UMAS protest on the University of Colorado Boulder campus

Lost Highways

Unforgetting Los Seis

Season 5, Episode 4

On a sleepy summer evening in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974, three young Chicano activists sat in a car at Chautauqua Park at the base of the iconic Flatirons—the giant red sandstone rock formations that sit above the foothills. Then, at approximately 9:50 p.m., the car exploded. Two days later, another car in downtown Boulder exploded, killing three more young activists. Their deaths came against the backdrop of the Chicano movement and the social justice activism of the 1960s and ‘70s. On this episode of Lost Highways, we’ll look back at Los Seis de Boulder—the nearly-forgotten group of six activists in the Chicano movement who were fighting for student aid and representation on the CU Campus, and the unresolved mystery of their deaths.

Header Image: By Juan Espinosa, circa 1973-1974. History Colorado Collections.

Guests: Jasmine Baetz, Deborah Espinosa, Megan K. Friedel, Dr. Nicki Gonzales, Michelle Jaakola Steinwand, Dario Madrid, Tomás Reyes Martínez Ortega, José Anselmo Ortega

 

Historical Tape:

 

Resources:

 

Los Seis de Boulder

“Lost Highways” from History Colorado is made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. And by the Sturm Family Foundation, proud supporters of the humanities and the power of story-telling for more than twenty years. 

[Slow fade-in of tense music/drone]

NOEL: On a sleepy summer evening in Boulder, Colorado, 50 years ago, three young Chicano activists sat in a car at Chautauqua Park at the base of the iconic Flatirons–the giant red sandstone rock formations that sit above the foothills.

MARIA: Then, at approximately 9:50 p.m., the car exploded. The blast shook the city. It was so intense that it broke at least one window in a nearby residence and rattled buildings and houses miles away. 

NOEL: The three people who died in the car that night of May 27, 1974, were 21-year-old CU junior Neva Romero; 24-year-old CU alumna Una Jaakola; and Una Jaakola’s boyfriend – 26-year-old attorney and CU law school graduate Reyes Martinez. 

MARIA: Two days later, on May 29, 1974, another explosion destroyed a station wagon that was parked in a lot at 28th and Canyon Boulevard, right in the center of town. 

NOEL: The second blast killed Freddy Granado, the former leader of United Mexican American Students, or UMAS. He was 31 years old. It also killed the poet Heriberto Teran, 24, and Francisco Dougherty, who was visiting from Texas and was only 20.

MARIA: A fourth person, Antonio Alcantar, was walking back to the car with the beers he’d just bought. He was severely injured and lost a limb, but survived. 

NOEL: In the days following, speculation about the cause of the explosions was all over the place. Authorities claimed that the activists were radicals. And news outlets, such as the Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Daily Camera, amplified the theory held by law enforcement that the occupants of the cars had accidentally blown themselves up while setting timers on bombs. 

MARIA: The six deaths occurred after a string of other explosions in Boulder that year. Bombs went off at a school, the Boulder courthouse, and the CU Police Department. A few were injured at a bombing at a hotel, but no one died. Unofficially, these acts were blamed on Chicano activists.

NOEL: But leaders in the Chicano movement distanced themselves from the bombings and rejected the idea that the back-to-back explosions killing six and wounding one could’ve been accidental. Many believed the six activists had been murdered. 

MARIA: In the media, these opinions were mostly framed as Chicano conspiracies.  

NOEL: Another explanation suggested that it may have been the product of Chicano on Chicano violence.  Though no one was ever charged, the theory of a botched bomb plot circulated as truth. 

MARIA: Many Chicanos didn’t believe it then and still don’t. It was a narrative created by the same authorities that had routinely discriminated against, harassed, and even killed members of their communities. 

NOEL: Among their friends and community members, the six people who died in those two car bombings were martyrs and soon became known as “Los Seis de Boulder.”  And in the 50 years since their deaths, those who knew them best have had to fight to keep their memories alive as the truth of what actually happened in Boulder in 1974 remains a mystery.

[THEME POST]

NOEL: From History Colorado Studios, this is “Lost Highways: Dispatches from the Shadows of the Rocky Mountains.” I'm Noel Black.

MARIA: And I'm Maria Maddox.

NOEL: On this episode, we'll look at how communities and individuals grapple with unsettling events for which no one interpretation has ever been universally accepted. We'll also examine the social conditions in the late 1960s and early 1970s that mobilized Chicano students at CU Boulder and across the country. 

Finally, we’ll ask why did the violent deaths of six young people who were students at the University of Colorado not become a prominent part of public memory?

NOEL: One quick note: This episode will amplify and center the voices of veterans of the Chicano Movement, whose experiences and stories have been historically under-documented or covered in prejudiced ways. 

The 1960s and ‘70s in America were defined by massive social upheavals. The anti-Vietnam War movement…

[Archival tape: Leave this area immediately…]

The Black Power and Civil Rights movements…

[Archival tape: So that the failure to pass a civil rights bill isn’t because of Black Power, it is the incapability of whites to deal with their own problems inside their own communities. That is the problem of the failure of the civil rights bill.] 

The American Indian Movement…

[Archival tape: I think that it’s something very good that our young people have taken over, even if it’s only this little place. Something that we’re trying to do. We’re trying to hang on to our culture, to our religion, to be Indians] 

The sexual revolution…

[Archival tape: Free our sisters, free ourselves!]

