Pedro Gonzales, 99; Activist, Early Latino Disc Jockey

Pedro Gonzales, a Mexican American social advocate and one of the first Latino disc jockeys in the United States, has died at the age of 99.

Gonzales, a longtime resident of the San Ysidro section of San Diego, died March 17 at Delta Convalescent Hospital in Lodi, near Stockton. He had moved to Lodi about three years ago.

Gonzales’ life was as colorful as it was long.

As a teen-ager, he joined Francisco (Pancho) Villa’s rebel forces in Mexico, working as a telegraph operator constantly on the run from government soldiers.

In 1923, he and his wife and child settled in Los Angeles, where he found a job as a longshoreman. Gonzales’ habit of singing while he worked led to his own Spanish-language radio show, one of the first in the nation.

His early-morning broadcasts over KMPC in the mid-1930s, during which he raged against the mass deportation of Mexicans, were adored by Mexican field laborers in the United States but feared by U.S. authorities.

In 1934, Gonzales was convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl and sentenced to 50 years at San Quentin, where he organized hunger strikes and other acts of civil disobedience to force improved prison conditions.

Six years later, the girl recanted, and Gonzales was deported to Mexico. He settled in Tijuana, formed a band and resumed his broadcasts. Once again, he became a sort of folk hero with his tirades against social injustice.

Much earlier in his life, in 1919, he was nearly killed in Chihuahua, Mexico, as a firing squad prepared to execute him for his allegiance to the revolutionary figure Pasqual Orozco. But at the last minute, a schoolgirl stepped in front of Gonzales.

The two of them--he 24, she 14--were later married.

“He was a larger-than-life character, and at the same time kind of an everyman,” said writer-director Isaac Artenstein, who made the 1988 film “Break of Dawn,” based on Gonzales’ life. Gonzales also was the subject of the 1984 PBS documentary “Ballad of an Unsung Hero.”

In addition, his struggles are memorialized in a mural at Chicano Park outside downtown San Diego.