Thursday, April 16, 2026, 12:45 pm -2:15 pm, 414/415.
Repeated at CSUCI April 30, 2026
“Jess Gutierrez:
A Chicano Organic Intellectual,
1970-1981”
Introduction
Once upon a time, in the early 1970s, an ethnic Mexican adolescent observed Chicanos at a family gathering sporting brown berets, black Ray-Ban sunglasses, and beatnik-styled goatees. On another occasion, this Chicanito, on un mandado issued by his mother to purchase una libra de carne molida at the local mom-and-pop market on Wooley Road in Oxnard, crossed a United Farm Workers picket line. As he wearily approached the demonstrators to fulfill his mother’s command, he spied familiar, multi-shaded brown countenances like those of his tios, tias, and grandparents. In middle school, a Chicano activist spoke to his class about barrio realities and warned him and his peers never to get ensnared with the police because once they had your name, they had your number; it would be put on a list with those of other brown youth. When a crime could not be solved, the fuzz, placas, jura, perhaps, a “pig,” if you will, went to that file to draw the name of one of the usual suspects to pin it on him or her. That’s what the guest speaker said.
The experiences of the mad Mexican described above was me: Frank P. Barajas. I have written two books, Curious Unions (2012) and Mexican Americans with Moxie (2021), that narrate the frustrations and resistance of ethnic Mexicans in Ventura County, northwest of the metropolis that is Los Angeles by sixty miles. A goal of my work has been to bring my community out of the shadows of events of el movimiento Chicana/o in places such as LA, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. I have sought to demonstrate that Chicanos in my tierra natal of Oxnard and other ethnic Mexican communities in Ventura County such as Moorpark, Santa Paula, Saticoy, and Ventura struggled to preserve and advance their dignity and material well-being, too, with the hope that this history will inspire and guide present and future generations to do the same.
My current project argues that el movimiento continued and transformed after 1975. The Chicano Movement did not flame out after the end of the Vietnam War. Not all ethnic Mexicans became Hispanic, vendidos, or as Culture Clash parodied in the 1990s, “Beaners with Beamers,” during the Reagan era of the 1980s. Although some did sellout. Chicana/o activists of distinctive generations shifted their advocacy, not all, from street protests to classrooms and boardrooms as educators, social workers, peace officers, entrepreneurs in the non-profit world, and other professions—legal and health, to name two—as they were now armed with higher education degrees.
Consequently, this paper examines the work of a person who survived a tour of combat in Vietnam and witnessed the first phase of the Chicano Movement, between 1965 and 1975, with a curious and righteous indignation about the life chances of the Mexican American—the native born and naturalized, as well as the North American migrant, not immigrant, as they lived in the conquered territory of Aztlán.
His name is Jess Gutierez, an organic intellectual of Chiques, aka Oxnard, in the sense of Antonio Gramsci and Paolo Freire writings, respectively Prison Notes and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), who utilized his talents as a grass roots writer and graphic artist to represent and empower a diverse population of ethnic Mexicans in Ventura County. I claim that Jess, as a freelance writer for the Ventura County Star-Free Press from the 1970s to the 1980s, and a graphic artist and photographer, represented how el movimiento Chicana/o transformed itself; or as one informant, Jess Ornelas of Santa Paula, asserted, became “more sophisticated.” Jess “Tamba” Gutierrez, through his regular commentary in the Ventura County Star-Free Press’ Minority View column, was the Ruben Salazar of this sub-region of Southern California. But where Salazar became a martyr by way of his assassination by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department on August 29, 1970, Jess was a critical agent who paid forward the cause of el movimiento Chicano since 1975 as he detailed the triumphs, challenges, and the contradictions of the struggles of the ethnic Mexican community in Ventura County.
Who Is Jess “Tamba” Gutierrez?
Jess was born in El Paso, Texas in 1946, in the El Segundo barrio, more specifically, the Chamizal area transferred to Mexico in 1964. He is the ninth of 11 siblings. When Jess was an adolescent, his parents moved the family to East Los Angeles. As he approached the age of sixteen, the Gutierrez familia relocated to the City of Oxnard to live in the barrio community of La Colonia. As Omar Valerio-Jiménez contends in Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory and Citizenship (2024) about the recollections of ethnic Mexicans in other places of the Southwest, Jess’s father, Jesus Sr., admonished his son that the Southwest was once part of Mexico until the conclusion of the US war against Mexico with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848. A war of conquest and land theft.
