Andrew Gutierrez

A while back, I began looking into the life of Andrew Gutierrez: his grave is a few minutes walk from my UNC office. I was surprised to find a fellow Gutierrez in Chapel Hill: I haven’t met any others in the four years I’ve been here. Looking through an ancestry website, which held census and naturalization records, yearbooks pictures, a draft card, and death certificate, I was able to work up a brief bio:

Andrew Gutierrez was born on New Year’s Eve 1903 in Santiago, Cuba to Jose and Emma Gutierrez. He was given the first name Andres, a name he carried to the United States aboard the SS Munargo, which dropped him in New York on June 27, 1922. He went on to attend the University of North Carolina and became a Civil Engineer. On Christmas Eve of 1924, he married Margaret Nesbitt, 17, whose family had been in Chapel Hill for a generation. You can still see the Nesbitt name on certain business in the area. At some point, they moved to Urbana, Illinois, where there first child Andrew was born in 1925. Three more children followed: Joseph, Rosita, and Margaret. Some time in the late 20s, the family moved back to Chapel Hill, where Andrew worked as an engineer at the Durham County Water Department. Later, he moved to Alexandria, Virginia, where he worked for the D.C. government. He died in Virginia in 1980 of Acute Pulmonary Ademaand Parkinsons.

Of course, very little of this tells me anything about his life, what he loved, what he thought of the life he led, how it must have pained him not to be able to return to Cuba in his later years. Still, every day when I see his headstone, I try to imagine those things, to fill in the other parts of life, the ones that don’t end up on paper.

UPDATE: JANUARY 27, 2025

Since I first published this on my old site, several people have reached out with knowledge about Andrew. Just a few weeks ago Joseph Gutierrez’ daughter emailed about the story. Here’s more of what I know

The first person to contact me was the late Blair Tindall, the author of Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music, a book later adapted into the Amazon series starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Lola Kirke. She wrote to me in 2018, five years before her passing, while she was cleaning out her mother’s house. She told me that her father, who had been a history professor at UNC, had bought two plots from the Gutierrez family (she described them as the “Gutierrez sisters”) at some point during the 70s or 80s. She wrote about her father, “Anyway, he’s buried in the middle of all the Latinos who were in CH when there really, really were none.”

Because of her email, I looked at Andrew’s story again and found that he had two sons who graduated from UNC, which apparently had a sizable Cuban population among its students. There were exchange programs with the University of Havana prior to 1960, including faculty. There were also Spanish language entertainers on campus. It wouldn't have been unusual for a Cuban family in Chapel Hill to send their kids to a segregated university. And as far as I can tell, Cubans were treated the same as whites and not subject to legal segregation (though of course I could be wrong).

Other relatives of Andrew have written, explaining that many of his children and grandchildren attended UNC. One briefly touched on his exile from Cuba, wondering “what it was like for him to realize he could never go home again or to be working as an engineer for the Washington DC Sewage and Water Board during McCarthyism and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

Ireland Bound