On a clear Saturday in March, Centennial Center Park fills with colour. Thousands of people, palms streaked in pink and turquoise, throw fistfuls of powder into the thin Colorado air while a DJ stacks Bollywood beats over the sound system. This is Holi, the festival of colours, staged in one of metro Denver’s youngest suburbs. To understand the Indians in Centennial, Colorado, you have to start here, at a public park that for one afternoon a year becomes the largest Hindu celebration in the Rocky Mountain region.
The Place
Centennial is barely older than the smartphone. The city incorporated in 2001, stitched together from unincorporated pockets of Arapahoe County so residents could keep control of their own zoning and tax base rather than be annexed by neighbours. Today it holds roughly 108,000 people across the southern edge of the Denver metro.
It is, by almost any measure, affluent. Median household income sits above $100,000, and well over half of adults hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. The city sprawls between the Denver Tech Center to the north and the open plains to the south, a landscape of cul-de-sacs, office parks, and big-box retail with the Front Range floating on the western horizon.
That combination, good jobs, good schools, and new housing, is exactly what has drawn a growing share of Indian families to settle here over the past two decades.
Centennial Airport, just to the south, is one of the busiest general aviation airports in the country, and the office corridors around it have made this stretch of Arapahoe County one of the region’s denser concentrations of engineers, physicians, and analysts. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of professional landscape that the post-1965 Indian migration to America has tended to find.
How It Became Indian
The Indian story in Colorado is older than Centennial itself, and for most of its length it had nothing to do with this corner of Arapahoe County.
The first arrivals
A handful of South Asians reached Colorado long before the suburbs existed. The 1930 census recorded at least 29 ethnic Indians in the state, most of them in rural areas, working as railroad hands, farmers, and labourers. Federal law was openly hostile: a 1946 quota capped Indian immigration at 100 people a year for the entire country, and miscegenation statutes meant several early Indian men married Latina women because marriage to white women was barred.
This was a scattered, largely invisible presence. There was no neighbourhood, no temple, no grocer. The community that Centennial knows today did not yet have its founding generation.
The 1965 turn
Everything changed with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the national-origin quotas. The new system favoured skilled professionals, and India, with its strong technical universities, sent engineers, doctors, and scientists. The same wave that built Indian enclaves like the Indians of Edison, New Jersey and the tech families of Cupertino, California reached Colorado too, just more thinly spread.
Denver’s Indians began to organise. The Denver India Association was founded in 1972. In 1984 a group of families, led by University of Denver law professor Ved Nanda, incorporated the Hindu Society of Colorado, the seed of what would become the region’s principal temple. By 2000 there were roughly 10,000 Indians in Colorado and around 15 Indian restaurants in Denver, up from just two in 1988, according to the Denver Public Library’s history of Asian Indians in Colorado.
The move south
The early temple sat in a converted house in Aurora, then a former church in Littleton. But the centre of gravity for newly arriving Indian professionals was drifting south and east, toward the office corridors around the Denver Tech Center and Centennial Airport.
Those corridors held the jobs. Centennial and its immediate neighbours became home to major employers in aerospace, telecommunications, and software, including United Launch Alliance, Comcast, and Arrow Electronics, alongside the broad cluster of medical and bioscience firms across south metro Denver. For an H-1B engineer or a physician finishing a residency, a house in Centennial put work, schools, and a temple all within a short drive.
Anchoring in Centennial
The decisive moment came in 2015. After nearly a decade of construction costing around $4.5 million, the Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of the Rockies opened its purpose-built temple at 7201 S. Potomac Street, on a 4.25-acre rise inside Centennial with views toward both the mountains and the plains. By then the congregation numbered roughly 1,500 families.
A community that had once met in living rooms now had a granite-and-marble landmark of its own, physically rooted in Centennial. The suburb did not just have Indian residents. It had become a centre of Indian religious and cultural life for the entire region.
The Landmarks
Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of the Rockies, 7201 S. Potomac Street. The anchor of Indian life in Centennial, opened in its current form in 2015 after consecration ceremonies that June. Its main hall holds seven principal shrines, to Shiva-Parvati, Durga, Venkateshwara, Lakshmi-Narayan, Rama and Sita, Radha and Krishna, and Saraswati. Most of the marble deities were carved in Jaipur; the Venkateswara image came from Tirupati.
Centennial Center Park, 13050 E. Peakview Avenue. The city’s civic green, and the unlikely home of Denver’s biggest Holi. Each spring the temple stages its festival of colours here, drawing thousands who would never fit inside the temple grounds. For one afternoon a municipal park becomes a sea of coloured powder and Indian music.
Godavari, 6882 S. Yosemite Street. A South Indian restaurant in Centennial known for Hyderabadi biryani, an enormous range of dosas, and Indo-Chinese dishes. It is the kind of place where families come after temple and software teams come for lunch, a reliable taste of home a few minutes from the office parks.
