Growing Up in Aurora: ACO All Day

Even though I'm not very good at reassuring my parents that they made all the right decisions about how to raise me, at least I've persuaded them that they made the right decision about where to raise me: Aurora, Colorado.

Like a lot of Coloradans, we're Midwestern transplants. We came from Columbia, Missouri, for my dad's job managing books at the Anschutz Medical Campus. Growing up off South Parker Road and South Peoria Street, I felt like I had it all.

I'm the son of an immigrant from Mexico; my classmates and friends had parents from Mexico, Eritrea, El Salvador, Ukraine, Indonesia, Uganda, Honduras, Belarus and a lot more places. I went through the Cherry Creek School District, in a path that led from Polton Elementary to Prairie Middle and Overland High School.

In first grade, I helped kids from Mexico who relied on Spanish and then saw them learn English and become better students than I was in high school. I walked to middle school with a friend, Vlad, who never shut up about being from Ukraine. Both my sister and I had best friends in high school who were habesha, the ethnic group from Eritrea and Ethiopia. 

My favorite childhood memories are of taking the 121 and 130 RTD buses with my mom to the Aurora Mall to catch a movie at Century 16. When I got older and started going out on my own, I'd walk to the Nine Mile Station — back when it was the last stop on the H Line — and ride it into Denver.

In high school, I would bum rides from my friends with cars to get lunch on Havana Street, mostly for fast food at Chipotle and Taco Bell — where they used to have our picture up for the largest order — but also for Sushi Katsu and Katsu Ramen. Before I was a teenager, Havana Street was where my parents bought groceries at Costco Wholesale and Cub Foods before it was H Mart, and would take me to Red Robin for birthdays.

That all seemed so normal, so it was funny that Aurora became a magnet for crazy headlines.

When I was thirteen, I kept seeing clips of terrorist Najibullah Zazi's Aurora apartment on Good Morning America. It stuck with me, because his two-floor suburban apartment building looked like all the others in Aurora, and there it was on national news.

During summer break in 2011, my mom came in my room early on July 20 and told me there had been a shooting at the Century 16 theater. I remember my friends texting to see if I was all right. As time went on, a friend or a classmate would surprise me by telling me they were in the theater that night.

And while I was in high school, one of my teachers was on the Today show defending his criticisms of George Bush to Matt Lauer, while another was breaking ground as one of the first teachers to get fired for having photos of her twerking on her secret, racy Twitter account (this was before OnlyFans). Meanwhile, some Overland students were threatening to sue the school for its response to a wrestler's death, and others were skipping class to join ISIS. I felt like I had grown up in the real-life South Park.

I find it ironic that I'm now a journalist writing about my hometown because former president Donald Trump says Aurora is being taken over by Venezuelan gangs. All those other tragic and wild headlines about Aurora never bothered me, but the ones about Venezuelan gangs do.

I wish we had a little more spirit. This isn't a perfect city, and we've had some deserved bad press. But if my neighbors and classmates are immigrants or transplants like me, we all came here because it was better than another place. In my mind, it's the best, and there's no place I'd rather be than in ACO all day.