José Villa leaves 'legacy of activism'

CLOVIS — After José Villa died in late June at his adobe home in La Villita, he was celebrated in New Mexico, California and beyond for his contributions as a community organizer, scholar and leader in the "Chicano Revolution" of the 1970s. But first he was born and raised in Clovis, where his formative years as the child of immigrants in pre-Civil Rights era America shaped the rest of his 87 years.

Villa's parents came to Clovis in 1915, said his son, leaving the bloodshed of the Mexican Revolution for a batch of different challenges in a land that itself only joined the United States a few years earlier.

"People were getting butchered everywhere, so up they came, they crossed in Juarez and they settled in Clovis," said Daniel Villa. "Before that, my grandfather had worked on the railroads, so he knew the area, more or less."

The family built an adobe home at 115 Jones Street, which José Villa would recall in an essay years later. He was born in 1931, one of the youngest of more than a dozen children. Many since moved, most of them for work, but the parents Encarnación and Luz stayed the rest of their lives in Clovis, which is "like the family seat," Daniel Villa told The News.

José Villa would graduate from Sacred Heart High School and marry Clare Cresap Villa in 1955 after four years with the Air Force serving in Korea and Japan, but not before an upbringing that involved working "the cotton and broomcorn fields" of the area, according to his obituary.

"Being a Mexican in the eastern part of the state, pre-War, from the 30s to the 50s, it was tough," said Daniel Villa. "He saw a lot of the social injustice, he grew up right in the middle of it. That's what kind of sensitized him to social issues. He didn't train exactly to be a community organizer, but I think those early experiences brought him around to doing what he did later in life."

Daniel Villa, a New Mexico State University professor emeritus, recalled his family's accounts of the all-hands-on-deck labor that was necessary for simple survival back in those years.

"It was dirty, hard work. It was work that no one else would take. It was like today - who's going to pick the vegetables and stuff? It's the people that have no other options. That was them, they were a poor family," he said. "I mean, the whole family went. (José Villa) was five years old, he couldn't really pick much cotton but he would pick a little pile from what he could reach. In a sense there was no childhood; you started working as soon as you could walk."

"That kind of stuff, I think it marks you for life," he added.

That much is also evident in an essay Villa penned, "Lessons Learned in a Mexican Home." In later interviews he would speak candidly about both the discrimination and kindnesses he encountered during that time, but in this essay he focused on the "unimaginable, terrible tribulations" his family endured on the way to Clovis, and the lessons on faith, work and perseverance his parents left for him.

"By example my dad instilled in us to not be afraid of anything or anyone. Once when we were 'chopping cotton' somewhere near Muleshoe, Texas. Someone screamed víbora! There was a rattlesnake nearby. My dad rushed to the snake and killed it with his hoe. He grabbed it and held it high for everyone to see. Then he flung it away as if to say that nothing should keep us from doing our duty," Villa wrote in the essay, last revised in March 2017. "By example, my dad taught us the principle of 'el aguante'... confront all challenges and forge ahead."

Soon after returning from service abroad, Villa and his growing family "began on a life journey which took the family to Lovington and Albuquerque; Yuma and Phoenix, Arizona; San Jose and Felton, California, until his retirement in 1992 when the couple returned to New Mexico to live in the adobe ruin in La Villita that they and their extended family had been restoring every summer since 1982."

By the time he retired in 1992, Villa had plenty of achievements under his belt; he assisted in creating Phoenix' Community Council under President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty; he led for two years the Mexican-American Graduate Studies Department at San Jose State University, and in 1980 he hugged President Jimmy Carter, among other items.

In an article last month, the executive director of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies remembered Villa as a "gentleman who committed all of his adult life to bettering the lives of others, preserving his culture, and making the pathway for race and ethnic studies."

"It is important to remember the ones who came before us and whose courage, commitment and labor allowed us not only to develop an academic field of Chicana and Chicano Studies, but also to institutionalize departments and programs," wrote Julia E. Curry-Rodriguez.

In an article this month, Metro Silicon Valley columnist Gary Singh recognized Villa's "formidable legacy of activism and heroics on behalf of Mexican-Americans, Latinos, Chicanos and other underrepresented communities."

Some of the Villa lineage still live in Clovis, though the adobe building at 115 Jones has long since been replaced. Daniel Villa said the concrete where his grandfather put his initials a century past is starting to disintegrate, though it appears his descendants' legacy will outlast that stone just as it has the adobe.

"(My parents) built a house made from dirt, had a roof over our heads, and always had food on the table," Villa wrote. "We had hard packed dirt floors, did not have electricity nor indoor plumbing... but I do not remember being poor."