Political science professor and Director of the Mexican-American Studies Center at the University of Texas
- Co-founder of the Mexican American Youth Organization
- Founder of the militant Chicano activist group La Raza Unida
- “We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him.”
- “Our devil has pale skin and blue eyes.”
Jose Angel Gutierrez was born on October 25, 1944 in Crystal City, Texas. He became politically active as a teenager, and in 1963 he worked as a door-to-door canvasser for five Mexican-American candidates running for his hometown's city council.
Gutierrez earned a BA from Texas A&M University in 1966, and an MA in political science from St. Mary's University (in San Antonio) in 1969. At St. Mary's, he became friends with Mario Compeon, Willie Velásquez, Juan Patlán, and Nacho Pérez. In 1967 Gutierrez collaborated with these four to establish the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), one of the Chicano movement's first student activist groups.
After leaving St. Mary's, Gutierrez returned to Crystal Rock to work on the “Winter Garden Project,” an initiative aimed at organizing Mexican Americans politically. Protesting such perveived educational inequities as the high dropout rate of Mexican-American high-school students, this Project featured mass walkouts by hundreds of such youngsters.
In a 1969
speech in San Antonio, Gutierrez
stated: “We have got to eliminate the gringo [an American not of Hispanic descent], and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him.”[1] On another occasion during the late Sixties/early Seventies, he
said: “Our devil has pale skin and blue eyes.” Gutierrez's "
plan" at this time was "to graduate a bunch of militant radicals" who would someday "come back and kick some ass!"
On January 24, 1970, Gutiérrez
registered the militant
La Raza Unida (“The Unified Race”) Party as a new political entity. In September 1972 he was elected as the organization's national
chairman.
Gutierrez
served as Crystal City's urban renewal commissioner from 1970-72, and as an elected trustee and president of the Crystal City Independent School District from 1970-73.
In late 1973/early 1974, Gutierrez was listed as a “
sponsor” of the Political Rights Defense Fund, a Trotskyite communist front created and controlled by the Socialist Workers Party.
From 1974-81 he served as a
judge for Zavala County, Texas, and in
1976 he
earned a Ph.D. from the
University of Texas at Austin.
In February 1979, Gutierrez
participated in the fourth national convention of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee.
In February 1981 Gutiérrez abruptly
resigned from his job as County Judge and relocated to Oregon, from where he mailed his resignation letter.
According to journalist Jaime Contreras, “media coverage implied that alleged judicial misconduct and subsequent investigations were the causes for his sudden departure.”
From 1981-85 Gutierrez worked as a
teacher in Oregon, first at Colegio Cesar Chavez and then at Western Oregon University (where he also served as director of minority student services). From 1983-85 he served as
commissioner of the Oregon Commission on International Trade, and in 1985 he
founded the Oregon Council for Hispanic Advancement.
Gutierrez moved to Dallas, Texas in 1986 and
enrolled at Southern Methodist University law school; he eventually earned a
JD from Bates College of Law (in Houston) in 1988.
From 1990-92, Gutierrez worked as an administrative law
judge for the City of Dallas. At that time, he candidly
described himself as “an activist, a catalyst for change.”
In 1994 Gutierrez received the “Chicano Hero Award” from the
National Council of La Raza. That same year, he
founded the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, serving as the Center's director until December 1996. He thereafter spent two years as special advisor to the university's president.
On January 14, 1995 at UC Riverside, Gutierrez
spoke at a Latino
conference regarding the effects of California's recently-passed Proposition 187, a ballot measure barring the state's illegal immigrants from accessing social services and welfare benefits. In the course of his
remarks, Gutierrez launched a tirade denouncing American racism and calling for Mexico's reconquest of the Southwestern United States:
“The border remains a military zone. We remain a hunted people. Now you think you have a destiny to fulfill in the land that historically has been ours for forty thousand years. And we're a new Mestizo nation. And they want us to discuss civil rights ... law made by white men to oppress all of us of color, female and male. This is our homeland. We cannot—we will not—and we must not be made illegal in our own homeland. We are not immigrants that came from another country to another country. We are migrants, free to travel the length and breadth of the Americas because we belong here. We are millions. We just have to survive. We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It’s a matter of time. The explosion is in our population.... I love it. Se estan cagando cabrones de miedo [Spanish for “They are shi**ing in their pants with fear”]. I love it.”
In 1999 Gutierrez was the ...