Young Jess’s indignation, grounded in history, was elevated in high school when a US immigration officer confiscated his father’s passport at the Tijuana border preventing him reentry to the US. Emotionally and economically devastated, the Gutierrez family struggled to survive sans their paterfamilias. Jess contemplated dropping out of school to help sustain the household economically, but a high school counselor, Mr. Appenzeller, aided the Gutierrez family to receive government assistance. A year later, Jesus Sr. rejoined his family after the INS returned his passport without explanation.
Two years after graduating from high school, Jess was drafted into the US Army in 1967. As a soldado razo, an infantryman, he temporarily served time away from the front lines of combat in a Supply unit. But when Jess refused to traffic Vietnamese girls for the sexual abuse of his commanding officer, he found himself assigned to a grunt platoon as punishment. On one patrol, Jess tripped a mine. Although seriously wounded, miraculously he survived, not losing his legs and feet. But a fellow GI was not so lucky as he laid dead next to him. In addition to witnessing the absurdities of warfare, Jess also experienced first-hand the racist nature of US imperialism against an indigenous populations in Vietnam, and Japan while convalescing in an army hospital.
As a Purple Heart veteran and car salesman when he returned home with a growing family, Jess took note how white-dominated systems exploited people of color. He followed and avidly read news reports on Chicana/o protests and urban-styled insurgencies in La Colonia and Santa Paula against police brutality, as well as the moratorium marches in East Los Angeles, and in Oxnard three weeks after the LAPD and LA County Sheriff Department officers stomped the Chicano community at Laguna Park where Ruben Salazar, Lyn Ward, and Angel Gilberto Diaz were killed by these white supremacist law enforcement agencies.
Jess did not participate in these protests, but as an observer the pronouncements of Oxnard Brown Beret leaders and anti-war activists such as Roberto Flores, Richard Carmona, and Rosalio Muñoz resonated with him. He became politicized, mad, indignatn with each injustice inflicted upon his community. His social consciousness was advanced as he attended Moorpark [community] College where he joined and led the student club El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (aka MEChA). Although an insensitive, unsupportive white, high school teacher crushed his self-confidence to write, at Moorpark College he found more supportive liberal faculty who encouraged him to develop his expressive talents. So much so, that he wrote regularly for the student newspaper The Raider Reporter.
Here, Jess found his voice.
From Moorpark College, he transferred to the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) where he earned a degree in Sociology. After his graduation, he worked as a director for La Colonia Youth Services. As a student of Chicano Studies literature, he shared his knowledge with readers of the “Voice of the People: Letters” section of the Oxnard Press-Courier. One of his first public writings outside college addressed the 1971 conviction of Army Lt. William Calley for the massacre at My Lai in March of 1968. In this submission, Jess denounced Cally’s sentence. For him, Calley served as a scapegoat of a system of empire that trained and ordered young, naïve men still in their teens to commit atrocities, then punished them when their inhumane, treacherous policies were exposed. War was an absurd tragedy perpetuated by an imperial regime. My Lai concurrently bared the corruption of the military’s administration of justice, according to Jess, who once served in Calley’s Army division. Hence, Calley’s conviction was not only a national betrayal of a person but also all young men in the US military.
In a May 1972 submission to the Ventura County Star-Free Press, titled by the editor “Racist System,” Jess articulated his indignation, and that of other ethnic Mexicans and Blacks, for the City of Oxnard’s lack of representations in its workforce, especially in higher status and better paying jobs. Utilizing data from an investigation by the California Fair Employment Practices Commission, Jess charged that not only did Whites hold most municipal jobs, but the 130 Chicanas and Chicanos that were employed by the city, seventy-seven percent worked at the lowest, and least remunerative, classifications—clerical, sanitation, and maintenance. From this systemic racism, Jess declared, “Oxnard citizens then should not be shocked when they hear minorities yelling Chicano Power, Black Power, racists; they are only expressing feelings of anger and disenchantment against a community that is composed and supported by all yet unquestioningly discriminated against those that are not Anglo – American.”
In December of 1972, Jess publicly marked his opposition to the Vietnam War. The bombing of civilians particularly appalled him. A genocide like those committed against Native Americans and Jews in Nazi Germany. A defining characteristic of Jess’s prose was his deft use of statistics to ground his perspective. For example, in this letter, titled “All for the sake of democracy?” by the editor of the Ventura County Star-Free Press, Jess pointed out that US aerial bombings of Vietnam surpassed the tonnage unleashed during WWII by three fold, two tons every sixty seconds, two-thirds of this number dropped in South Vietnam, “the country that we were supposed to defend not attack.” He continued by detailing that the devastation of Vietnam’s flora and fauna, as the US sprayed defoliant over six million acres, in the process destroying crops that caused widespread famine. In addition, there were 5,500,000 casualties—4.5 million civilian men, women, and children. US casualties made up less than one percent of this number, the rest were Vietnamese. All at a cost of $150 billion, “enough to give every man, woman, and child in Vietnam, $3,400.”
