An Auraria Parable: An Unforgettable Story Sharing Experience

By Rowena Alegría

Have you ever wished to journey back in time, to walk the streets of yesteryear and not only hear but witness the stories of Denver’s past told by the people living them? In May, over a limited run, DCPA Off-Center partnered with local artist James Lopez, his company, the Exposure Project, and the Auraria Campus to offer An Auraria Parable, an immersive experience that was about as close to a ride in a time-traveling DeLorean as you might get. My role in the project was to facilitate the gathering of stories about the campus and the city’s oldest neighborhood, which inspired the show, and then host conversations to help participants understand their role in furthering the work – which continues although the show wrapped this spring. Please allow me to explain.

Auraria began as a mining camp in 1858. For millennia before then, the area near the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek was a gathering place to camp, hunt, and trade for dozens of tribes including the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Ute. Since 1976, the Auraria Campus has been home to the Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and the University of Colorado at Denver. For An Auraria Parable, however, the dates and details of history were less important than the creation of a fictional world that visitors could occupy, in the spaces as they stand today.

“Instead of it being a show about the history, we set out to show people what it felt like to exist on that land: Indigenous people, Aurarians, and students, all from very unique perspectives,” Lopez said. “As you walk on campus, you explore what was and is there and go back in time by meeting with different characters in present or past.”

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By definition, immersive art is an experience in which the viewer is enveloped by the artwork, becoming a participant rather than a passive observer, where their actions impact the adventure. For An Auraria Parable, performers portraying residents of the Old Westside neighborhood guided participants across campus to experience 9^th Street Historic Park, not as a tree-lined street of academic offices, but as the homes they once were, with laundry drying on the line and a front porch, where a neighbor might see you skipping school and call your mom. Through characters telling stories of the neighborhood, participants stepped back in time, walking a mile-and-a-half tour that took them to the church at the community’s heart, through visual and audio art installations, and to the gardens of past and future on what is now the Auraria Campus. They even got to eat pickles, inspired by Displaced Aurarians who shared vivid memories of the local pickle factory before it burned down.

“We know why we love pickles because of the pickle factory being part of our history,” said Frances Torres, a retired licensed clinical social worker whose parents bought the house that still stands at 1033 9^th Street in the 1930s and raised a large family there before being displaced along with about 300 other families as part of the Denver Urban Renewal Program between 1955 and 1973 to make way for the Auraria Higher Education Center. The house now serves as the office of the MSU Denver Honors Program. “It was the best pickle I’ve eaten, and I really do love pickles.”

The tart taste of pickles, water poured into colored glass vessels, the tinkling of jingles on a dress were all part of the show.

“That experience – of having tactile things to interact with – creates a stronger memory and impact,” Lopez said. “We wanted participants to be in the world we created.”

Inspired by Lopez’s artistic sensibilities and interest in what he calls the “cycle of displacement” (also known as gentrification), the show’s storylines were grounded by members of the Auraria community. Over the better part of a year, the team hosted story sharing events at which Displaced Aurarians, students, administrators, and interested members of the community were invited to share their stories, memories, and hopes. Unlike many storytelling events, the goal was to empower participants to learn how to share their stories in the way they remembered them but not to capture or record them. From their shared stories, instead, the team began to design and develop the experience and create an entirely fictional world based on the themes of the memories shared.

Lopez continued, “We’re always talking about this, how everybody has a story. My thing is, yes, AND… there are so many ways to share stories. A lot of times, people feel like they can’t, like most stories are just on stage. I think stories can be shared in many ways. You can share your story however you want, and we wanted to empower that.”

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With this project, it was especially important to empower the people who had been displaced from Auraria and to include their reminisces, to bring to life their stories.

“Not everybody on the campus knows the history, the situation,” Torres said. “A lot of what we try to do is to teach people that there’s something to recognize. Auraria was a community. We want to treat it as a community. We want the academic community to recognize that, too.”

Torres serves on the Auraria Historical Advocacy Council (AHAC), a nine-member committee formed in 2022 to oversee all planning and use of the 9^th Street Historic Park, from art installations to commemorative signage to a healing garden, along with Sheila Perez Kindle.

“I still get real sentimental about it,” said Perez Kindle, a Displaced Aurarian who retired after more than 30 years as a Pediatric Animal-Assisted Recreational Therapist. “We lost friends. Even families were separated. The trauma’s still there. They say get over it, but it kind of haunts people who were just pushed aside. They made empty promises. And we weren’t going to let it go.

