When Juan Gonzales was in a photojournalism class at San Francisco State University in 1967, during the height of the student protests, he heard an explosion go off in the hall. He left his classroom and found a student had tried to plant a bomb in a locker, but it had gone off prematurely.
“I was the first one there,” Gonzales said. “He was laying against the door and his hair was all pushed up and his skin on his face and hands was all torn off.”
This anecdote would become one Gonzales, now 78 years old, shares with the myriad of students he’s had at both SFSU and City College of San Francisco, where he now teaches. His ability to draw on decades of experience in journalism is why he was honored with a Distinguished Teaching award on behalf of the Society of Professional Journalists at this year’s MediaFest in Washington, D.C.
According to the announcement for the 2025 winners of a variety of awards, the award for Distinguished Teaching is given to a journalism teacher “who demonstrates exceptional teaching ability, contributes meaningfully to journalism and journalism education and upholds the highest standards of the profession.”
John Adkins, the editor-in-chief of “The Guardsman,” CCSF’s campus newspaper, and a student of Gonzales, said his tutelage will have a lasting impact on his life.
“I feel like I’ll always kind of hear his voice in my head when I do journalism later in life as a professional career,” Adkins said.
Gonzales’ interest in journalism began at Franklin High School in Stockton where he contributed to his school newspaper, “The Yellow Jacket,” now known as “The Buzz.”
“I’ve always been a writer, even as a little kid, I was writing short stories and poetry and Christmas plays that my cousins would act out,” Gonzales said. “So my interest in journalism wasn’t really there; it was really in writing.”
After graduating high school, Gonzales went on to be an editor at “The Collegian,” the campus newspaper at San Joaquin Delta College, and later finished his bachelor’s degree in journalism at SFSU. He was an editor on “The Phoenix,” covering everything from the Mission District to the student strikes on campus.
“The whole thing was pretty intense because there were demonstrations every day,” Gonzales said. “At that time, I was a reporter covering it. I had a billiard ball whizz by my head while I was trying to cover a story.”
After graduating from SFSU, Gonzales was asked to develop a course for the newly created Raza Studies, which is currently named Latina/Latino Studies, and ever since then has been an educator of journalism.
The motivation behind “El Tecolote” came from the courses Gonzales designed. He taught the students about the lack of coverage for the Latinx community and how to be storytellers to fill that gap. However, they ran into the issue of having no newspaper in which to publish their work. Gonzales decided to create a bilingual newspaper, which is the longest-running Spanish-English newspaper in the U.S. today.
“I wasn’t thinking of starting a newspaper until I was 40 years old, and [there] I was, 21 or 22,” Gonzales said. “Right after the spring semester, we started having regular meetings every two weeks. “[We were] talking about whether we can do it, how we’re gonna do it, who’s going to be contributing and working with it. I think I had around 10 people who said they wanted to work with it.”
After picking a name for the publication, “El Tecolote,” meaning “the brave owl, the protector of the neighborhood,” his team chose a deadline for the first issue and started raising money.
“We did [a talent] show and that raised us $300-400 profit. At that time, it was only going to cost us $75 to publish 5,000 copies of a four-page newspaper,” Gonzales said. “We said, ‘Now we have it, now let’s shoot for the date Aug. 24, 1970.’ And sure enough, the paper came out.”
From the start, “El Tecolote” decided not to rely on the university or its funding, so instead, they found a place in the Mission District to base their operations.
“We decided right away that we would find a place in the neighborhood, a community center or whatever, just to not be based on the campus [but to] be based in the community we wanted to serve,” Gonzales said. “We even worked out of my house, my apartment, kitchens… we wanted to be independent in every sense of the word.”
In order to reach a wider audience and to target their intended readers, they made sure the paper was in both English and Spanish.
“We got a lot of heat from the Spanish-speaking newspapers of that time, saying, ‘You’re foolish, you should be doing Spanish only,’” Gonzales said. “We stayed committed to doing the paper bilingual, and now there are many papers that are bilingual publications. It helped us build an audience, a bigger support base.”
