable patches. These urban farmers hawked their produce downtown from fruit, vegetable, and flower stands. Some saved enough to buy a horse and wagon. After putting a canvas roof on the wagon and hanging a scale on the outside, Italians began infiltrating Denver neighborhoods and even suburbs with their street song of "Vegetable Man! Vegetable Man! Nice ripe tomatoes! Fresh pascal celery! Just picked strawberries!"

As the Mile High City grew, many of these farmers graduated to larger businesses, opening pasta factories and restaurants, groceries and wholesale produce companies. To this day, Denver's large wholesale produce firms are clustered around the Denargo market in the Platte bottomlands, and many are run by descendants of Italian pioneers.

Italians who came to Colorado tended to be poor and were derided for their dark complexions, Catholicism, foreign language, different food, and homemade wine. Denverites called them macaroni eaters, wops (without official papers), and Dagos (originally "Diegos" a derogatory term for Hispanics who were confused with Italians). Many lived in tents, shacks, and shanties in the river bottoms and worked hard, poor-paying jobs-building railroads, digging coal, tending truck farms and toiling in smelters.

Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, the Italian nun who became the first U. S. citizen to be canonized a saint, visited Colorado in 1902 and reported: "Here the hardest work is reserved for the Italian worker...they merely look upon him as an ingenious machine for work...I saw these dear fellows of ours engaged on construction of railways in the most intricate mountain gorges.Š Poor miners...work uninterruptedly year in and year out, until old age and incapacity creep over them, or at least until some day a landslide or explosion or an accident of some kind ends the life of the poor worker, who does not even need a grave, being buried in the one in which he has lived all his life."

To give Italian immigrants "the holy joys which in our own country the poor peasant has on Sundays at least," Mother Cabrini helped erect Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church [photo 4-17] in Denver's Little Italy. This dignified Romanesque church, with its ornate Italian interior, still stands at 36th and Navajo Streets in North Denver. One of the twin copper-capped towers houses the 1,000-pound bell known as "Maria del Carmelina."

With the help of Mother Cabrini's church, as well as a school and orphanage, Denver's Italian community ultimately prospered, moving out of the river bottoms to North Denver and, still later, out to suburban Adams and Jefferson counties. Hard-working first-generation immigrants sacrificed themselves to feed, cloth and educate their children, who often became professional and white collar workers. In a once-condescending city, Italians slowly earned respect-and even admiration-often the hard way.

Denver historian Stephen J. Leonard, in his detailed study of early Denver immigrants, concludes that most groups, with the exception of the Chinese, fared better in Denver than in many larger Eastern cities. Yet the Depression of 1893 and the rise of the anti-immigrant American Protective Association darkened that dream for many by 1900. Many immigrants, especially the Chinese and Scandinavians, were among the thousands who left Denver during the 1890s. When the economy and immigration perked up again after 1900, a new wave of immigrants came from central and eastern Europe, followed by blacks from the South and East and Hispanics from southern Colorado and New and Old Mexico.