One Arizona man showed the power of marching for your beliefs

The last time I saw Alfredo Gutierrez was at this year’s May Day rally outside the State Capitol.

He was standing toe-to-toe with a MAGA supporter who had shown up at the protest and was marching through the crowd, wielding an oversized Trump flag, determined to start trouble.

While I couldn’t hear what he was telling the man over the din of the protestors, it was clear Alfredo wasn’t having it. Even at his advanced age, Alfredo let the surly MAGA loyalist know he wasn’t about to let him cramp the enthusiasm of rally-goers, even going so far, at one point, as to jerk down the man’s flag before onlookers stepped in to keep the face-off from escalating.

The incident was quintessential Alfredo Gutierrez, who died this week at 79 of cancer.

To say that Alfredo Gutierrez was passionate about social justice would be a colossal understatement. A follower of civil and human rights icons like Cesar Chavez, Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of Alfredo’s life was driven by the struggle for civil rights here and nationwide.

Booted out of Arizona State University in the 1970s for helping lead a student protest to raise the wages of laundry workers — though he returned last year to complete his undergraduate degree — Alfredo possessed a piercing and daunting intellect.

Born in Miami, Arizona, a small mining town east of Phoenix, to engage Alfredo was to know that this was a man who spent a great part of every day pondering the state of the world. He was never afraid to share his opinion, whether on stage or from the audience — and when he stood to speak, he commanded attention.

There was a presence about him, a physical and intellectual quality that ensured he would not be ignored, attributes that no doubt came in handy later as a state legislator, lobbyist and born-again protest leader.

After an extended stint as a businessman, Alfredo returned to grassroots activism with unfettered passion in the 2000s, eager to fight against the state’s growing anti-immigrant tilt. Partnering with other established Latino leaders and a deep bench of young, up-and-coming immigrants rights activists, Alfredo helped organize the largest protest march in Arizona history in 2006. By some accounts, as many as 100,000 people marched that day in support of immigrants rights.

Later, Alfredo would help organize Arizona’s opposition to Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Senate Bill 1070, then the most stringent anti-immigrant bill in the nation. More recently, he’s been a vocal critic of right-wing, Trump-era policies against immigrants.

In his later years, his reputation as a firebrand evolved not so much to temper but refine his unquenchable spirit.

I didn’t always agree with Alfredo — like when he once suggested that Latino voters should step away from voting as a way to remind party leaders of the value and power of our burgeoning electoral bloc — but I always knew that he had arrived at his points of view honestly and logically.

As confrontational as he could be, he was also capable of great humility. I saw an example of this up close at a luncheon honoring former Arizona Gov. Raul H. Castro, the state’s first and only Latino governor, when Alfredo approached our table to show his deep respect for the aging ex-governor despite a decades-long rift between the two men.

At heart, Alfredo was the consummate Chicano activist, a true believer in El Movimiento. Despite his forays into Democratic Party politics and later as a lobbyist, he always remained convinced that marching in the streets could effect change.

In a fictionalized version of Alfredo in my play, American Dreamer: The Life & Times of Raul H. Castro, I imagined him making this point to Castro:

GUTIERREZ: Your problem is you think the system is here to help you. All that talk about the founding fathers. They’re not my founding fathers. My people are proud mestizos, who, despite the rejection of this country at almost every turn, had the courage to push off the yoke of our oppression so we could live our lives with dignity.

CASTRO: How? By marching in the streets?!

GUTIERREZ: Sí, hombre, sí. How do you think we passed the Civil Rights Act? The Voting Rights Act. It’s because we marched in the streets. We didn’t need an army or guns to do it. All we needed was the people’s army and our faith in justice man, justice.

Rest in justice, Alfredo Gutierrez, rest in peace.