Although the data may vary today, the point is that Jess utilized his sociological imagination, the connection of his personal experiences with larger forces, as proposed by sociologist C. Wright Mills, to frame his point of view. This quantitative approach influenced him to examine problems from a perspective of systems—imperial, educational, legal, and the political—at play. Jess’s civic engagement as a candidate for the local high school board and serving on a number of civic commissions and organizations advanced his Weltanschauung as a public, organic, intellectual. Jess also edited a Spanish-language newspaper in which the Star-Free Press ran some of his commentaries in English. This and his periodic, yet regular, submissions to local newspapers garnered the attention of Chuck Thomas, editor of the Ventura County Star-Free Press’s op-ed page.
In early 1975, Thomas invited Jess to be a regular contributor to his newspaper’s Sunday A Minority View column. William “Bill” Thrasher, an Oxnard High School civics educator, first wrote essays for this column on a variety of topics. But the condition of the Black community was his focus. The Ventura County Star-Free Press consequently sought a contributor who would bring the perspective of the Mexican American. Jess’s background and talents fit the bill. The Star-Free Press offered him a modest stipend for each essay. Jess accepted the invitation.
During and after his tenure as a Minority View contributor for the Ventura County Star-Free Press from 1975 to the late 1980s, Jess wrote on a variety of topics related the Chicana/o community, e.g., voting, consumerism, immigration, youth violence, ethnic identity, culture, profiles on residents, US interventionism, and education. Jess quantitative and qualitative evidence in his essays during a time when there were no internet search engines or online databases. With feet and legs still embedded with shrapnel, Jess walked the aisles and stacks of the Oxnard Public Library regularly to obtain the hard facts needed to ground his boldly measured writings.
As an organic intellectual, Jess often wrote his stories in the first person. This was because his experiences were not uncommon to the people in Ventura County’s Chicana/o communities. Therefore, as hoped by Chuck Thomas, Jess attempted to create, with moxie and an unapologetic flare, a bridge of understanding between ethnic Mexicans and the dominant population of Whites.
Jess’s November 16, 1975, Minority view essay was titled “The reasons for writing (and reading) this column.” He expressed that he felt compelled to write because there were so few ethnic Mexican, Chicano journalists that reported on issues that impacted his community: racism, discrimination, education, youth violence, and unemployment “which continue to destroy many of our people.” Anglo decisions and policies that killed, maimed, and debilitated raza. Consequently, his point of view was an endeavor to address and redress matters of life and death. And as a Chicano who came of age in the barrios of Southern California, Jess contended that he was the most qualified not only to tell the stories of his community but from their perspective. For example, in regard to the matter of immigration, Jess viewed this problem grounded in the “(known facts)” of the corruption of officials in charge of the Immigration and Naturalization Services and the “(known facts)” that ethnic Mexican immigrants were considered “aliens” in their own land as Mexicans did not cross the border, the border crossed them. Furthermore, he underscored how county agencies discriminated against racial minorities at a time when they held the highest unemployment rates. Like muckraker journalists of the early twentieth century, Jess believed that by exposing the challenges that ethnic Mexicans faced, positive change could be achieved. But not without collective struggle by a community with varying talents and temperaments. His aptitud was that of a writer and graphic artist not afraid to offend and alienate. As a Chicano, he was obligated to take expected hits for los de abajo.
At 32-years of age, Jess interrogated his identity, to the point of crisis: Mexican, Chicano, pocho. In a Minority view essay published on Sunday, September 17, 1978, the day after the celebration of Mexican Independence when Chicano’s enjoyed the consumption of Mexican antojitos (food prepared by street vendors), music, and “colorful folklorico dancers,” Jess asked, “‘But what about after the fiesta’ What happens to our Mexicaness?’”
To ballast his identity, Jess declared that he is a US citizen born along the US-Mexico border in the city of El Paso’s El Segundo barrio. His family of thirteen (parents and 10 siblings resided at a site of “dilapidated precidios (worse than projects).” His “home” had two bedrooms and no indoor bathroom. Penury shaped his identity from a young age. But his parents, Jesus Sr. and Juana, never failed the family with shelter, food, a sense of security, and love. Yet Jess was unsure of who he was, particularly as the family migrated to Juarez, Mexico in 1954, when he was eight. Here Jess was not Mexican; he was a pocho—a diluted, adulterated, weak Mexican even though Spanish was his first and only language at the time. In the classic quandary of a Chicano’s quest for his identity, Jess was ni de aquí, ni de allá, neither Mexican nor American. Added to the no man’s land of self, Jess experienced the trauma of paste being inserted into his mouth by one teacher and taped shut by another for speaking Spanish at El Segundo’s Alamo elementary.