And the disability rights movement… 

[Archival tape: What do we want? ADA? When do we want it? Now!]

These and many others social movements at the time challenged and threatened dominant American values.

MARIA: And the State of Colorado was no different. It was a hotbed of Chicano activism. There were boycotts, walkouts, multiple Chicano-run newspapers, and the leadership of Denver-based Corky Gonzales.

[Corky Gonzales: The social structure of this country we are understanding why we have the poorest level of education, why we have the highest percentage of unemployment, why we have the biggest number and percentage of those killed overseas. See we, we’re understanding and teaching each other that, we’re starting to look at the system, the educational system, we’re looking at the establishment… ]

NOEL: You may remember Gonzales from our Season 2 episode: “The Miseducation of Freddie Freak.”  Gonzales and those in the Chicano movement rejected the term “Mexican-American.” To them, it implied that they’d somehow left their homeland to live in the United States. Chicano people have lived in the Southwest for longer than it’s been part of the US. 

MARIA: Here’s José Anselmo Ortega, a lifelong Chicano activist who participated in the movement in Boulder in the 1970s. 

JOSÉ ANSELMO ORTEGA: We're Indigenous to this area. And this has been our land all this time. People ask people me, What is Chicano?” And I tell them, “It's a "mestizo," someone of European and indigenous blood. But it has a political tone to it because that is the name we chose for ourselves. It's not a name that was given to us as Mexicans, or Mexican-Americans, or Latinos or Hispanics. Chicano is who we are, and that's who we choose to be called as a people.

NOEL: Dario Madrid is one of the founders of La Gente, a Chicano organization offering security for activists and a community space to practice boxing, football, wrestling, and basketball. 

DARIO MADRID: I first got involved in the Movement when I was 12 years old. My brother was killed by the cops here in Pueblo. He was two years older than me, so he was 14. I was 12. That's when we first started… Back then, we didn't call it the Movement or anything, but we knew we were being discriminated against, you know. My mom tried to take that case to court, and of course, they ruled in favor of the cops. They said that he had hung himself. Even though he had his skull was cracked from ear to ear, and had numerous bruises and black eyes and chumps, chunks of hair on his head. And you know, people, when you commit suicide, you don't do all that stuff to yourself. 

[Music]

DARIO MADRID: Growing up, I was beat by the Pueblo cops, like, three, three different times. I mean, beat up. Clubs, you know, the whole thing, from, one of the times, the jailer even refused to put me in jail because I was so beat up. They just took me straight to the hospital. 

MARIA: Dario Madrid says there was police violence in Chicano communities throughout the country. And systemic racism had always affected just about every aspect of their lives: housing, employment, education, access to safe drinking water, and the military.

NOEL: Mexican Americans were drafted in disproportionately high numbers compared to other ethnic groups. This became clear during in the 1960s and 70s with the War in Vietnam. Here’s Dr. Nicki Gonzales, Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion, Professor of History at Regis University, and a member of the Colorado State Historian’s Council:

NICKI GONZALES: They couldn't afford to go to college. And so they weren't able to get those college deferments. And once they were in the military, they're often put in the most dangerous positions. 

NOEL: And when they returned to the U.S., they often felt like second-class citizens, which inspired many to become active in the Chicano Movement. 

MARIA: For many Chicanos, the anti-war stance made sense. One of their slogans was, “Our struggle is not in Vietnam but in the movement for social justice at home.” 

NOEL: This growing discontent reached a fever pitch in California on August 20, 1970, when some 20,000 to 30,000 people marched down Whittier Boulevard in East L.A. to protest the War.

[Chanting clip from the Moratorium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4t8J3Nw6bk]

MARIA: The demonstration, known as the Chicano Moratorium, started off peacefully. But after someone threw a can at law enforcement…

ROSALÍO MUÑOZ: They broke up the crowd, beat up on women and children, went into the streets shooting tear gas and with shotguns that people fought back.

NOEL: This is Rosalío Muñoz, one of the organizers of the Moratorium in a video published by The Los Angeles Times in 2020. In its aftermath, over a hundred people were arrested, and three people were killed, including the reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Rubén Salazar. Here’s Jose Anselmo Ortega again:

JOSÉ ANSELMO ORTEGA: The Moratorium in L.A. opened a lot of eyes, you know, the journalist was killed, you know, by a gas, tear gas canister, you know, and that created a lot of anger, you know, and emotion. 

[Music]

MARIA: José Anselmo Ortega had joined the Chicano movement after struggling with racism in school. 

JOSÉ ANSELMO ORTEGA:  I had been having some difficulty in school. Not academically, but I just didn't feel. I didn't feel like my needs were being met in the public school at that time, all the boys had to take metal shop and woodshop. It was mandatory. I was never inclined to do those type of things. And all the girls had to take home economics. 

MARIA: Despite his interest in physics, Ortega was channeled into vocational training. And he was not alone. This was a common path for Mexican-American and Chicano students in the 1960s and 70s. 

NOEL: Many teachers viewed Chicano students through the lens of indifference, if not flat-out racism, expecting them to work exclusively “with their hands” instead of their minds. Dario Madrid:

DARIO MADRID: Chicanos were just, we were like conditioned back then, especially in high school. The counselors never encouraged us to go to college. And everything was either you're going to prison or go to the service. So people took the service.

