Juan Gonzales, 79, steps down as chair of City College of San Francisco's journalism department this month, ending a 41-year run. The bilingual Mission newspaper he founded in 1970, El Tecolote, is not going anywhere.

At Acción Latina, the Mission District nonprofit where El Tecolote has been published for more than five decades, some of Juan Gonzales' former students gathered June 6 for his retirement party. The 79-year-old spent part of it coaching a current student on his reporting.

At the end of this month, Gonzales will officially step down as chair of City College of San Francisco's journalism department — a post he has held since 1985, forty-one years. El Tecolote, the bilingual Mission paper, stays his.

The paper predates the chairmanship by fifteen years. In 1970, Gonzales — then 22, fresh out of San Francisco State's journalism program, with internships at the Associated Press and United Press International — was asked to help build SF State's new ethnic studies program. He taught a journalism course. Out of that course, El Tecolote was born.

"I saw the information needs of the people in that community," he said. "And so I started a newspaper."

The alumni list is long. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and novelist Hector Tobar got his journalistic start at El Tecolote. Santiago Mejia, now a staff photographer at the San Francisco Chronicle for close to a decade, came up through The Guardsman — City College's student paper, which Gonzales also helmed — after Gonzales found him in a science class and pushed him toward the New York Times Student Journalism Institute. "Juan found me," Mejia said. "He saw things in me that no one else could." Other students went further: the Richmond Review and the Sunset Beacon on the Westside, and the Ingleside Light, all trace roots to his program. The Society of Professional Journalists recognized his teaching with an award in 2025.

"I want to give other folks younger than me a chance to run the department," Gonzales said, "maybe even take it another notch up."

The retirement, by all accounts, is approximate. Gonzales said he plans to get more involved with El Tecolote — "while I can still think and talk and have the physical abilities to do so." At the party June 6, Chronicle photographer Mejia offered what may be the most accurate forecast: "He's retiring today, but he's still fighting the fight tomorrow."