Even at Juan Gonzales’ retirement party, the 79-year-old journalist and mentor couldn’t help but offer some tough love. He put his arm around a student, who was smiling bashfully, and gave him a nudge along with some basic words of encouragement — you’ve got a good conscience, you’re a good reporter, we just need to sharpen your skills.
At the end of this month, Gonzales will officially retire from his post as chair of City College of San Francisco’s journalism department, which he’s held since 1985. The student at his retirement party June 6 was one of dozens of Gonzales’ colleagues and mentees who came to celebrate him at Acción Latina — the nonprofit which houses the bilingual newspaper he founded in 1970, El Tecolote.
“I want to give other folks younger than me a chance to run the department,” Gonzales said of his retirement from City College, “maybe even take it another notch up.”
Gonzales’ students have gone on to work at news desks across San Francisco, across the state, and across the country. Others have gone on to found their own neighborhood papers: the Richmond Review and Sunset Beacon on the Westside came out of his tutelage, as did the Ingleside Light.
“We need journalists to speak truth to power,” Gonzales said of his work.
One of Gonzales’ mentees, Santiago Mejia, was taking science classes at City College when a student in one of his classes announced that The Guardsman, City College’s student newspaper, was looking for contributors. Mejia ended up working there for four years.
Today, Mejia is a staff photographer at the San Francisco Chronicle, and has been for nearly 10 years.
“As a Latino man, I had someone to look up to,” Mejia said.
Gonzales pushed Mejia to apply to the New York Times Student Journalism Institute, and wrote him a letter of recommendation.
“Juan found me,” Mejia said. “He saw things in me that no one else could.”
“He’s retiring today, but he’s still fighting the fight tomorrow.”
Another mentee of Gonzales’, Mission Local’s Eleni Balakrishnan, remembers the responsibility he gave her as editor-in-chief of The Guardsman. “He gave me the green light to call the shots,” Balakrishnan said.
Gonzales learned how to call the shots — and delegate the shot calling — early. In 1970, at the age of 22, he was asked to develop a course for San Francisco State University’s new, first-of-its-kind ethnic studies program.
Gonzales was fresh out of San Francisco State’s journalism program, and had a couple of internships under his belt (one at the Associated Press, another at United Press International). He decided to teach a journalism class.
Out of that class, Mission-based newspaper El Tecolote was born. At the time, Gonzales said, the lack of news coverage in the Mission District was glaring.
“I saw the information needs of the people in that community,” Gonzales said. “And so I started a newspaper.”
Gonzales went on to get a masters degree at Stanford University, and then returned to teaching again, this time at City College, which had given him an offer he couldn’t refuse: tenure.
The Guardsman and its student reporters regularly win awards. In 2025, Gonzales was recognized for his teaching with an award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
“You don’t think about those things until people bring them up,” Gonzales said. “You’re doing it for the love of the craft, and the love of working with students, working with anyone who wants to be a journalist.”
Now, Gonzales says his stepping down as department chair will free up valuable time to continue mentoring young journalists, and to get more involved with El Tecolote.
“While I can still think and talk and have the physical abilities to do so, I want to be as helpful as possible to help the next generation of journalists,” Gonzales said.
Gonzales’ own history — the way he tells it — is filled with moments to suggest that he was bound to be a newspaperman: In grade school, he used a printing-press toy to make his own newspaper sheets he called the Lafayette Times (“because I lived on Lafayette Street, in Stockton”). Later, in junior high, he contributed and made art for his school’s literary magazine.
But it was when Gonzales was a senior in high school that an advisor submitted one of his stories for an award from the San Francisco Press Club. Gonzales received an honorable mention. That, he said, set him on the path to seek a career in news.
“I said, ‘My God, somebody in the professional world thinks I have some talent.’”