Jess grasped that the personal was political in the sense that peers of his, near and far in other barrios, struggled with similar issues of identity of not only being an ethnic Mexican but “shuffling” back and forth from viewing themselves as “Brown/white/brown/white….” And, in concert, wanting to be Brown and not wanting to be brown, wanting to be White, and not wanting to be White. And knowing the mentalité of both the Brown and White—a Chicano version of W.E.B. Du Bois’ double consciousness. For some, this psychological catastrophe resulted in doom. Jess posited that “For the less fortunate, to be pocho means a nightmare of alienation, poverty, drugs, mental illness, and dehumanizing lives in the barrio. Here lies the answer for many of our incarcerated brothers, riots in our own barrio and community suicide.”
On the legacy of the Chicano movement, two weeks before the celebration of el diez y seis de septiembre in 1978, Jess critically intimated that Chicanos, as a community, lacked the courage and spirit of self-sacrifice of the Independence leaders of 1821 and of el movimiento. Jess averred, “Today, many of us are saddened by what we see; the opposite of what Hidalgo died for. We no longer see the brotherhood and commitment of the La Raza that we saw during the 1960s and early 1970s.” He then went to recite a wistful poem titled “What happened to the movement?” A sonnet that lamented the passing of Chicanas and Chicanos in struggle for self-determination and noble causes: bilingual education, the end to racism everywhere. “It was born in the 1960s,” Jess declared. “MECHAS asking for ‘higher’ education and EOP. And now it’s Chicanos ‘high’ on PCP.” Self-determination achieved by Chicanos was the problem. La Raza Cosmica had turned to La Raza Comica. The poem expressed a contradiction in consciousness as Jess recognized achievements in the creation of community institutions clinicas, teatros, and campaigns of resistance against Coors, Bakke, and Proposition 13. But this was undermined by political disunity, as if there ever was unity, in the form of youth violence and prison gang wars of self-determination. Attributes of el movimiento continued to exist but so were the problems that ignited them. The Vietnam war ended, but barrio warfare replaced it. Unity existed but it was fragmented: barrios united against barrios. “Tony, Johnny, Flaco, all gone…. Not killed in Vietnam but by a clica.”
Two years later, Jess evaluated the legacy of el movimiento positively. His message was directed, specifically, toward Whites who continued to view ethnic Mexicans as a problem, a Mexican Problem. Gueros enjoyed Mexican culture but disdained them as a people. In the process, Jess re-considered the legacy of el movimiento as it continued but under a different guise. “Contrary to popular belief, Chicanos have been and continue to be active 365 days out of the year and not just on Cinco de Mayo. As I told my friend, what has happened over the years is that the tactics and styles of activism have changed dramatically.” Chicana/o unity existed in specific campaigns that ranged from the cultural to the political. He pointed to the work of Barrios Unidos whose members, spearheaded by Xavier Flores, the younger brother of Oxnard Brown Beret co-founder Roberto Flores, who visited schools and organized a regional conference of over three thousand attendees from throughout the state that year to address the locura of youth violence. Chicanos of Ventura County continued the struggle for self-determination in winning electoral campaigns in Santa Paula and the City of Fillmore. Chicana/o collectives for different causes met regularly at 6:30 am on Wednesdays at El Concilio headquarters in Oxnard to coordinate their advocacy resisting police brutality and advancing cultural productions such as the first annual Noche de Cultura led by MACA, the Mexican American Correctional Association. Whether groups of educators, peace officers, or healthcare professionals their missions overlapped so that ethnic Mexican communities of Ventura County lived lives with dignity. They did not always win but when they did, as Jess stated, the victories did not happen by accident. With a spirit of righteous indignation, or being mad as hell, “They were the result of many hours of hard work by people who had hope and won.”
Conclusion
The importance of Jess Gutierrez was, and is, being that he still lives, that he was a freelance writer and photo journalist who was of the Chicano community, who expressed stories from the perspective of raza, by la chicanada, and for el pueblo. His essays are a testament to el movimiento’s ideal of self-determination in that his writing articulated the struggles of Chicanas and Chicanos to define their own experiences and destinies, i.e., a community speaking for oneself, not spoken for, defining their own history and reality to advance el movimiento for community liberation. This inspiration, among many, is the reason I am a historian who came of age looking up to UFW picketers and Chicana and Chicano activists sporting berets and goatees.
Thank you.
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