MARIA: By discouraging Mexican-American and Chicano boys and girls from pursuing higher education, many left the classrooms to go work in low-wage, labor-intensive, and often dangerous jobs. 

NOEL:  Here’s Deborah Espinosa, a Chicana activist, historian, and the former director of El Pueblo Museum:   

DEBORAH ESPINOSA: My grandpa worked in the timber, my brothers worked in the timber in the mountains. That's what took them there. Other people worked in the coal mines. Those are dangerous jobs. I laugh now because I, as a child, I thought it was normal for men to have one or two fingers missing... I remember in grade school, I attended parochial school, and the only time I ever heard about Mexican history was the Mexican-American War, and we lost. 

NOEL: Students like Deborah Espinosa, José Anselmo Ortega, and Dario Madrid could go through 12 years of education without encountering a single teacher or administrator who reflected their lived experiences, offered a positive view of Mexican-Americans and their history, or encouraged them to go to college. 

MARIA: Nevertheless, says Nicki Gonzales:

NICKI GONZALES: Education was seen as a way out of poverty. For many, it was seen as a way of a method of social mobility.

NOEL: There were many obstacles to higher education for young Chicanos. Lack of representation and the prohibitive cost of college were among the biggest.

DARIO MADRID: At that time, there was very few Chicano teachers. I think there was eight of them, no administrators. And we wanted to put a stop to all that. So we figured, “Hey, let's go to Boulder, get educated, bring back some teachers.”

MARIA: Until the late 1960’s, very few Chicanos enrolled at CU. But this changed quickly after a group of students created the United Mexican American Students organization, or UMAS (now UMAS y MECHA) in 1968. 

NOEL: Their main goal was to recruit more Mexican-American and Chicano students. They traveled throughout Colorado, encouraging young people to apply to CU.

MARIA: They also advocated for financial assistance for the many first-generation students who desperately needed it.  

NOEL: CU Boulder’s Equal Opportunity Program (EOP) and the Migrant Action Program (MAP), opened doors for many of them.  

MARIA: And the efforts of UMAS paid off. By the summer of 1972, there were about a thousand Chicano students on campus.

NOEL: And that number kept growing. 

DEBORAH ESPINOSA: Generally we went to school, you know, and socialized together. But there were also lots of organizing meetings. There were, you know, lots of on-campus marches. 

MARIA: José Anselmo Ortega was still in high school when he attended his first political rallies at CU with his older brother, José Esteban Ortega. Here, he recalls listening to UMAS: 

JOSÉ ANSELMO ORTEGA: I realized that I wasn't alone in my thoughts about this and my feelings about it. It was a much bigger problem than just with me wanting to go into science. And being in the UMAS office and listening to them and putting two and two together, I consider my time in Boulder as my political baptism. That's where I learned that things could change. And it was so heartening to be marching with all these people with the same goal, with the same ideals, shouting “Chicano Power! Viva la Raza!” You know, we are a force to be reckoned with. 

DEBORAH ESPINOSA: That is what became a problem for the administration, for the Regents of CU. That when we got there, we were wearing our culture, we were wearing, you know, the serapes and all the colors and very proud to look Indigenous. And we were loud, and we were bold. 

NOEL: As the number of Chicano students exploded and the Chicano student Movement gained traction and visibility, so did the pushback. What ensued was a clash between the more conservative elements of the university’s administration and what they perceived as politically radical students. This, however, was not unique to Boulder; it was happening all across the country. Here’s Nicki Gonzales again:

NICKI GONZALES: And we see this throughout American history, whenever there's progress made toward justice and equity, there's always a backlash. And by the late 60s, we start to see really, really strong backlash. You see it in sort of the intimidation and the antagonism that agencies like the FBI and, you know, local police departments began really cracking down on civil rights activists. There's the program, Cointelpro, the counterintelligence program out of the FBI, that, you know, had files on activists throughout the country, no matter no matter what group they belonged to. And it was at that time, in the early 1970s, when they were really cracking down on Chicano activists in particular.

NOEL: COINTELPRO, an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program, was created by the FBI to surveil, discredit, and “neutralize” groups and organizations that they perceived as a national threat. It was allegedly dissolved in 1971 after a group of anti-war activists from the town of Media, Pennsylvania, leaked classified files that documented years of unlawful espionage on U.S. citizens and attacks on foreign leaders. The outrage was swift. 

MARIA: In 1975, Senator Frank Church conducted public hearings to investigate the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, and the National Security Agency. 

[Archival Tape: Its purpose is not to impair the FBI’s legitimate law enforcement and counter-espionage functions but rather to evaluate domestic intelligence according to the standards of the constituion and the statures of our land.]

MARIA: Cointelpro followed many groups, but few were as viciously targeted as the Black Panther Party.  

NOEL: Ericka C. Huggins was a member of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Panthers when her husband, John Huggins, and “Bunchy” Carter were shot and killed on the UCLA campus in January 1969. Here she is in an excerpt from a 2016 interview from the Library of Congress. 

ERICKA C. HUGGINS: We were always in fear of our lives. We were followed by the police and the FBI. Our phones were bugged. They would leave signs on our cars, or the front doors of our homes. Just pure harassment. Stalking is a better way to describe. We were stalked by the FBI, and. And so that was. And we lived in a... in the conditions of war, it felt. Because by that time already, at least six members of the party in Los Angeles had been killed. 

