The melting pot: Patricia Gutierrez, 50-year north Greeley resident: “They call it ‘Little Mexico’.”


It cost Patricia Gutierrez’s husband, Magdaleno, about $8,000 to purchase their home in north Greeley in the 1960s.

It needed some work because it was originally a duplex with a waning exterior, but it had a lot of space and boasted a big lot with a lot of square footage. Now, generations of the Gutierrez family have lived in the home the couple built. Magdaleno died in 2014, and Patricia, 73, still lives there with her two daughters and granddaughter. She’ll be there until she’s gone, she said, and then she’ll leave the home to her children to sell at likely 30 times the price she and Magdaleno bought it for. Or at least that’s the plan. Gutierrez said she believed in putting love in her home since the day her family moved in, which was during the decade of Lyndon Johnson. And still she mows her front lawn every week, which is obvious, as it looks like a putting green at a five-star golf course.

Before her husband died, Gutierrez said they worked on home projects such as re-painting the exterior of their home yellow or touching up the white columns on their front porch. It’s her home, and she said she believes Jesus Christ gave her everything in it and kept her safe in it after all these years.

But Gutierrez knows north Greeley’s reputation.

“(Outsiders) call it ‘Little Mexico,’ and I don’t know why they call it that,” she said. “Maybe because we used to have a lot of people from the other side of the border. But you know, they’re nice people once you get to know them. They’re not all bad people.”

Gutierrez attributed a lot of crime that occurs to the heavy drug use that exists in the neighborhood. She said even one of her nearby neighbors likely used to deal years ago, with several others joining in the trailer park that sits behind her home. She doesn’t see that sort of activity as much anymore, she said.

Gutierrez remembered a time her husband said he wished he would’ve bought her a new house on the “nice” side of town. But she didn’t need that new house. She only needed him, their family and the house they built together in that north Greeley neighborhood.

That was, and will always be, their home, she said.

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