MAY 8, 2025 | OPINION | By Stecy Mwachia
I often find myself conflicted by immigration’s relationship to colonial expansion, and where my immigration falls within that story. While tales of manifest destiny are often glorified, they are filled with hidden atrocities of guns, germs and steel. In my time at Colorado College, I’ve developed my ideas on this much more, and come to some conclusions about my spatial and temporal experience in the American West that may shock you.
During my first semester at CC, I was riding in a campus van on the way to a geology trip for my First-Year Program (FYP) course. I remember looking out the window in absolute awe of the beautiful views, of the flora and fauna I had never seen before but mostly at the resilience of the towns we drove through on the way to the San Luis Valley.
They were so historic and illustrious to me, and I remember saying with a deep sigh of wonder, “It’s so beautiful here.” The person sitting next to me gave me a perplexed look, they must have been thinking, what is wrong with this girl? The houses were visibly old, beat down and in a long-forgotten outdated western style.
“This is a nice neighborhood to you?” they said. I shook my head and sighed again.
They just didn’t get it, they didn’t see what I was seeing — they couldn’t feel what I was feeling. All I could think about was how I was witnessing the remnants of the Wild West. The descendants of the cowboys and rap-shooting scallions of the 1840s, they live right here. So many stories, so much history, and I wondered what my role in it would be.
I’m from a rather large suburb of Kansas called Olathe, 35 minutes southwest of Kansas City. Throughout my life, I was fed spoonfuls of images of the Old American West; I even had a friend growing up named after Wyatt Earp. My mom and I loved to watch “Little House on the Prairie” and read cowboy kiddie books. My favorite series of all time was “Little Women.” When I was in preschool, my preschool teachers (along with my freshly immigrated Kenyan parents in an attempt to assimilate) even dressed me up as a little pilgrim.
Luckily, by the time I took AP United States History in high school, I was thoroughly educated on the history of the Western US, the Trail of Tears, the forced sale of Indigenous land and the oppression of Asian migrants during the Gold Rush. This was through my own intellectual pursuits and curiosity, no credit to my public American education, which really painted the image of a grand and righteous journey in pursuit of deserved spoils. Throughout that class, I had many realizations about the history I was taught throughout my life, and what the realities of that history actually were like in the United States for those who lived through them.
The most unsettling of those realizations was that the journey of these early Americans across the United States, these ‘colonizers’ as we may say, sounds extremely similar to my own.
Abandoning everything you’ve ever known to make a perilous journey west in pursuit of freedom and opportunity. These are all themes that have placed themselves in the center of my life. Whether it’s my parents moving almost 9,000 miles west to get me and my siblings into better schools, or me packing my entire life into a suitcase to move to Colorado College, with nothing but a full ride scholarship, dreams and pride.
The story conservative white America paints, even of the most beautiful and serene images of this region, is a well-constructed lie. The Wild West, in actuality, may be closer to the socio-cultural moment our school is a part of than you may think.
The Wild West was a progressive place, even in the way we think of that word today. Cowboys living in isolated communities were often recorded engaging in homosexual relationships.
Women in the old American West were some of the first to receive suffrage, with Wyoming granting women the right to vote in 1890, and the states of Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Washington and California coming right after. At Colorado College, I have witnessed women having exuberant amounts of independence from their male peers, within affiliated campus organizations or outside of them.
Cowboys were not the entirely white mythological beings we see depicted by actors such as Clint Eastwood and Henry Fonda. In fact, the word cowboy is an English translation of a Spanish job title, a vaquero. Hispanic Americans were so central to the history of cowboys in the West, it is baffling how much of an effort was put into wiping out their history.
Black and Native American cowboys also left their mark on the western frontier. “African American cowboy Bill Pickett was known in Oklahoma as “the greatest sweat and dirt cowhand that ever lived – bar none.” But he is remembered in history as the inventor of bulldogging (also known as steer wrestling) – the only one of eight rodeo sports that is credited to an individual.
My sophomore year here, I started listening to country music and taking it seriously for the first time. I had long made fun of my friends in Kansas for their country proclivities and music, calling them old-fashioned like their parents. In all honesty, I think I was scared to participate in country Kansas culture, scared to be forcibly excluded. I had a history teacher ask me about it in class one time, and I told her that I thought most people who listened to country music were racist, and so I didn’t want to listen to the music of people who hated me. I had no idea how ignorant that take was, or what I was about to find out.
When Lil Nas X came out with “Old Town Road” and Beyonce dropped her “Cowboy Carter” Album, it meant a lot to the black community in the United States. The release of those two works and the influence that followed throughout the black community was the origin for a cultural reckoning, a rediscovery and reclamation of rural American life.
I loved this movement because it has allowed me to experience an element of my cultural identity I never explored before. All of a sudden, I was going to country concerts and wearing bootcut jeans to my sorority events.
I had always felt American, and I had always felt Kenyan, but I didn’t feel like I was a Kansan until last year, until Colorado taught me what a westerner really is. I want to take the spoils that I righteously deserve in the epilogue of the colonial empire. I want to come back for everything my ancestors ever lost.
In Colorado College, I see the American West, I see the Wild West, where anything can happen. Rapid social change, women with power and freedom and passion for exploration and individuality. Love being love wherever and whoever it is, justice being served in the face of extreme difficulty. All happening underneath a great big desert sky and a Rocky Mountain skyline.
The problems within the West were not the ideals it represented, but rather its use to justify genocide, environmental destruction and systems of oppression. In our dissection of the American West during expansion, we must consider the diversity of its population, the freedom of its constituents, the power of women in the West, the intentional extermination of Indigenous peoples, the slave trade, as well as the Mexican-American War. I am still trying to figure out where I fit into this story, and what the future holds for my life and where I go off to next.
I see Colorado College as the wild west, as my American west. Somewhere between history and reality, somewhere between pain and mythical prosperity.