NOEL: According to The Guardian, by the end of 1969, the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program had fed 20,000 children in nineteen cities. In an internal FBI memo, J. Edgar Hoover wrote that the program “...represents the best and most influential activity going for the Black Panther Party and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.”

ERICKA C. HUGGINS: So the way the FBI did things was that they created this animosity, and then they and they filled our organizations, all of them, not just the Black Panther Party and US organization, every student organization: the Women's Movement, the Gay Liberation Movement, which is what it was called at that time, all the Latino, Asian and Native Movements, the Anti-War and more, all of them, this is history were filled with FBI operatives and informants who tended to look like, talk like me, be like the people in that organization. But we knew what they were doing. We didn't know the name Cointelpro, but we knew what they were doing by then because so much death had already occurred. 

[Music]

NOEL: Years of intense, student-led anti-Vietnam War activism had put CU Boulder on the government’s activist watchlist. And the explosions in Boulder in the early 70s only brought more scrutiny. 

MARIA: Many in the Chicano student Movement at CU Boulder suspected that Cointelpro had infiltrated their community. 

NOEL: It also seemed suspicious that some of the more politically engaged students of color saw their financial aid stripped away.

MEGAN FRIEDEL: In the fall of 1973, students arrived on campus to find that their financial aid had been cut, and it disproportionately affected Mexican-American students because they were the highest number of students of color on campus at the time. 

NOEL: This is Megan Friedel. 

MEGAN FRIEDEL: I am the lead archivist and Head of Collections Management and Stewardship for the University of Colorado Boulder Library's Rare and Distinctive Collections. There is evidence that there were some administrators on campus who were actively trying to take away financial aid or find mechanisms to take away financial aid from activists on campus, 

NOEL: Whether or not they succeeded isn’t reflected in the records. And… 

MEGAN FRIEDEL: At the same time that you see that in the records, you also see support for minority students. You also see the beginning of Affirmative Action happening at the same time, I think it would be a mistake to say that all of the University was actively trying to take away financial aid for minority students. I think it's a much more nuanced and complex story. 

NOEL: What is clear, is that tensions on campus had been rising for some time, especially after Joseph Coors, who served on the school’s Board of Regents, had opposed the creation of UMAS, the Black Student Union, and a Chicano Studies Program at CU. 

MARIA: For many Chicano activists, the Financial Aid Crisis of 1973 and ‘74 demanded direct action. 

NICKI GONZALES: The students, they rebelled. They demonstrated against that. And one of the ways they did that was by occupying Temporary Building One on the CU Boulder campus. It was a form of civil disobedience to to challenge those policies and to call attention to those policies and to attract more attention from other activists to support their cause.

NOEL: Occupiers of Temporary Building 1, or TB-1, were trying to elicit a response from the university, which, up until that point, had delayed negotiations with UMAS students to address the financial aid crisis. Another demand from Chicano students, according to the 2017 documentary “Symbols of Resistance,” was to remove UMAS Director Joe Franco and Assistant Director Paulo Costa, for frivolous spending, and for approving attacks on students. 

MARIA: Deborah Espinosa, Dario Madrid, and José Anselmo Ortega all participated in the Occupation. 

JOSÉ ANSELMO ORTEGA: It felt like it was just going to be a one day, two day thing, but it ended up going on and on. Initially, they refused to negotiate. They refused to talk 

NOEL: Chicano activists on campus felt surveilled during the Occupation of TB-1, and some said it seemed like a police state.

JOSÉ ANSELMO ORTEGA: We knew there was a police presence around us. We could look out the front and see agents in the other buildings, surveilling us. Once in a while, you would see weapons that they would have, the people that were in the UMAS office could hear walking on the roof. 

MARIA: At the same time, says Deborah Espinosa, the campus had grown eerily quiet. And some UMAS activists had begun to wonder why the administration had not addressed their demands at al

DEBORAH ESPINOSA: Why didn't the police come in and arrest the students? Put a stop to it at some point, instead of just being around us and, you know, watching us come and go. At that point I’m not talking about the police, I'm talking about the FBI. 

NOEL: The standoff went on for almost three weeks. 

MARIA: Until May 27 … 

[Music]

DEBORAH ESPINOSA: One night my husband came in. Had to be about midnight or one o’clock maybe. And he woke me up and he said, “You have to go home, you and the baby have to go home. He said that there had been an explosion at Chautauqua Park. 

JOSÉ ANSELMO ORTEGA: We all heard it. And within. Oh, my gosh, within an hour, hour and a half, we received word that it was Neva, Reyes and Una that were involved in that first explosion... Someone said that they had found Neva's ID embedded in a tree that was close to the explosion. That it was just stuck on the tree. The explosion was so intense. 

DEBORAH ESPINOSA: By the time I did get to our apartment, the phone rang. It hadn’t been very long, and it was Freddy Granado. He asked me, “Was it really Neva?” And I said, “Yes. And it was, you know, Reyes and Una” and I had to tell him. “Yes, it was.” And he couldn't believe it. “No, no, no.” It was a brief conversation. And then that night when we all gathered on the steps of TB-1 that night. We were all there. Everyone was there, of course. And then Freddy came, and he was very angry. He came inside where I was, and he picked up Catalina, my little girl, and he held her up, and he played with her, and he talked to her, you know, and and then he stepped outside, gave a very fiery speech. He was very angry. And then… that was the last time we saw him.

