Chicano activist to bring message to Valley

AUSTIN — Jose Angel Gutierrez, the Chicano activist credited for helping found a political movement in the 1960s and whose controversial remarks about whites have drawn rebuke, will speak in Brownsville on Tuesday.

Gutierrez, 63, is an attorney and professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, who helped propel Mexican-Americans into elected positions in the 1960s in his native Crystal City. It was a time when whites ruled South Texas politics despite Hispanic majorities.

Gutierrez said he remembers the day in 1961 when activists wearing fancy suits from San Antonio rolled into Crystal City in their big cars to help rally Hispanic voters to overturn the old leaders. He describes a place where white employers discriminated against Hispanics, local government didn’t pave roads or bring services to the “brown” side of town, and Texas Rangers used brutal policing techniques.

“You can’t grow up in a time like that and not know that you’re treated differently,” he said.

The activists recruited Gutierrez, then just 16 years old and the state champion in rhetoric, to give political speeches around town because he could hold a crowd’s attention and could afford to be less inhibited than the candidates themselves, he said.

He was fighting against what he called the “cultural genocide” of Mexican Americans by whites in power.

The activists’ struggle was successful, and Hispanics began to win elections for school board, mayor, even county judge.

“We left an indelible mark,” he said. “We changed the course of politics in the country because other people followed up.”

He went on to create the Mexican American Youth Organization in 1968, then to co-found La Raza Unida in 1972 to help elect more Hispanic people to office. He served terms on the school board in Crystal City and as Zavala County judge, and later worked in government leadership roles in Oregon and Dallas.

He also earned the ire of many, including some Mexican-Americans in Congress, for comments he made in an April 10, 1969, interview with the San Antonio Evening News in which he said it was necessary to “eliminate the gringos.”

Gutierrez said on Friday those remarks, which have followed him for more than 30 years and even resulted in death threats to his family, were taken out of context and don’t reflect that he was discussing eliminating the gringo system, not killing white people.

Rogelio Nuñez remembers reading the comments and understanding that Gutierrez meant reforming a system. Nouns, who heads the Harlingen human rights group Proyecto Libertad, worked for political reform in Kingsville at the same time Gutierrez was working in Crystal City, and the two used to trade notes on their progress, he said.

Nuñez has known Gutierrez over the years to be a positive person with a message of hope to young people, he said.

“He still sees us as a people with a self-determination mindset,” Nuñez said. “If we let somebody else define us, they’re going to define us in a way that is not who we are.”

Gutierrez said his work has improved political representation in politics, opened the door for bilingual education, and pressed the Texas Rangers to reform.

But many Hispanic professionals who benefited from the civil-rights movement have grown complacent in their success, rather than furthering social causes for Mexican-Americans, he said.

“We were a generation of builders, we are doers, we get things done,” he said. “I haven’t seen them doing much — except they changed the name from Chicano to Hispanic.”

Jose Angel Gutierrez will give a lecture about his latest book, “Chicanas in Charge: Paths to Power in the 21st Century” at 9:25 a.m. on Tuesday in the Science & Engineering Technology Building at the University of Texas at Brownsville-Texas Southmost College. An informal brown-bag lunch will follow at noon. Both events are free and open to the public.