Biography
Esiquio Navarro was one of the Gallup, New Mexico defendants of 1935 — a National Miners' Union leader jailed in the roundup — in the mass prosecution that followed the 4 April eviction riot. On 4 April 1935 a crowd of Gallup, New Mexico coal miners protesting the eviction of a National Miners' Union family clashed with deputies; Sheriff Carmichael was killed and two miners shot dead. Under martial law some six hundred were rounded up, dozens held for deportation, and ten miners — most of them Mexican-born — were charged with first-degree murder, facing the electric chair. At the Aztec trial in October 1935 three were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to forty-five to sixty years; the rest were acquitted, several only to be seized for deportation. The Gallup case became one of the ILD's great Southwestern defenses.
Printed Exiquio Navarro, the unemployed leader is identified as the prisoner who escaped on April 4 in the Gallup confrontation. This corroborates actual prior detention and a break in physical custody; the issue does not establish a complete duration or a later release from any subsequent case. Daily Worker, October 7, 1935, original PDF page 5. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n240b-NAT-oct-07-1935-DW-Q.pdf#page=5
Page 8 identifies him with the other of Exiquio Navarro and Victor Campos as the two eviction-proceeding defendants who escaped in the April 4 Gallup confrontation and had not been recaptured when this report was written. Exiquio is the printed variant of the existing Esiquio record. The source separately says the sheriff and two demonstrators were killed; the escaped defendants are not mistakenly treated as those two deaths. No later recapture or final discharge is established. Source: https://newspapers.swco.ttu.edu/bitstreams/34268242-ac0d-472e-8d03-7eb5b704a2c0/download
Contemporary Gallup chronology
The 1935 International Labor Defense pamphlet names “Exiquio Navarro” with Victor Campos and Campos’s wife as having been arrested on a breaking-and-entering accusation after neighbors reopened the evicted household’s home. It places that initial arrest before their April 4, 1935 hearing, when the sheriff was taking the prisoners out of court. The pamphlet does not identify the earlier booking day, the end of that detention or an individual later murder-case outcome for Navarro. This initial eviction-related detention must not be assumed to begin on the hearing day or merged automatically with a later roundup case.
Source: Louis Colman, Night Riders in Gallup, International Labor Defense, 1935, pp. 8–9. Existing custody dates and counters are unchanged.
An eyewitness account attributed to the Liga Obrero investigating committee describes Navarro being tried for breaking a lock and restoring an evicted family’s furniture to a house owned by State Senator Clarence Vogel. Workers were barred from the courtroom; the account says deputies took Navarro through the rear while the crowd rushed into the alley, after which shooting began. The newspaper prints Exequio Navarro. Its allegations about the sheriff’s death and police responsibility are advocacy testimony, not judicial findings, and supply no final discharge date.
