This month, Colorado Law honors Edmundo Gonzales ('72) as the April Alum of the Month. Gonzales has enjoyed a long and distinguished career, serving in a variety of positions in both the public and private sectors. He is currently a member of the U.S. Air Force Senior Executive Service, where he is senior adviser to the assistant secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. He is primarily responsible for the Air Force’s Wounded Warrior Programs, which coordinate all of the medical and non-medical recovery of our combat wounded, ill, and injured.
Born and raised in northern New Mexico, Gonzales’s primary motivation for pursuing a career in law was a desire to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, Antonio Rivera. Rivera, who was an attorney in the pre-statehood New Mexico Territory, would go on to serve as a member of the state’s first legislature when it became the Union’s 47th state in 1912. As a young man, Gonzales attended the prestigious New Mexico Military Institute, after which he earned undergraduate degrees in education and chemistry from Arizona State University. He began his legal education at the University of Arizona, but decided to accept a commission in the army after his first year. His service brought him to Colorado’s Fort Carson, and in an effort to stay in the area he applied and was accepted to Colorado Law.
Gonzales credits longtime friend and mentor Larry DeMuth ('53) for being an instrumental advocate in the early stages of his career. The late Dean Sears introduced the two while Gonzales was still a student. DeMuth, who was general counsel at Mountain Bell at the time, began immediately recruiting Gonzales to join the telephone giant’s legal team. Seeking to gain a bit of experience before moving in-house, Gonzales went into private practice with a Denver firm before moving to the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) Denver office as a federal field attorney. After a few years with the NLRB, Gonzales accepted an offer from DeMuth to join Mountain Bell. Gonzales worked with Mountain Bell through the break-up of the Mountain Bell System in the early 1980’s. He remained in the telephone business following the break-up, accepting a position with U.S. West (the successor to Mountain Bell), where he would serve until 1993.
It was also during this time that Gonzales’s long-time friend, Federico Peña, became Denver’s first Latino mayor. Gonzales worked tirelessly with his wife, Katherine Archuleta, who was an aide to Peña, on both of Peña’s campaigns. Together, they spent countless hours helping Peña organize and execute some of Denver’s most notable public projects as a part of the Denver Downtown Plan Committee, which developed the first vision of improvements for the city in the 1980s. When President Clinton chose Peña to head the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), Peña made Archuleta his deputy chief of staff at USDOT and the family relocated to Washington, D.C. Following the move, Gonzales accepted an appointment to the U.S. Department of Labor (USDOL). During his time there, he spent a year serving as chair of the U.S. delegation for the NAFTA Labor Side Agreement. In 1995, Gonzales was nominated by President Clinton to become the first chief financial officer for the USDOL, a position he held for two years where, notably, Gonzales and other agency CFOs helped to balance the federal budget.
After serving for two years as CFO of the USDOL, Gonzales decided to return to New Mexico to raise his young daughter surrounded by the state’s unique cultural heritage. Over the next twelve years, Gonzales served in a number of different executive roles for entities in the state, including Lockheed Martin, New Mexico’s Technology Incubator, the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, and the New Mexico Computing Application Center, as well as starting his own consulting firm. When Archuleta accepted a position that brought her back to Washington, D.C. in 2009, Gonzales started his work with the Air Force, and has remained with the service since that time.
Calling the Air Force the final act in a long career, Gonzales looks forward to merging his love of photography and travel so that he can compile books to share with children and inspire the next generation.
Five Questions for Edmundo Gonzales
What is your fondest memory of being a student at Colorado Law?
Enjoying the company of my classmates, many of them veterans like me from the Viet Nam era.
What do you know now that you wish you had known in law school?
Through the years, I have come to appreciate the operational context that both governmental and non-governmental large complex organizations rely upon to conduct their affairs. It would greatly enhance attorney effectiveness to better understand how risk decisions are made, abated, or transferred. It is all about achieving value-added efficiency and effectiveness and knowing when it works or does not work. Attorneys are trained to deal with what doesn’t work and to create schemes that do work.
What advice would you give to current students as they’re preparing to graduate?
Take time to consider what you believe your life plan includes. Write a “Grand Scheme” life plan with financial plans and an initial 100-day plan to launch your career. Then look off to what you think your life will be on the day you die. Think of the day before and consider the happiest times of your life. Write them down in your plan and work to achieve them.
Who was the biggest influence on your career?
Larry DeMuth ('53) mentored me and taught me to chase the issues, not the job positional titles. Titles can be dangerous, because job titles can be given and taken away. Never link your own self-worth to a job title: if you lose your job, you can lose your self-worth. Never give anyone that ability. Enjoy mastering issues, the good stuff will naturally come along with the satisfaction that you make a difference.
Of what accomplishment are you most proud?
Clearly, ending my career helping our wounded warriors recover from physical and mental injuries. There is nothing like watching warriors and their families fight back to reintegrate not only into the service, but more importantly, back into a quality of life. I don’t know how it happened that I got this chance; maybe because I’ve learned to chase issues that others don’t.