On Thursday, Nov. 18, from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Longmont Museum, El Comité de Longmont, or El Comité, will hold a book sale and signing event for the newly revised and expanded edition of We, Too, Came to Stay: A History of the Longmont Hispanic Community.
At the event, Longmont community members can purchase a hardback copy of the book for $25 or a paperback version for $15. The money from book sales will go toward furthering the mission of El Comité, a nonprofit dedicated to facilitating communication and understanding within the community to improve social justice, education and economic status for the Latino and non-Latino members of Longmont, according to its website.
People who purchase the book at the event will have the opportunity to have their copy signed by Donna Lovato, executive director of El Comité and Marjorie McIntosh, editor of the new edition – both of whom had a hand in revising and expanding the original version of the book.
The new edition of We, Too, Came to Stay: A History of the Longmont Hispanic Community is an updated version of the book which was originally published in 1988 by the Longmont Hispanic Study Group, or LHSG, under the leadership of Longmont native Olivas Duncan.
“(The book) was updated to honor and preserve the excellent work of the Longmont Hispanic Study Group and Mrs. Duncan, as well as the Longmont Senior Center who provided valuable support,” Lovato said.
According to Lovato, the original volume of We, Too, Came to Stay: A History of the Longmont Hispanic Community was a response to They Came to Stay: A History of Longmont — a book issued in 1971 which, many community members felt, told the city’s history from a White perspective and paid little attention to the Hispanic/Latino population.
The response came from a partnership between LHSG and Duncan, whose contribution to the book began by interviewing Latinos from the Longmont Senior Center about their life journeys which had led them to settle in Longmont. Members of LHSG supplemented Duncan’s stories by researching more of Longmont’s history — specifically, the Hispanic/Latinos influence in Longmont — to be included in the book.
The resulting first edition included stories of Latino community members as they immigrated to Longmont and other evidence of their arrivals, such as pictures and historical documents, according to Lovato.
However, the first book was somewhat of a cash model, Lovato said — an apparatus that Duncan hoped would inspire members of Longmont’s Latino/Hispanic community to come forward and tell their own stories. Although the original book did not fulfill these expectations, Duncan spent the following years pondering the idea of an updated second version.
In 2008, Duncan began a new round of interviews of Longmont’s Latino/Hispanic community members to feature in a new edition of the book. By early 2013, however, her efforts were cut short due to an illness. Recognizing she wouldn’t be able to finish what she set out to do on her own, Duncan passed over her materials — six new interviews along with all the content from the first edition of the book — to El Comité and encouraged the organization to carry forward with the book’s expanded version. On Oct. 1, 2013, Duncan died.
In early 2020, Lovato and McIntosh were working together on another project when McIntosh, an editorial volunteer for El Comité, asked Lovato about the second version of We, Too, Came to Stay: A History of the Longmont Hispanic Community.
After locating and rifling through the materials, the duo became inspired to follow through on the author’s vision for an updated edition. “We were like, ‘why not?’” Lovato said.
Following nearly a year and a half of revising and adding to the first edition, copies of the new book started printing last month.
Since then, it has been copyrighted and registered in the Library of Congress — labels which were never granted to the book’s original version.
Today, the newly revised and expanded edition of We, Too, Came to Stay: A History of the Longmont Hispanic Community “contains six new interviews/accounts with new high-resolution digital scans of the original visual material to produce sharper illustrations,” Lovato said, “in addition to the previous interviews.”
Lovato, like Duncan, hopes the book will inspire community members to tell their own stories — a message which she expects Dr. Nicki Gonzales, the first Latina to hold the role of Colorado State Historian and a guest speaker of the event, to also address on Thursday.
“It doesn’t matter what color you are — everyone has a story, and they need to tell that story,” Lovato said. “It is important to remember that the history of Longmont Latinos has been neglected and ignored. This work brings to light the experience of Longmont Hispanos. It examines the unique history, and appreciation of the culture both socially and economically.”
