When we think of Colorado divides, aside from the big one that runs through Rocky Mountain National Park, we often think of the mountains versus the plains, or the Front Range versus the Western Slope. Often overlooked is the divide that runs east-west across southern Colorado. Historian and Estes Park local Adam Thomas explores how the social and geographic boundary known locally as the “Tortilla Curtain” took shape in southern Colorado, separating the wealthier northern region around Colorado Springs from the more industrial and culturally diverse City of Pueblo. Drawing on environmental, urban, and architectural history, Thomas shows how ideas about space and culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries helped create and reinforce this internal line of division, shaping patterns of investment, development, and identity across the state.

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About Adam Thomas

Dr. Thomas is an Associate Teaching Professor of History at Colorado State University and Assistant Director of CSU’s Public and Environmental History Center. He is also the founder and principal of Historitecture, an Estes Park-based architectural history, historic preservation, and cultural resource consulting firm specializing in preserving, interpreting, and promoting the built environment of the Intermountain West. Dr. Thomas holds a B.S. in journalism from the Medill School at Northwestern University, an M.A. in history from Colorado State University, and a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University. He has led numerous architectural history and public history projects ranging from thousands of individual property surveys to dozens of major neighborhood histories and documentaries. In 2013, Historitecture, with the City of Pueblo and Historic Pueblo, Inc., received the Governor’s Award for Historic Preservation, Colorado’s most distinguished honor in the field, for the Pueblo Neighborhood Studies Project, which increased awareness of the complex histories of underserved neighborhoods and connected those neighborhoods to funding through historic preservation programs. Dr. Thomas studies the interplay of race, identity, and the built environment in the American Southwest. He teaches courses in American history, architectural history, public history, material culture, and the post-1900 American West.