En este episodio de la Podcast de Alejandra Campos, attorney Alejandra Campos talks with Indhira Barrón, a Mexican immigrant, community activist, and founder of Pueblo Azul Colorado. Over the years she has become a lifeline for immigrant families in Colorado’s mountain communities.
Her story covers abandonment, depression, single motherhood, and finally finding herself again. It also shows something Attorney Campos says the community needs right now: Latinos showing up for each other, whatever country they come from.
A Mexican Woman Fighting for Venezuelan Families
Attorney Campos first met Indhira about three years ago at a community talk at a library in the Glenwood Springs area. Indhira came up afterward with a pointed question: why were local families being told that asylum seekers couldn’t get a work permit until they’d been in the country more than a year?
What struck Attorney Campos, who is Venezuelan herself, was that Indhira isn’t Venezuelan. She’s Mexican. Yet she spoke about the Venezuelan families who had arrived in Colorado’s mountain towns with real love and no judgment. To her it didn’t matter how they had entered, whether through the border, through CBP One, or any other way. She saw people.
Many of those families arrived in some of the wealthiest areas in the country, where housing is scarce and expensive even for people with steady jobs. Indhira has spent years helping them with:
- Food, including picking up donations from churches and bringing snacks and meals to children who depend on them
- Housing, in a region where even documented workers struggle to find a place to live
- Access to services: benefits, health care, and mental health support
“I’m not saying the help comes from Indhira’s pocket,” Attorney Campos clarifies. “Indhira has become the connection: how to reach these resources, these systems, these benefits, this mental health support.”
Know the rules: asylum and work permits
The question Indhira asked at that first meeting is still one of the most common, and it’s getting harder to answer. Under the long-standing rule, an asylum applicant could request a work permit 150 days after filing the asylum application and receive it once the case had been pending 180 days. In February 2026, the Department of Homeland Security proposed lengthening that waiting period to 365 days and pausing new asylum-based work permit applications when processing times are long.
These rules are changing. Before you count on a work permit timeline, talk to a licensed immigration attorney about your specific case.
“Immigrants Are Major Contributors to This Economy”
Indhira describes the people she works with every day:
“We are great contributors to this country’s economy. We’ve already risked everything, even our lives, to get here. So the only thing left is to work hard.”
She sees workers who get up after everything they went through on the journey and go to the fields, construction sites, and outdoor jobs most people won’t do. They don’t skip work over a headache, and many have no access to unemployment or other safety nets. “Honest, hardworking people who want to get ahead and contribute to this country,” she says.
When families do turn to assistance, Indhira notes, it’s usually because they’ve been pushed to the extreme, not because they want to take advantage.
Using public benefits can raise immigration questions for some people. If you’re unsure whether a program could affect your case, ask an immigration attorney before applying or turning it down.
“We Are Worth So Much”
Attorney Campos used this part of the conversation to speak directly to the community:
“Remember where we come from. The simple fact of coming from where we come from already makes us strong. We don’t have to feel humiliated because we don’t speak the language, or because we speak it with an accent.”
She tells her own daughter that her brown skin is something to be proud of. The danger, she says, is that the system can push immigrants down so far that they start believing they’re worth less. Instead, she says, be authentic and proud of what you’ve survived.
Indhira’s Story: Abandoned, Pregnant, and Alone
About 25 years ago, Indhira came to the United States from Mexico following her first love. She was six months pregnant. When she landed, nobody came to pick her up. She was left waiting at the airport.
With no papers, no job, and a baby on the way, she had to ask for help. She moved from California to Las Vegas, back to California, and eventually to Colorado’s mountain region. She became a single mother, just surviving one day at a time.
In Mexico, she had been a professional with a degree in business administration, working as a director at an import company that brought furniture from Indonesia into Manzanillo. In the U.S., she started at the bottom, cleaning. “I had to learn to tame my ego and learn to serve in the best way.”
Losing Yourself in Survival Mode
The hardest part, Indhira explains, wasn’t the work. It was what survival did to her mind.
“When we’re in survival mode, we focus only on breathing. We lose our identity. We don’t know what we want, because we’re just getting through the day.”
She didn’t know at the time that what she was living through was major depression. “I didn’t know it had a name.” She had grown up in a culture that taught women to stay quiet, especially about anything shameful. A pregnancy outside marriage after being abandoned meant blaming herself before anyone else could.
The depression went so deep that she lost skills she once had. She had used computers every day in her old job, and in those years she couldn’t anymore. She describes those years as a blur: “I was there, but I didn’t experience it.”
Alcohol as self-medication
Indhira also talks openly about turning to alcohol. She explains why so many immigrants, especially men who came alone and left their families behind, end up drinking away their paychecks:
“Alcohol is a way to self-medicate the absence, the emotional pain of being far from our families. It’s a false, passing happiness.”
For her, alcohol let out the version of herself that was buried. “When I drank, I was sociable. I felt alive.” Attorney Campos adds the line that may stay with viewers most: “Loneliness, my friends, is what kills us in this country.”
A Mother’s Love as a Wake-Up Call
What finally changed things was her daughter. After a long wait, her daughter was diagnosed with autismo, and fighting for the right help pushed Indhira to get better herself.
Her message to immigrant parents:
“Mental health matters not only because I matter as a person, but because we are now building a life that needs us. It’s wonderful to provide everything material we never had. But if we’re not well emotionally, we won’t notice when our children aren’t well emotionally.”
That experience led her to found Pueblo Azul Colorado, a peer-support and resource group for Spanish-speaking parents and caregivers raising children with disabilities. Today it is becoming a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Why She Does This Work
“What motivates me every day is that I knew that hell. I was there. I wouldn’t wish what I went through, out of not knowing, on my worst enemy.”
Her goal is for families to know that resources exist, there is hope, and healing is possible. Money and belonging matter, she says, but so do well-being and self-respect.
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