From Sefarad to the San Luis Valley: Crypto-Judaism in the Southwest

It’s often said that slavery is America’s original sin. But the kind of slavery most of us learn about in history class—the brutal, dehumanizing enslavement of Black people in the Southern states—wasn’t the only or even the first kind of bondage in the Americas. On this episode of Lost Highways, we look at a far-less institutionalized form of forced labor and servitude widely practiced in the American West. And as we’ll see, enslavement has taken many different forms. We’ll look at the ways power and economics in the Borderlands helped to perpetuate slavery in the United States long after its official abolition. We’ll also look at the ways this history of Indigenous slavery continues to affect descendants, some of whom struggle to reconcile their familial and genetic pasts with their sense of belonging in what has been their homeland for generations. 

A monument to Christopher Columbus, sitting in the middle of Pueblo, Colorado has been dividing the town for years. To the large population of Italian-Americans whose ancestors came to Pueblo around the turn of the twentieth Century, it has long been a point of pride and a symbol of cultural belonging. But for the Indigenous and Chicano communities who also call Pueblo home, the statue of Columbus is a dark reminder of the long history of colonialism and genocide his voyages sparked. On this episode, we look at how community identities have been formed around historical heroes, and what happens to those communities when the actual history of those heroes catches up with what they’ve come to symbolize.

Since the racial justice protests of 2020, when most people think of monuments being torn down, they think of confederate statues in the south being toppled from their pedestals. But a Civil War monument to Union soldiers that stood in front of the Colorado capital for more than a hundred years was also pushed over during the protests that followed in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. On this episode, we’ll look the ways History Colorado has pioneered a new approach to  dealing with controversial monuments. We’ll also take a look at what monuments should mean, the purpose they serve in maintaining our cultural narratives, and the challenges of reframing those monuments as the stories we tell ourselves about the past evolve over time.

On this episode of Lost Highways, we’ll take a look back at how Title IX’s passage in 1972 inadvertently codified the separation of sports by sex. And while the law opened the door to equal opportunity in sports and education for women, it also placed sex at the center of how we define fairness without fully addressing issues of equality where gender and race are concerned. We'll also meet Donna Hoover, the young woman who, in 1976, went out for the boys soccer team at Golden High School in Golden, Colorado and wound up changing women's sports in America forever.

On a sleepy summer evening in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974, three young Chicano activists sat in a car at Chautauqua Park at the base of the iconic Flatirons—the giant red sandstone rock formations that sit above the foothills. Then, at approximately 9:50 p.m., the car exploded. Two days later, another car in downtown Boulder exploded, killing three more young activists. Their deaths came against the backdrop of the Chicano movement and the social justice activism of the 1960s and ‘70s. On this episode of Lost Highways, we’ll look back at Los Seis de Boulder—the nearly-forgotten group of six activists in the Chicano movement who were fighting for student aid and representation on the CU Campus, and the unresolved mystery of their deaths.  

The Sand Creek Massacre was the deadliest day in Colorado history, and it changed Cheyenne and Arapaho people forever. On the morning of November 29, 1864, US troops under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington attacked a peaceful camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho people made up mostly of women, children, and elders along the Big Sandy Creek in Southeastern Colorado, near the present day town of Eads. The scale of the massacre was horrifying. More than 230 men, women, and children were murdered in the most brutal ways imaginable. US troops mutilated living and dead bodies, taking body parts as gruesome trophies back to be paraded and displayed in Denver.  This is the first episode in a series about the Sand Creek Massacre. Throughout the series, we’ll focus on sharing Cheyenne and Arapaho accounts and oral histories.

In 1881, white residents in the mining town of Gothic, Colorado lynched a Chinese man. Or did they? As the latest episode of Lost Highways investigates this reported act of anti-Chinese racial violence from Colorado’s past, we consider what it means to belong in the places we call home, and how such acts of violence continue to echo into the present—whether it actually happened or not.   

With the new reality of megafires in the West, we take a look at what happens when history itself is destroyed and how we hold on to who and what we are when we lose the artifacts and records that tell our stories. We’ll take you from the Waldo Canyon Fire of 2012 near the town of Manitou Springs to the Denver suburbs of Louisville and Superior, Colorado where the 2021 Marshall Fire wiped out not only hundreds of homes and businesses, but also the entire Superior history museum, along with centuries of artifacts, archives, and community memories.

Colorado's San Luis Valley is the last place you might expect to find a centuries old lineage of Sephardic Jews. But a rare form of breast cancer and a host of odd traditions, artifacts, and rituals led researchers to discover an enclave of Crypto-Jews that fled Europe for the New World in the 16th Century to hide out in one of the most remote areas of the lower 48 states. On this episode, we’ll unveil a secret Jewish faith and identity rooted deep in the American Southwest.

For nearly a century-and-a-half, archaeologists have been studying Mesa Verde in hopes of deciphering what happened to the Ancestral Puebloan people who lived and thrived there for so long. For many, it remains one of the great mysteries in the history of North America. On this episode of Lost Highways, we’ll explore the way that historians and archaeologists try to solve these kinds of mysteries, and how they know what they say they think they know. Where does that confidence come from? How confident are they, actually? And what happens when what we think we know changes?