NOEL: In his passionate speech at the Memorial in front of TB-1, Florencio “Freddy” Granado claimed that Chicano blood had been spilled, implying that they had been targeted because of their activism. 

MARIA: 48 hours later, on May 29, 1974, Freddy Granado was killed in a second explosion on 28th and Canyon Boulevard, which also took the lives of Heriberto Teran and Francisco Dougherty and severely injured Antonio Alcantar. 

DEBORAH ESPINOSA: It was confusing and shocking, and mostly we moved in disbelief. How could this have happened? How could this have happened? How did it escalate to this? 

MICHELLE JAAKOLA STEINWAND: I would say this is the kind of thing no family wants to have happen to them. It was absolutely shocking. Traumatic. I found out when I went to work and met with my boss, who was the one who informed me that she had heard something about a bombing in Boulder, and that it was Una's boyfriend's car. 

MARIA: This is Michelle Jaakola Steinwand, Una Jaakola’s sister. The two grew up in Bemidji, Minnesota, and came to Colorado in 1970. In the aftermath of the bombings, she says… 

MICHELLE JAAKOLA STEINWAND: There was a lot of fear and a lot of paranoia. I think the impact was profound on the families. I think the impact was profound on their friends. And I think the impact on the community at large was profound in terms of what did this mean? What, if this could happen, what else could happen? 

MARIA: Michelle’s sister, Una Jaakola, was 24 years old and had graduated from CU with a double major. 

NOEL: Neva Romero, 21, was a former homecoming queen in the town of Ignacio and a CU junior who wanted to be a bilingual educator. 

MARIA: Reyes Martínez, 26, was a graduate of CU Law School and the boyfriend of Una Jaakola. The three who died in the second explosion of May 29, 1974, were Heriberto Teran, 24, a poet and an artist… 

NOEL: He had written a poem in memory of Neva, Reyes, and Una, just hours before his own death. 

MARIA: Francisco Dougherty, 20, a Vietnam Veteran who had dreams of becoming a doctor. 

NOEL: And Florencio ‘Freddy’ Granado, 31, an UMAS leader and CU Boulder graduate. 

[Music Out]

NOEL: After the second bombing, university officials met with Chicano students and negotiated an end to the occupation. The students and the CU administration agreed that Joe Franco and Paulo Acosta would be removed from their positions at UMAS-EOP and that the university would grant amnesty to those who participated in the occupation of TB-1. 

[Music]

MEGAN FRIEDEL: The headline on the front is “Car Bombing Claims Six Lives.

And the next column is that “An agreement was reached at TB1.”

MARIA: This is Megan Friedel at the CU Boulder archives, showing us an original edition of El Diario de la Gente.

MEGAN FRIEDEL: I pulled out the issue from, let's see here… June 11th, 1974, which was the first issue immediately after the bombings. These are really, really crucial documents because they're some of the only documents that really fully show the, the throughline, the timeline of what's happening from 1973 through the summer of 1974. 

MARIA: And they were written in English and Spanish…

MEGAN FRIEDEL: This is documentation from the community about what was happening to their friends, their loved ones. There, you know, here is like an article about Florencio Granado, Freddy Granado, who died in the second bombings, written by Juan Espinosa, who was a friend. This documents the community's grief and their response, and also places it, centers it within this bigger narrative of the Chicano movement and social justice activity at the time and treatment of Chicano students on campus. 

NOEL: The majority of non-Chicano newspapers stuck with the narrative that the activists themselves were to blame for their gruesome deaths. 

MARIA: Even though the ATF investigation would take months to complete, law enforcement officials had formed this theory almost immediately after the bombings.

NOEL: On May 28, the morning after the first bomb went off, The Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder reported that “Investigators were theorizing… that the occupants of the car may have been assembling a bomb.”

MARIA: The Denver Post echoed the belief, shared by the Boulder Police Department, that the three activists had accidentally blown themselves up.

[Music Out]

NOEL: On May 29, 1974, The Daily Camera reported that the managers of the Lazy J. Motel, where Una Jaakola shared an apartment with a roommate, had seen police surveilling her unit for several days, and that a search warrant was conducted around the same time as the explosion.

MARIA: During the course of the investigation, officials talked to over 150 people. However, many refused to cooperate or provide meaningful information. According to newspapers, Alcantar, the sole survivor of the second bombing, became the prime suspect. 

NOEL: At first, he claimed he was just hitchhiking and didn’t really know the other victims. But his statement soon fell apart. And on May 31, 1974,The Daily Camera reported that when authorities searched his home, they found “wires, timing devices, flashlight batteries taped together, and a manual describing how to make bombs.” 

MARIA: However, the Grand Jury convened that year found insufficient evidence to press criminal charges. 

NOEL: And now, 50 years later, we’re no closer to decisively knowing what happened during those two summer nights in Boulder. 

DEBORAH ESPINOSA: We felt they were victims. Or we wanted to believe they were victims. The idea that they had blown themselves up was just too painful, first of all, to think about. And secondly, how could they have risen to such a level of radicalism? We could understand that but was it really that serious?

JOSÉ ANSELMO ORTEGA: Nothing's ever really been definitively said about the cause. You know, some people said that they had done it on their own. Other people said that it was all Cointelpro, the government, you know, trying to silence the people that they could silence, to create intimidation and to create an atmosphere of fear, to subdue the movement at that time. 