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“Being recognized was one big major step,” she said. “At first, we didn’t recognize the magnitude of that. Now we’re saying, we have a voice. We want to be able to talk to the students and let them know what happened, students, personnel, professors. Where did that house come from? They don’t know, Golda Meir’s being the exception. But those are the houses we lived in during that period of time – not who built that house but who lived there.”

Perez Kindle’s family lived at 1004 Champa and then at 915 Curtis. “It’s sacred land to me, she said. “I was born there.”

While An Auraria Parable was not the vehicle to directly address all of AHAC’s concerns, Perez Kindle, Torres and others shared their stories to help inspire the production and experienced it as part of a test audience.

“We wanted to make sure that these things they were telling us about, the themes of their stories, were represented – that they saw themselves inside of the production,” Lopez said. “We wanted them to feel seen and heard. We set out to move away from trauma, not necessarily into happiness but toward what it was to actually live somewhere. What were the sensory moments, the engagements happening in real time? That’s what we used to help design the show itself.”

Many others contributed stories that showed up in the production. Marsha Whiting, an enrolled member of the Chippewa Cree Tribe and also Sicangu Lakota, was part of a mother/daughter team of story sharers that contributed a Native perspective to An Auraria Parable. Lopez created an entire storyline for student Joseph Bowman.

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At a story sharing event in St. Cajetan’s, which was consecrated as the first Spanish-speaking church in Denver in 1926, many stories were told about the former Catholic church and how it served the community, providing not just religious services but also a school, a health clinic and a credit union. They spoke of major life events that took place there, such as weddings and baptisms. St. Cajetan’s had also been designated for demolition until the community’s fervent and eventually successful campaign to spare at least the building, which is now an event space.

“We really felt we needed our church. But it doesn’t serve as a church now. It serves as memories,” Torres said.

One of the experiences of the show was a visit to what is now that very empty space. Participants, especially Displaced Aurarians, had a visceral reaction.

“I really wanted to get the feeling our family had going there,” Perez Kindle said. “I remember St. Cajetan’s being so full of light, all of the colors from the stained glass, and now the empty shell. I wanted there to be some resemblance of the past. I just wanted to feel it, how much that church belonged to that community, or the community belonged to it.”

But she didn’t. Which, according to Lopez, served the production – and his purpose.

“It used to be a church, but participants saw it as it is now, as an event space,” Lopez said. “To know the history, to experience what it felt like to have community there, then have it removed, created a somatic experience. It’s a completely different space because you have this emotional experience and dynamic understanding.”

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In other words, through An Auraria Parable, participants were able to also experience the loss. They were able to imagine what it used to be like to attend services at St. Cajetan’s, to be part of that community, and then to feel what it was like to have that connection taken away.

“This project really hit hard for people the way I wanted it to,” Lopez said. “That’s why I love sight responsive work – thinking about space and how to pull from it.”

“I saw the people’s faces, gathering new information,” Torres said. “I thought it was all new information for them, but I also thought they took it in. I have this hope in younger people and was really glad they were doing that. I don’t know where that’s all going to lead but am hoping some of those young people would become more interested in accurate history. We’re trying to make sure that people acknowledge our historical presence.”

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Perez Kindle admitted to not understanding at first the intentions of the project. “I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it as much as I did. How could you tell the stories of Auraria in these short vignettes? But in the end, it was touching. Other people probably won’t get it in the way I did because I lived it, but it told our story. I was there. It just made me chuckle when she was telling the story I told. That’s us. This is all of us. We’re human artifacts. This is our story. I want people to see it. If you have questions, I want to tell you.”

When participants had visited all but the final stop on their Auraria journey, they came to see me on the back patio of the Golda Meir House. Together, we processed their experience, what they had seen and heard, what they felt. What had they collected that touched them? Was there a moment of empathy? A connection? They shared their stories with me and with each other, which meant they were ready to carry on the work.

Lopez added, “The ultimate goal of An Auraria Parable was we wanted to empower people to tell their own stories, to become storytellers, to discover that their story was important, too, and could be shared. History gets lost unless we share.”

The final stage of their Auraria Parable journey celebrated this transition.

“I think I’m a storyteller,” Torres said. “I’ve always thought I could do more. I walked out of the building like I don’t tell enough stories!”

To me, there are never enough stories. And looking back through An Auraria Parable maybe helped us look forward to the next one.

“An immersive experience begins when you first hear about it,” Lopez said, “and ends when you forget.”

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