Gonzales became involved in the farm worker’s movement, and was a student activist in college, he said.
And I started thinking, Hmm, this is maybe something I want to do.” My dad just threw me into the courtroom and said, ‘Argue your case.’ And I did. I said it wasn’t my fault - but the ticket said that it was,” he said. It was when he got into a car accident leaving his High School parking lot that Gonzales caught the courtroom bug. If anything, Gonzales said he learned he definitely did not want to be a Water Commissioner. Still, Judge Gonzales’ spark to pursue law didn’t come from watching his father’s judicious allocations of water. Sometimes he'd come back a day or two later and say, ‘This is what we need to do.’” Sometimes he would make the decision right away. I would watch my dad seemingly ad nauseam listen to people’s grievances. Watching his father weigh each scenario, Gonzales learned “any time you're in a position to have to make the decision between people, it's critically important to honestly listen to both sides. Gonzales is interviewed by Rocky Mountain PBS’ Kate Perdoni in Alamosa, Colorado.
It was kind of like an ad hoc arbitration process,” Gonzales said in an interview with Rocky Mountain PBS. “I remember him having to mediate between neighbors who were arguing over water, and having to make decisions about who was right and who was wrong. My dad had to maneuver the politics and the conflicts that engendered as a normal course of doing business,” he said.
“Water is the blood of agriculture, particularly in this area. He came home daily with stories about the community and its water, Gonzales said. Growing up, his father was Water Commissioner on the Alamosa and La Jara River systems, raising and lowering head gates to accommodate some of the earliest adjudicated water rights in the state. “It does create a fundamental understanding that your worth in large part is dependent on your ability and willingness to work - and that it is honorable to work.” “My dad had me out there in the fields driving the pickup and the truck, basically standing on the seat,” he said. “It was the typical sort of stuff that was grown then - and still is,” Gonzales said. His family were sheep ranchers and grew alfalfa and barley for Coors brewing. He was raised on a farm outside the small town of Capulin. Judge Gonzales was born in Alamosa, at the only area hospital at the time, in 1952.
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