How We Made This | Listening to Auraria's Past

Collaboration

Listening to Auraria’s Past was built collaboratively over several years. The audio walking tour was shaped throughout by displaced Aurarians and members of the Auraria Historical Advocacy Council. Sheila Perez-Kindle, Virginia Castro, and Frances Torres provided editorial oversight and helped create the overall vision for the tour, with Sheila Perez-Kindle also recording individual sections of the tour.

Faculty and graduate students at University of Colorado Denver researched, wrote, and recorded the tour. Professors Cameron Blevins, Rachel Gross, and Michelle Comstock guided the research, writing, and recording. Sophia Imperioli contributed to the early research and and earlier version of the project website, while Krista Marks and Indira Saha co-led the recording, editing, and production of the audio tour. Rachel Gross served as the primary narrator for the audio tour. Cameron Blevins oversaw the technical development of the website and the tour’s audio distribution.

Making the Tour

The audio tour rests on a major archival foundation: a collection of oral history interviews recorded through History Colorado’s “I Am Auraria” project, which preserved the firsthand memories of community members displaced from the Auraria neighborhood. Much of our work began by immersing ourselves in those interviews, listening closely and following along with transcripts to understand what this community meant to its residents along with the wrenching experience of displacement and its aftermath.

Using this archival source and through conversations with members of the displaced Aurarian community, we collaboratively planned and wrote a script for an audio walking tour, weaving together narration by Professor Rachel Gross and Sheila Perez-Kindle along with clips from the oral history interviews so the story is told alongside the voices of the people who lived it. The tour moves roughly chronologically through three parts: the neighborhood before displacement, the displacement and its aftermath, and the work of community members in the following decades. In addition to narration and original oral history clips, we overlaid sound effects to evoke particular memories and emotions, along with original music by Daniel Valdez and Tony Garcia (who grew up in Auraria himself).

An initial draft of the tour was recorded, edited, and produced in Summer 2025. Community members listened to this draft and provided valuable feedback for the project team, who revised the script and re-recorded a final version of the tour during the fall 20205 and spring 2026 semesters. The final tour was completed and released in May 2026. It is presented through a series of audio recordings anchored to eleven stops or locations on campus, along with a full-tour audio file that combines all eleven stops into a single, uninterrupted listening experience.

Making the Website

The goal of this website is to preserve the memories and stories of Auraria’s history told through the audio walking tour. Each of the tour’s eleven stops has a corresponding page on the site where visitors can find the audio for that stop along with a written transcript. To help visitors get oriented, each page includes a map of the stop’s location and a photo of the building or location on campus that they should stand at while listening. Bella Briganti made the hand-drawn illustrations of the stops. Finally, we have provided a variety of entry points for people to listen to the tour; in addition to our website, it is available on popular streaming apps like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music. For longer-term preservation purposes, all audio files were also uploaded to the Internet Archive.

The website was built by Cameron Blevins in spring 2026. The project’s original website had been a Wordpress installation that was no longer serving the project’s needs. As none of the project’s team members had extensive web development skills, we decided to use agentic AI coding tools (Claude Code and Codex) to build a custom Jekyll site hosted through Github Pages. However, we drew a clear line on the use of these tools; they were only used to build the site’s structure and design, while all of the content on this site was produced entirely by members of the team themselves.