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Perhaps it's just the approach of the season of peace and goodwill and all that, but I felt twinges of sympathy for our legislators yesterday when I read about the new house districts they had to contrive. It had to be tough work.
Traditionally, the San Luis Valley has been one district, which seems reasonable. It's all rather agricultural for the 100 miles from Poncha Pass to the New Mexico line. Currently, the Valley is House District 60, represented by Lewis Entz, a potato farmer who lives near Hooper.
So there's an agricultural district represented by a farmer who lives right in the middle of it. It's hard to see anything wrong with that.
However, the Valley is 45 percent Hispanic, and has not sent an Hispanic representative to the Colorado General Assembly for about 50 years.
If you were concerned about that, one solution might be to go through the grunt work of American politics: find a good candidate or run yourself, prepare issue statements, attend county fairs and town parades, endure rubber-chicken dinners, knock on doors, hand out propaganda.
In other words, if it was actually that important to have an Hispanic representative from the Valley, don't you think some such candidate would actually go to the trouble of running? And yet, Entz ran without opposition last year in District 60.
Rather than take their chances at the ballot box, three women -- Jennie and Adeline Sanchez of Center and Debra Casanova of Alamosa -- went to federal court.
In essence, their argument was that the state had somehow gerrymandered the districts to prevent an Hispanic from being elected, and that we gringos are just too bigoted to vote for an Hispanic.
Since no such candidate even tried the last time around, how could they know? And since the San Luis Valley is a distinct geographic entity, how is it gerrymandering to make it a legislative district?
Further, I'm a textbook archetype of the hinterland bigot demographic profile -- underemployed financially challenged rural white guy without a college degree. Even so, I've supported Hispanic candidates on many occasions: Carlos Lucero in a U.S. Senate primary, Andy Vigil in a county assessor primary, George Chavez for county sheriff.
So I find it more than insulting that these plaintiffs, and the federal courts, assume that I and my friends and my neighbors are too narrow-minded to vote for Hispanic candidates. They might have tried running somebody capable and energetic in District 60 before whining to the federal courts.
But the federal courts ruled in their favor, and so an interim legislative redistricting drew new lines. The new District 60 -- the counties of Conejos, Costilla, most of Huerfano, a chunk of Pueblo -- will have an Hispanic majority.
But the counties the plaintiffs lived in -- Saguache and Alamosa -- will be lumped into a revised District 44 with Park, Lake, Gunnison, Chaffee, Hinsdale, Rio Grande and Mineral.
Not only is the San Luis Valley split by this arrangement, but the plaintiffs who wanted a majority Hispanic district will be in a majority Anglo district.
Some fear that splitting the Valley will make it easier
for urban Colorado to raid its water, but that fear is
groundless. Whenever Front Range Colorado really wants to
take the Valley's water, it will, no matter how the Valley
is apportioned for the legislature. As former Gov. John
Love famously observed, In Colorado, water flows uphill
toward money.
The whole District 60 mess makes me wonder whether geographic districts have become obsolete, what with this assumption that we do not have political interests in common with our neighbors, if they're of a different ethnic background.
When Colorado draws new districts after the 2000 census, perhaps it should throw out the map, and allow voters to select a category of interest. Then the legislative districts could be drawn accordingly.
As it is, Saguache and Crestone are very different places -- one's a pleasant spot where dogs doze for hours in the street, and the other is a vortex of New Age energy -- but they're stuck with the same representatives.
Under my select your district
plan, Crestone
could ally itself with other airhead zones -- geomancers in
Boulder, gurus in Aspen, crystal fondlers in Telluride --
and thus enjoy a representative more enlightened than the
nearby potato farmer it gets under the current system.
This enlightened representative could materialize a levitation system along the I-70 corridor, while channeling water from transcendental cosmic sources to the thirsty and growing Front Range.
Why not try it? It makes as much sense as any other scheme that the federal courts might impose.
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