Chicana activist/artist Lola Gutierrez dies on Christmas Eve

Lola Gutierrez captured her world through murals, sculptures and cartoons that gave image and form to the Chicano culture she strived to preserve.

On Christmas Eve 2023, Lola, 82, joined her ancestors. She was well-known in the Chicano community for her powerful paintings of indigenous women, El Chito comic strip in La Cucaracha newspaper and her knack for restoring damaged religious santos with common materials.

Lola was born in San Pablo in Colorado’s San Luis Valley and came to Pueblo in 1953 when her father went to work in the steel mill.

At the age of 13, Lola, began her career as an artist and later earned degrees in art and the humanities, according to a newspaper interview.

But it was El Chito that first introduced her to a larger audience in La Cucaracha. Through “El Chito,” she made readers laugh, think and remember. Mostly she had them laughing at themselves.

In one strip, Chito pulls into Jose’s Gas Station and asks the attendant, “Would you put some wind in my tire?” If you are too young to remember when gas stations had attendants, you probably never knew that “wind” was once a Chicano word for “air pressure.”

With a few strokes of her pen on a few frames of a comic strip, she was able to convey complex plots and deliver a punch line.

For example, in one strip Lola depicts some deer hunters hearing La Llorona crying loudly in the woods. Initially, they are frightened and inclined to run, but one of the hunters decides to talk to her. He assumes she is crying for her lost children, as legend has it. He tries to assure her that her children were all right. “No, I’m crying cuz I didn’t get a deer!” La Llorona wails.

Issue after issue, El Chito was one of La Cucaracha’s most popular features.

It was not always fun and games for El Chito. Sometimes Lola used the comic strip to make social commentary on the events of the day — Billy Gallegos being held hostage by the Iranians, police brutality, poverty and injustice. El Chito was guaranteed to be thought-provoking.

When she created El Chito, she was almost 40, the mother of four children with two grandchildren. She had been married to Danny Gutierrez, a founding member of the Rudy Gutierrez Orchestra (they were cousins), one of the most popular Mexican/Chicano bands in Colorado at the time. The couple were divorced after 11 years, but remained friends until 1993, when he died in a traffic accident south of Pueblo.

In an interview in La Cucaracha, she said she painted almost daily during the marriage and considered herself a professional artist — usually unemployed or working as an unpaid volunteer. She did most of her painting for free by choice.

“Why should the people with money have all the art? God-given talent is not to be sold to rich people,” she said.

In discussing her paintings, Lola emphasized their main purpose is to “keep the culture.” The preservation of Chicano culture was important to her, more important than fame or fortune.

She was also a muralist. Unfortunately, her murals did not survive. Even though she had prior approval for the painting from the Pueblo City Parks Director Lew Quigley, a mural she was painting on a maintenance building at Zapata Park (Bradford) in 1979 was whitewashed by city crews. The mural was destroyed the day after the City Council declined an offer by Chicano artists to paint murals in all the buildings in the city’s parks. Within a few years, cultural murals in neighborhood parks became commonplace and today there are statewide efforts to preserve these public treasures.

A second mural by Lola at Zaragoza Hall in Bessemer was also whitewashed after some found it “depressing.” The dominant image in the piece was a woman cradling a dead soldier in her arms.

“The central theme of the work is the Vietnam War and the thousands of Chicanos who died and left their women to carry their burdens in life,” La Cucaracha reported at the time. “Through the use of color and form, Lola conveys the feeling, not just an image. In the painting on Vietnam, she successfully conveys the feeling of war contrasted with the beauty of life and living.”

Later in her life, Lola found a niche restoring religious statues. In a Pueblo Chieftain story by Mary Jean Porter, she talked about her santos personified.

“He came from Chama,” Lola said of the statue of St. James she was working on. “They brought him in the back of a truck all the way over La Veta Pass. My cousin who lives in San Pablo, Veronica Atencio Mondragon, she’s the one who told them about me. I do a lot of work for people. They come and bring statues to me; I don’t want to say no.”

In the article, Lola explained her process involving cloth mesh, a mixture of wood filler and silt, to fill and replace the chips and renew the plaster finish.

“I don’t use electric tools. I do it all by hand; I want to feel it with my hands. I talk to him while I work. ‘I’m sorry for what they did to you,’  I tell him. I think this (St. James) is the one I love the most.”

Lola’s daughters, Isabelle and Esperanza Gutierrez and Carlo Armco wrote in Lola’s obituary: “Lola loved to sing, dance, play the guitar and the Indian drums. She was very talented. Painting was one of her passions along with sculpture and poetry. Lola had a great sense of humor and when you met her, she was instantly a friend. She will be greatly missed by all who knew and loved her.

“She used to say, ‘Don’t say goodbye, say, see you later,’ ” Esperanza said.