INDIA’s Restaurant. Denver’s oldest and most decorated Indian restaurant, serving since 1989 and long a fixture for south metro families. Its rogan josh, kebabs, and biryani predate Centennial’s incorporation and helped set the standard for the region’s Indian dining.
Cherry Creek High School, 9300 E. Union Avenue. The flagship of the Cherry Creek School District that covers much of Centennial, consistently among Colorado’s top-ranked high schools. For many Indian families, the strength of these schools is the single biggest reason they chose this suburb over cheaper ground elsewhere.
The south metro Indian grocers. Stores such as Swagat in nearby Aurora supply the lentils, fresh curry leaves, frozen parathas, and spice blends that hold a kitchen together. The corridor of Indian groceries along the Aurora-Centennial line is what turned a scatter of households into a community that could eat the way it always had.
Where They Came From
Centennial’s Indians are not from any single region of the subcontinent, and that is part of why the temple holds so many shrines. The seven-deity main hall and the smaller shrines to Hanuman, Jagannath, Ayyappa, and Kartikeya reflect a congregation drawn from across India.
The professional pipeline shaped the geography. Software and engineering brought families with roots in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Maharashtra, while medicine and business drew from the north and west as well. The presence of a dedicated Venkateswara shrine, with its image from Tirupati, speaks to a strong South Indian, particularly Telugu, thread, the same community that fills Godavari’s tables for biryani and dosas.
Colorado’s older Indian organisations, from the Marathi Mandal to Kerala and Tamil associations, mirror this spread. Centennial did not draw one village. It drew the technical middle class of a whole country, and built a temple wide enough to hold all of it.
Centennial Today
Indians remain a minority in Centennial. The city is still around 85 percent white, with Asian residents making up roughly five to six percent of the population. There is no single Indian street here, no row of sari shops, nothing like the dense ethnic high streets of Edison or the Mahatma Gandhi District in Houston.
What there is instead is a quieter kind of presence: a temple that anchors thousands of families, a public park that turns pink every March, restaurants tucked into strip malls, and classrooms at Cherry Creek and Littleton schools where Indian American students are a familiar and growing part of the mix. The community shows up in numbers far larger than its census share at festivals and weekend pujas, then disperses back into the cul-de-sacs.
You see it in the small things. A line of families outside Godavari on a Friday night. Children in the Cherry Creek schools whose surnames trace to Hyderabad or Chennai. The smell of fresh curry leaves in a grocery on the Aurora line. Diwali lamps in November windows and the wide, loud joy of Holi in March. None of it dominates the suburb, but all of it is now part of how Centennial works.
That is the shape of a young suburb’s diaspora. Centennial is not the kind of place where Indian families arrived first and others followed. It is a place they chose, deliberately, for the jobs and the schools, and then made room for their own gods and grocers within it, much like the Indians of Overland Park, Kansas, another affluent inland suburb that grew an Indian community around good schools and professional work. The colour thrown at Centennial Center Park each spring is the most visible sign of a community that, in barely two decades, has woven itself into one of Colorado’s newest cities.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Indians live in Centennial, Colorado?
Centennial does not publish a separate Asian Indian count, but Asian residents make up roughly five to six percent of its 108,000 people. Colorado as a whole is home to more than 28,000 Indians, with a heavy concentration in the south Denver metro suburbs that include Centennial.
Why did Indians settle in Centennial?
The Indians in Centennial, Colorado came largely for work and schools. The suburb sits beside the Denver Tech Center and Centennial Airport employment corridors, home to aerospace, telecom, software, and medical employers, and is served by the highly ranked Cherry Creek and Littleton school districts.
Is there a Hindu temple in Centennial?
Yes. The Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of the Rockies at 7201 S. Potomac Street is the major Hindu temple of the Denver region. Its purpose-built temple opened in 2015 and serves roughly 1,500 member families with shrines to seven principal deities.
Where is the Denver Holi festival held?
The region’s largest Holi, the festival of colours, is staged each spring at Centennial Center Park, 13050 E. Peakview Avenue, organised by the Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of the Rockies. It draws thousands and is billed as the biggest festival of colours in metro Denver.
Where can I find Indian food and groceries near Centennial?
Godavari at 6882 S. Yosemite Street serves South Indian food and biryani inside Centennial, and INDIA’s Restaurant has served the south metro since 1989. Indian grocers along the Aurora-Centennial corridor, such as Swagat in Aurora, supply spices, lentils, and fresh produce.
When did Indians first come to Colorado?
A small number of Indians lived in Colorado as early as the 1930 census, working in railroads and farming. Large-scale settlement followed the 1965 immigration reforms, with the Denver India Association founded in 1972 and the Hindu Society of Colorado in 1984.
If your family’s story passed through Centennial, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a university town in Andhra or a clinic in Gujarat, to a temple on Potomac Street and colour thrown across a Colorado park, to wherever you are now.