DEBORAH ESPINOSA: It did disperse the movement if that's what they wanted, it did to a degree because families didn't want to send their kids to college anymore, to CU.

JOSÉ ANSELMO ORTEGA: People became frightened that they could be next. 

NOEL: Here’s Tomas Martinez Ortega, the son of Chicano activists Esteban Ortega and Rita Martinez, who were also in Boulder and were part of the student movement: 

TOMAS MARTINEZ ORTEGA: I can imagine for everybody afterwards, it's been super scary, super hard to live with. I'm a generation removed, and I still feel the effects of what Los Seis went through. And I know that it affected my dad, because years later, he was still hiding his trash. Always looking behind his back, making sure there were security. Just small things that would affect him, almost like if he had PTSD from a war. My dad was a marine, and he was still scared. 

MARIA: But for others, like José Anselmo Ortega, the fear didn’t stop them. 

JOSÉ ANSELMO ORTEGA: It just became a tighter group. The people that weren't going to be intimidated continued to fight.

NOEL: Whatever the truth may be about the deaths of Los Seis, it was a traumatic experience for the entire community, and not just for Chicano activists and those who knew Los Seis. 

MARIA: We can only imagine the impact that two car bombings and the deaths of six young people had in a small college town. But even before Los Seis, Boulder residents were on edge after a string of unsolved bombings in the city.  

NOEL: Dynamite hit the Flatiron Elementary School on February 24, 1974, causing little damage. Then, on March 16, two separate blasts targeted the CU Police Department and the Boulder County Courthouse. Investigating officers believed these attacks were related to an escalating conflict between Chicano activists and school administrators. 

MARIA: Joel Dyer of the Boulder Weekly notes, "Part of the history of 1974 that has been mostly lost to time is the fact that a bomb was going off somewhere in the U.S. on average every four days.” 

NOEL: The explosions were blamed on a wide variety of militant activists including the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, and the American Indian Movement. In Colorado, a number of Chicano organizations, such as the Brown Berets, the Crusade for Justice, and UMAS were also blamed.

MARIA: For some activists, gradual change wasn’t enough. And they were willing to use direct action if necessary to gain attention from the media and make their voices heard. 

NOEL: Which is why some think the car bombings were a result of this style of activism.

MARIA: But there’s also plenty of reasons to believe that the deaths of Los Seis may have been political. 

NOEL: Chicanos everywhere were being brutalized by the police and sometimes killed with impunity. Between 1972 and 1979, nine activists connected to the Chicano Movement in Colorado, including Los Seis, lost their lives. Ricardo Falcon, a co-founder of UMAS, was gunned down by a far-right extremist named Perry Brunson at a gas station in New Mexico in 1972. Falcon and others were headed to a “La Raza Unida” conference in Texas. He was shot when they stopped for water. Brunson was found not guilty of manslaughter by reason of self-defense. 

MARIA: Here’s Dr. Priscilla Falcon, the widow of Ricardo Falcon, and a Professor Emerita of Chicana/o and Latinx Studies at the University of Northern Colorado, featured in Symbols of Resistance: 

PRISCILLA FALCON: I know in my heart and in my soul that my husband was murdered. The town of Oro Grande and Alamo Gordo helped Mr. Brunson in every way they could with the murder because no attempt, no attempt of any sort of help was given to my husband. How do I tell my two-year-old son that my husband was murdered? He was murdered in Alamogordo over water, and no help was given to him. 

MARIA: On Saint Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1973, Luis “Junior” Martinez, who worked at the Crusade for Justice in Denver, had an altercation with the police. After a shootout, his body was found in a nearby alley. He was 20 years old. 

NOEL: Vietnam Veteran Carlos Zapata was killed in Downtown Denver in May 1979, under mysterious circumstances. He was 29 years old. And similar occurrences were happening elsewhere in the country. Here’s Ricardo Romero, another veteran of the Chicano Movement, in an oral history from 1981, published by The Freedom Archives: 

Ricardo Romero: You go into New Mexico and you have, Linda Montoya at Escuela Aztlan, an alternative school that's created. She's killed by the police in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And then you go into the assassination of Rito Canales and Antonio Cordova of the Black Berets that were set up by the police. And these guys were riddled. They're shot, like thirty some times, you know, on under the pretext that they were trying to steal dynamite. 

NOEL: There's no hard evidence that confirms that any of these deaths were connected. But they contributed to a sense of mistrust and fear in the Chicano community. And their killings continue to burn in the memories of lots of people who were involved in the Movement.

[Music]

NOEL: Just three years ago, after decades without any concrete information about the deaths of Los Seis, a copy of the official report on the 1974 explosions was made available to the public after it was anonymously donated to the CU Boulder archives. 

MARIA: It includes testimonies, lab results, diagrams, and graphic details about the body parts that were strewn on the site of the explosions. 

NOEL: But, says Nicki Gonzales, much of the supposed evidence that Los Seis blew themselves up boiled down to them being, “known activists” or “known militants.” 

NICKI GONZALES: The report that has come out since then, through University of Colorado Library, it's a joint report, FBI, ATF and the local police department was really good at describing those young activists as criminals. And it's really in a document like that where you see, you know, the word “militant” or civil rights radical becoming synonymous with “criminal.” I mean, it's plain as day to see, you know, who they were targeting and how they were trying to fracture these movements. 

