
2 minute read
From the beet fields to writing class
Frank Alvarado recalls life growing up in Fort Lupton
BY BELEN WARD BWARD@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
Frank Alvarado has had an interesting life, from Fort Lupton’s fields picking beets to the 82nd Airborne, all the way to IBM.
In his latest role, he’s trying to capture that interesting life in words. Alvarado wants to write a book documenting the history of Mexican Americans working in the fields and has a few snippets and memories written already.
“People don’t know what we went through. We only know about what happened to the African Americans, the Japanese Americans putting them in camps,” Alvarado said. “We don’t know about the Mexican Americans living in my area of Fort Lupton, working the fields. We didn’t even have doctors or dentists.”
Alvarado’s roots go back to Texas, where his family worked as migrant workers picking cotton on South Padre Island. His parents brought him to Fort Lupton as a baby.
He grew up working the beet fields of Fort Lupton with his family and also traveling to different places, working the harvest fields of Rio Hondo in Harlingen, Texas, picking cotton in Lubbock, Texas, and potatoes in Nebraska.
When he started school at Fort Lupton Butler Elementary at 11 years old, he didn’t know his ABCs. His teachers were reluctant to put him in sixth grade with students his own age.
“I started the second grade. But I had a problem in school. There is a Mayday celebration where all the kids dance around the Maypole,” Alvarado said. “I was dancing with a little 7-year-old girl.”
There were other issues, beyond embarrassment, too.
“People were looking at me calling me a ‘Mexican.’ They never called us Mexican American; my family was born in America,” Alvarado said.
His parents wanted him to persevere.
“I told my Dad, and he said I must do what they tell him in school,” her said.
So, he took his concerns to the school’s principal and asked to be moved up. The principal said he couldn’t advance every student that had a problem.
“I told him what if I give you straight A’s and B’s?” Alvarado said.
He did, and advanced through school quickly.
“I was good with Math because my dad taught me and he was good at math,” Alvarado said. “They agreed to skip me a few grades as long as I maintained A’s and B’s.”
Alvarado joined the army in 1954 after graduating but was too young to be sent to South Korea. So they sent him to Germany after the war.
“I was a Demolition Expert with the 82nd Airborne and took jump training with the 82nd. Then I was sent to Germany when the 11th Airborne was activated, then moved into the Fourth Infantry Division for combat engineers,” Alvarado said.
Alvarado said when to returned to the states in 1958, he went to Fort Lewis, Washington, for about eight months.
“I finished my tour in Fort Lewis Washington and came back to Fort Lupton and went back to school using the Korean GI bill and studied Electro-Mechanical Technical and also went to business school,” he said.
He went to school at Emily Griffith and then transferred to