With their reporting, relevance and consistency, they built up a community and a following. However, for the first few years, the paper was run entirely by volunteers from a variety of places. In order to secure more funding, Gonzales helped form a nonprofit called “Espina del Norte Inc.” which would allow them to take donations and give donors a tax write-off.
Gonzales said in the spring of 1985, the president of CCSF reached out to him to offer a full-time position in the journalism department.
Today, Gonzales serves as the adviser for “The Guardsman,” and is the chair of the CCSF journalism department. Abby Sigler, culture editor for “The Guardsman,” enrolled at CCSF in search of a new career after previously working in the tech industry.
“I signed up for class and showed up on Day 1 to Juan’s class and pretty much felt like I made the right decision,” Sigler said. “He really teaches from the perspective of old-school journalism, and I say that with reverence. I think it’s such a blessing to be taught by someone with such a vast history.”
Adkins first met Gonzales when he gave a recruitment speech and wrote his phone number on the board during one of his classes at CCSF.
“I almost was wondering if I had to remove myself from the room because I almost felt like I was going to tear up,” Adkins said. “I just had this sense that I was exactly where I needed to be, and I changed my major to journalism the next day.”
Katynka Martinez, a professor at SFSU and department chair of Latina/Latino Studies, started at SFSU in 2007, teaching the classes Gonzales had developed: Latina/o/x Cinema, Latina/os and the Media and Latina/o Journalism. Her students would contribute articles and photo essays to “El Tecolote,” and in 2009, she became a board member for Accion Latina, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding arts and cultural projects in the Mission District, including “El Tecolote.”
“I don’t know how he does it, being both a professor, the adviser for the campus newspaper and chair of the department, because those are all three different skills,” Martinez said. “He’s provided a huge service to City College and, honestly, to San Francisco journalism, period.”
The extent of Gonzales’ impact on journalism is apparent in the students he’s inspired to pursue journalism.
Martha Sanchez, a freelance writer who has worked with “El Tecolote,” took a class at CCSF with Gonzales back in the late 80s.
“It’s just like everything fell into place. I knew what I wanted to do. I knew who I was. He was very encouraging,” Sanchez said. “It gave me a place to belong.”
After taking classes with Gonzales, many students like Sanchez go on to write for “El Tecolote.” Gonzales has a passion for recruiting a variety of writers from just about anywhere.
Alexis Terrazas, an SFSU alum and former editor of “El Tecolote,” first met Gonzales in 2008 at a state conference in Sacramento that he attended with his community college newspaper staff. Being one of the few Latinos on staff, Terrazas was approached by Gonzales right away.
“Juan’s class, it was like this incubator for aspiring, early-career journalists,” Terrazas said. “Oftentimes, they were POC journalists that might have not gotten direct shots at mainstream newsrooms.”
Terrazas said Gonzales told him about an on-the-spot opinion writing contest at the conference and asked Terrazas to enter his work. Terrazas agreed, entered the contest and won first place for his commentary during the awards ceremony. A few years later, Terrazas received a call from Gonzales, who let him know there was an opening for an editor at “El Tecolote.” Once again, Terrazas agreed, and served as editor-in-chief for 10 years.
During Terraza’s time at “El Tecolote,” he attributes the work of Gonzales as instrumental in the preparation of the next generation of journalists.
“During my time at Teco, we relied a lot on volunteers and student journalism,” Terrazas said. “That pipeline from City College to ‘El Tecolote’ was so vital.”
From the moment he founded “El Tecolote,” Gonzales remained involved with it in one form or another, all while teaching the future generation of journalists.
Gonzales said he plans to retire from CCSF at the end of the Spring 2026 semester, but that won’t mark the end of his career. He plans to return to “El Tecolote” to help in any way he can.
“As long as I can breathe and feel healthy enough and can think, if I can still contribute, I will,” Gonzales said. “My heart and soul is still dedicated to the newspaper that I started, and I will contribute for as long as I can.”