DENVER — Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales was a boxer, poet, teacher, political organizer and prominent Chicano civil rights movement activist in Colorado. He was also a father, and his legacy lives on through those he taught, including his son, Rudy Gonzales.
As Denver7 celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month, we sat down with Rudy Gonzales to reflect on his father’s life and how he’s stepped into those shoes to give back to community with the hope that their stories will inspire future leaders.
We met up with Rudy at the West Denver library branch named for his father. Portraits of Corky hang between stacks of books, and an interactive computer screen at the front entrance tells his story.
But it's no accident Corky is recognized here. “We organized, we fought for it,” Rudy said, through a successful community petition to the Denver Public Library system. "It was people power, not the people in power, but people power,” he said.
Community efforts like this are very much in the spirit of Corky. “If he didn't like something, he created a parallel,” Rudy said, something “that spoke to his and to community’s vision of justice, of equity, of peace, of change.”
Corky was a child of the Great Depression “who literally fought his way out of abject poverty,” Rudy said. His father, Federico Gonzales Rivera, came to Colorado from Mexico in 1911 and raised his eight children alone after their mother Indalesia Gonzales died when Corky was just 2 years old.
Growing up poor, Corky believed all you had was your character and hard work. His first rise to prominence was as a boxer.
“He was a fearless fighter,” Rudy said. “He threw me in the ring to box for several years. My brother too, and that taught us discipline.”
When Corky retired from the ring in 1955, he had earned a record of 63 wins, 11 losses and 1 draw.
He took that fighting spirit with him into politics.
“He was a highly principled man,” Rudy said. Eventually, he broke from traditional politics, and his successful businesses, to focus on grassroots organizing.
“He came back to his community,” Rudy said. “He wrote the poem 'I Am Joaquin,' where he speaks to it” in the line “I withdraw to the safety within the circle of life – my own people.”
As a leader in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s, Corky sought to inspire Chicanos, or Mexican Americans, to understand themselves by learning the history of the southwest United States.
He created the Crusade for Justice, a Denver-based organization through which he organized protests against the discrimination Chicanos experienced in housing, jobs, education and the criminal justice system.
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Corky focused on “connecting those dots, and how it affects us as people… why it's important that we civically engage, and why it's important to have a democracy,” Rudy said.
To teach those lessons to young people, Corky also founded a school, Escuela Tlatelolco, where Rudy was a student.
A top lesson: “We didn't cross the border. Border crossed us. We're Indigenous to this hemisphere. We predate this government by hundreds and thousands of years,” Rudy said, referring to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, through which Mexico ceded territory, including what is now Colorado, to the United States.
“That history and that knowledge gives you a different perspective on life. When you know where you come from, you understand your presence, you’re present, and you can envision a future,” he said.
For nearly a decade, from the late 1990s to mid-2000s, Rudy was a leader in education. First at the Escuela Tlatelolco, then with Mosaica Education, and later as director of the DDHS Family Crisis Center.
But it still “took a long time for me to find my niche, my destiny,” Rudy said.
Then, 16 years ago, he took on a new challenge to serve community.
When he became the president and CEO of Servicios de la Raza in 2008, he said many told him, “the agency was gone, it was dead.”
Chicano activists created the bilingual human-services organization in 1972. For decades, it had served Denver’s low-income Spanish-speaking populations and other marginalized communities. But by the 2000s, Servicios de la Raza was in financial straits.
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“I'm a hard head. I think I got that from my dad too. Cabezadura, terco, right? And I didn't listen,” Rudy said.
Under his leadership, Servicios de la Raza is now the largest Latino nonprofit service provider in Colorado. Rudy took the organization “from a $400,000 deficit to a $19 million budget, from six staff to 118, from poorly paid staff to sustainably paid staff,” he said.
“It was like completing a circle in my life,” he said, taking over a community organization “founded in the fire and baptism of the Chicano movement.”
Rudy's leadership and service to community was recently recognized with a César Chávez Latino Leadership Hall of Fame Award from the Denver Public Library.
Now, as he leads the group forward, he reflects on one of the teachings of that movement: self-determination. “We can sit behind the desk and not just have to clean it. Although my mom made me clean it too,” he said with a laugh. “You need to be humble. You need to be there for people.”
Today, Servicios de la Raza offers everything from mental health care to financial coaching, HIV and STI testing, re-entry help for the previously incarcerated and assistance for victims of domestic violence. Since 2020, they’ve also partnered with Denver on its Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) program, a crisis response system intended as an alternative to police dispatches.
“We don't just provide services, but we also advocate, and that means civic engagement,” Rudy said. The group's goal is “to address inequities, injustices, violence and anything else that harms people or community, most specifically our Latino communities.”
Rudy said the need for these services is more apparent than ever following the COVID-19 pandemic, and as Denver’s immigrant communities grow. Rudy said so-called “newcomers” are among those his organization is set up to help.
“We've been working with migrants as an agency at Servicios for 52 years. What's new [about newcomers]?” he said.
Over the years doing this work, Rudy said “we're seeing significant progress, but there's still a lot of room to grow.”
Latinos still face disparities in health outcomes, education and when it comes to leadership positions for "someone like me who likes chicharrones, chile verde and frijoles," Rudy said.
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Still, as Rudy looks ahead, he sees opportunities.
“There’s never been six Latinos in city council. Are you kidding me? There's never been such a Brown caucus at the state legislature level,” he said.
“Leadership is so simple it's often thankless,” he said. For him, being a leader boils down to: Putting community first, showing up to your commitments, doing the hard work of getting involved and following through.
He hopes to encourage the next generation to “pick up those batons” and “push that needle even further.”
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