Santa Fe Drive, the stretch you are walking, is Denver's oldest arts district, home to galleries, studios, and cultural institutions since the 1980s and carrying the particular character of Denver's Latino community. Santa Fe Drive runs south through neighborhoods that were historically the heart of Mexican American Denver — communities arriving in waves from the early twentieth century, drawn by agricultural labor, railroad work, and the meatpacking industry. The Chicano civil rights movement that emerged from these neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s produced Rodolfo Corky Gonzales, founder of the Crusade for Justice movement, and transformed Denver's politics durably.
The galleries along Santa Fe feature Latino and Chicano artists alongside the broader Denver art world, and the First Friday gallery walk that draws thousands of visitors each month is one of the longest-running such events in the city. The murals along Santa Fe, many referencing Mexican and Chicano iconography, assert the cultural claim of the neighborhood even as gentrification pressure pushes against the longtime community. The Museo de las Americas, a few blocks south, is the premier Latino art museum in the Mountain West.