Barajas, Colette

Part 1 was recorded in Tucson, AZ on March 5th, 2025 and covers the following themes:

b. 1953 

  • First visit to Tucson from Chicago in 1968 as part of marijuana smuggling business. Move to Tucson in 1974. Tucson’s counterculture scene, music, parties, restaurants. Trips to Nogales. Experiences running drugs. 

  • Rebellious streak as a student in a Catholic girls school in Chicago. Sex ed, birth control, and abortion in the late 1960s. 

  • Exposure to racism and Civil Rights in Chicago as a child and young adult. 

  • Dating and social stigma of bisexuality, deciding to identify as a lesbian. 

  • Tucson’s lesbian community in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 

  • Gay bars from the sixties to the eighties, financing, ownership, clientele, safety. 

  • Tucson’s LGBTQ politics in the 1980s. 

  • Starting a women’s bar, Colette’s, in 1983. City harassment. 

Part 2 was recorded in Tucson, AZ on May 2nd, 2025 and covers the following themes:

  • Attending the Democratic National Convention in 1968. 

  • Starting a second bar, also called Colette’s. 

  • Getting sober while running a bar. Promoting nonalcoholic beverages. 

  • Relations between Tucson’s gay and lesbian communities from the 1970s on. 

  • The AIDS epidemic, discrimination, organizing. 

  • Wingspan. 

  • Changes in Tucson’s LGBTQ+ community from the 1970s to 2020s. 

Aengus Anderson