Articles

Originally published in: The Washington Post

Jesus Collazos wasn’t any of those things. He was an immigrant from Colombia who grew up taping cardboard in his shoes to cover holes. He was a husband, father and grandfather who created a life for his family in Northern Virginia. He was a letter carrier.

For 25 years, Collazos worked for the U.S. Postal Service in Arlington and eventually bought a house on his route. The job took him to his neighbors’ homes, and his personality often took him into their lives. Now, those who knew him and others who never got the chance want to see him honored in the same way as some of the country’s greatest discoverers, thinkers and activists. They want to see his name on a building.

If a Virginia lawmaker’s proposal goes forward, Collazos could become one of the first covid-19 victims in the country to have a building named after him.

“He would be shocked,” his daughter Vanessa Collazos tells me on a recent afternoon. “He’d be like, ‘Why me?’ He’d be so shocked, honestly — and grateful. It really shows how much the community loves him.”

She recalls growing up in Arlington and watching her father get up in the middle of meals because someone on his route called his phone to ask for help. One man used to call often, she says, and her dad always stopped to respond.

“My dad knew he was by himself, that he was all alone,” she says of that man. “But my dad didn’t just do that for him. He did that for everybody.”

When children wrote letters to Santa, her dad wrote them back. When someone needed home repair work done, her dad provided names. When an extra hand was needed for a quick task, her dad offered his.

“I feel like my dad just did so much,” she says. “Even on his days off he would be helping someone in our neighborhood.”

If a building is named for Collazos, people years from now will inevitably look up and wonder about him. Who was he? What made people want to remember him?

This is what they should know:

The legacy Collazos built from his mail truck was one of creating connections in a region where people are often divided. Divided by politics. Divided by language. Divided by economics. In the nation’s capital and its surrounding suburbs, “gentrification” is not just a buzz word, it is an acknowledgment of the differences between the comfortable and the struggling.

Collazos was able to cut through all of that. He was a Latino immigrant who didn’t just penetrate the fabric of an expensive-to-live-in community: He became an important thread in it. He filled his phone with the numbers of people who needed work and the numbers of people who had work to offer. He was a builder of invisible bridges.

There is no way to know how many Americans who have died after contracting the coronavirus have had buildings named after them. A quick online search doesn’t show any. The proposal to honor Collazos calls for renaming a North Arlington post office, the one where he began his career, and comes nearly a year after his death on June 6, 2020. At the time, he was 67 and a year into his retirement.

Vanessa Collazos and her brother, Michael Collazos, learned about the potential renaming through a neighborhood social media site. There, they saw a post from Mike Cantwell, the president of a local civic association, saying he was asked by U.S. Rep. Don Beyer’s office to check the “pulse of the community” about the possibility of honoring Collazos in that way.