MARIA: I met Megan Friedel at CU Boulder to look at the report.  

MEGAN FRIEDEL: So what we're looking at here is a redacted copy of a report that was produced by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, presumably in 1974. 

NOEL: The report is over 200 pages long. Though much of it is dry documentation from the ATF, the FBI, Boulder law enforcement, and the County Coroner, there are surprisingly intimate and relatable details of Los Seis' lives. 

MARIA: For example, Una Jaakola had finished her last shift at the Holiday Inn and had packed for a trip to Alamosa with her boyfriend, Reyes Martinez. 

NOEL: In Neva Romero’s apartment, her father found a critique of the Ballet Folklórico de México from her recent trip there, and an essay about a boy she was crushing on. 

MEGAN FRIEDEL: As horrific as this document is, it does really humanize the story in a lot of ways, because you do realize how young they were, and you do realize, I mean, the interviews with Una's parents or her dad in particular are just heart-wrenching. And you realized, you realize just the relationships that were severed when these six died. 

NOEL: Megan read the conclusions of the report aloud:

MEGAN FRIEDEL: “The consensus of opinion based on this investigation and previous knowledge of the victims' militant beliefs led the investigating officers to believe that the explosion occurred while Martinez and Romero were setting the timer on the bombs”. 

And then, the second bombing, the conclusion, it says, “It is believed the bomb on May 29th was intended in retaliation for the three deaths on May 27th.” 

So, that's two very, very stark conclusions. And I will say that in talking with community members, no one was surprised that that was the federal conclusion. If you take this document on face value and you just look at these two pages that I've quoted from, and you don't place this in the context of all of the other sources that we have in the archives about discrimination towards Chicano students on campus and, related to the Chicano Movement, and if you aren't reading closely in the newspapers with the language that's being used to describe them, you're missing the full context of this report, and especially the fact that the grand jury trial returned inconclusive verdicts and did not move forward with any federal trials. 

MARIA: So, what, if anything, does this ATF Report confirm, challenge, or change?

MEGAN FRIEDEL: As an archivist, another challenging thing is, like, I'm not in a place to comment about what the document really changes in terms of the narrative. All I can talk about is, like, what I, as an archivist, see in here. And I think you see the, this full-throttle investigation coming from so many agencies towards this community that already felt incredibly persecuted. 

MARIA: In the absence of an agreement on how to interpret the cause of the car bombings, what’s left for some, especially those who were closest to Los Seis, is the lifelong struggle to understand, remember, and bring meaning to their lives. 

NOEL: Deborah Espinosa:

DEBORAH ESPINOSA: I defend Los Seis for their bravery, and I tell people they died for education. 

MARIA:  Michelle Jaakola Steinwand, Una Jaakola’s sister:

MICHELLE JAAKOLA STEINWAND: And they all had lives that would have been so rich and contributed so much. I am pretty sure I would have been an aunt. And my children could have had an aunt.

NOEL: Michelle is wary of losing sight of the humanity of Los Seis, so she welcomes the opportunity to talk about her sister: 

MICHELLE JAAKOLA STEINWAND: Una was a beautiful person. Probably the first thing you would notice is that she was pretty. And, she was as beautiful inside as she was outside. But I would say first and foremost, she was very kind. She also was really funny. And I've been told that that particular funny bone and, wish to be silly and humorous was something she shared with Reyes. 

NOEL: Here, Deborah describes Freddy Granado:

DEBORAH ESPINOSA: Freddie was, one of a kind. He wasn't afraid. And that made us afraid, you know, because we felt like he wasn't destined to live a full life because he had a lot of encounters with police over the years, and he his boldness in those situations could have gotten him killed. And he wasn't going to stop. That was who Freddie was. 

NOEL: Here’s Dario Madrid describing Neva Romero: 

DARIO MADRID:  First of all, she was beautiful. But she was an activist. She was really outspoken and was kind of unheard of back then. To have, people like that speak up. I have a lot of respect, I had a lot of respect for her, for her for doing that. And then she was able to reach people and and recruit people to Boulder that other people couldn't reach. 

I have a daughter that I named even Neva, after Neva Romero. 

NOEL: The name Neva has become common among the Chicano community. It’s one of many ways they honor Los Seis and make sure their story is remembered.

MARIA: Tomas Martinez Ortega was named after Reyes Martinez. And his sister carries the name Neva. Their father’s surname was Ortega, and the way names are passed down, he would’ve typically been “Tomas Reyes Ortega Martinez.” But his parents intentionally changed the order:  

TOMAS MARTINEZ ORTEGA: I found out years later it’s so that I could have Reyes Martinez together in one swoop. 

MARIA: Reflecting on his parent’s generation and their activism at CU, Tomas says they were trailblazers, in more than one way: 

TOMAS MARTINEZ ORTEGA: They were the pioneers in Chicanismo. And none of them were born like that. None of them were born to raise a fuss or to create these ways of working, around the system or through the system or with the system to create change. My dad wasn't a Chicano activist before he went out there. He was a Chicano activist coming out of it. 

NOEL: While some argue that the deaths of Los Seis gutted the student movement on campus, it’s also fair to say that it inspired many in the Chicano community to get an education. 

DARIO MADRID: All my kids, they all got degrees and stuff, you know? So, there was something positive that came out of that whole thing.

DEBORAH ESPINOSA:  I can say that there are many archivists, Chicano, Chicana archivists, and authors who have, are now emerging as PhDs. The academics that we wanted in those days or were striving to be. There are doctors and lawyers. So the Movement was, is successful.

[Music]

NOEL: In 2019 a memorial was installed the CU campus to honor Los Seis and remind passersby of the history. 

MARIA: It’s called the Los Seis de Boulder Community Sculpture Project. 

NOEL: It was spearheaded by Jasmine Baetz, a ceramicist who was a graduate student in the Art Department at CU Boulder from 2017 to 2019.  

MARIA: The memorial is a big step in redressing the historical erasure of Los Seis and the legacy of student activists of color at CU. 

NOEL: After attending a screening of the Symbols of Resistance documentary, Baetz was struck by how strange it was that she’d never even heard of Los Seis. She was appalled by the lack of public acknowledgment, and began working on a sculpture to honor them. 

JASMINE BAETZ:  With sculptures and with plaques and, kind of a space that you can go to to remember and also a space that, to some extent, interrupts the, the sort of daily flow or like the a-historical way we can kind of skate over a campus and not think about what happened on it. 

NOEL: At around 7 feet tall, the rectangular gray memorial is almost like the pedestal of a monument. It has mosaic tile portraits of Los Seis on each of the four faces. And it sits on a concrete foundation in front of the TB-1 building east of the Macky Auditorium. At its base you can read:  “Dedicated in 2019 to Los Seis de Boulder & Chicana and Chicano students who occupied TB-1 in 1974 & everyone who fights for equity in education at CU Boulder & the original stewards of this land who were forcibly removed & all who remain.” And it adds “Por Todxs Quienes Luchan Por La Justicia (for all those who fight for justice)."

MARIA: Many members of the Chicano community and surviving family and friends of Los Seis welcomed the Memorial. It would offer a degree of validation and a step toward healing.

NOEL: It also raised serious questions about CU’s historical treatment of Chicano students. The Administration initially authorized a temporary installation, but resisted making the memorial permanent. 

DEBORAH ESPINOSA: There's never been any acknowledgment. Never an apology. And it's time for that. It’s time for that. It won't heal everything, but it will validate. It would validate the students who took over TB-1. And that's why other students need to learn this story.

MARIA : On September 16, 2020, after years of pressure from different groups, the university finally allowed the Los Seis memorial to stay permanently in place in front of TB-1.

[Music fade in]

NOEL: Since its unveiling, the sculpture has sparked public interest and discussions on Los Seis. And, for Chicano students who don’t often see their culture reflected on campus, it serves as a tangible reminder of the ones who came before them. 

JOSÉ ANSELMO ORTEGA: I'm pleased with the memorial that they have in front of TB-1 now. My cousin, his grandson is going to CU Boulder now. And he didn't know the story of Los Seis. And I told him the story. And now he passes by that monument every day, and he sees it. And it's a reminder. I just saw him now for Christmas, says “I pass by, by there every day, José. And it's it reminds me of what you told me about what these people really did, why I'm able to go there now without any problems, without having to fight anybody, without having to argue and fight for my education. I look at that, and it reminds me of the story that you told me, the sacrifices that they truly made for us.”

 

🎵

“… Sonriendo hasta el fin

En este cielo de sierra 

de Colorado se ven

Las almas de seis soldados

Seis fusilados

Seis hijos del bien…” 

 

[THEME SONG]

NOEL: The corrido you just heard, “Los Seis de Boulder,” was composed and performed by Augustine Cordova. It’s a song from 1974 that was re-recorded in 2014 for the Boulder County Latino History Project.

Lost Highways is a production of History Colorado and History Colorado Studios. It’s made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor. And by a founding grant from the Sturm Family Foundation, with particular thanks to Stephen Sturm and Emily Sturm.

If you enjoyed this episode of “Lost Highways” and want to support it, please subscribe, rate us, and write us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Also: tell a friend and share one of your favorite episodes. You can find links to individual episodes at historycolorado.org/losthighways.

Many thanks to Tyler Hill, who produced this episode.

Special thanks also to Susan Schulten, our History advisor; to Chief Creative Officer, Jason Hanson, to Publications Director Sam Bock; and to Ann Sneesby-Koch for her newspaper and periodical research; and to history Colorado’s editorial team Lori Bailey and Devin Flores. 

We’re deeply thankful to Devin Flores, who served as a liaison to members of the Chicano Movement in Pueblo, Colorado.

And a huge shoutout to Sharyn Zimmerman, our volunteer transcriber for this episode. 

If you'd like to see a transcript of any of our episodes, either as a matter of accessibility or because you'd like to use “Lost Highways” in your classroom, you can find them at historycolorado.org/losthighways.

The Merry Olivers composed the music for this episode, and our theme is by Conor Bourgal.

Many thanks to our editorial team: 

Shaun Boyd

Eric Carpio

Terri Gentry

Chris Juergens

Aaron Marcus

Ann Sneesby-Koch

And to our Advisory Group: 

Susan Schulten 

Thomas Andrews

Tom Romero

And Cara DeGette

Finally, a huge thanks to the entire staff at History Colorado. And thanks for listening. I’m Noel Black.