Biography
Identified as married and a member of the International Labor Defense and United Mine Workers of America. He is not identified with the separately recorded Chicago activist José López. Page 12 individually lists this person among three women and one man held on the accusation of aiding a prisoner to escape, under $500 bond, in the Gallup proceedings of 1935. This four-person list is separate from the murder defendants. The source does not establish an individual arrest day, conviction, actual bond release or duration. Source: Louis Colman, Night Riders in Gallup, International Labor Defense, third printing June 1935, https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/pamphlets/night-riders.pdf
The April 20, 1935 Daily Worker named Jose G. Lopez among the Gallup defendants facing first-degree murder proceedings in Santa Fe after the early-April confrontation at the courthouse. The April 19 report described a preliminary hearing, with forty-five defendants appearing and three unavailable through wounds or illness. The report establishes charges and hearing participation, but does not individually establish continued physical detention for every person in its roster. No complete term or exact arrest date is established. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n095-NAT-apr-20-1935-DW-Q.pdf#page=1
Page 1’s May 10 Santa Fe dispatch individually identifies this Gallup defendant as $500 bail for aiding a prisoner to escape; active in UMWA Local 1721. It describes fourteen workers held in the state penitentiary death-house area awaiting trial, ten on first-degree murder accusations and four on escape accusations. Pretrial placement in that area does not mean a death sentence was imposed. Bail set does not establish bail posting; later dispositions in the existing record remain distinct. Page 8 calls for trade-union defense. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n113-NAT-may-11-1935-DW-Q.pdf
Page 1 reports actual release on bond on Wednesday, May 22. The individually specified amount is $500. Pallares is separately described as under deportation proceedings. The four named escape-charge defendants include an unexpanded “Mrs. Avitia”; her given name is not assumed. This bond release is a custody endpoint, not acquittal or termination of proceedings. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n125-NAT-may-25-1935-DW-Q.pdf
Page 8 individually lists this defendant among four others facing the charge of aiding and abetting a prisoner’s escape after seven murder defendants were acquitted but remanded on that separate accusation. This corroborates the existing distinct escape-charge cohort. The $2,000 bond in this paragraph is explicitly assigned to the seven remanded men, not individually to these four; their existing earlier bail figures are not overwritten. No verdict, physical release or duration for this individual is reported. Source: https://newspapers.swco.ttu.edu/bitstreams/34268242-ac0d-472e-8d03-7eb5b704a2c0/download
The Gallup biographical installment identifies Lopez as Juan Ochoa’s stepfather: after his first wife and two children died of smallpox at Mimbres in 1914, he married Ochoa’s widowed mother in 1915. It describes ranch and mine work, illness from Gamerco working conditions, participation in the 1933 miners’ strike and the April 1, 1935 transition of the Southwestern local into the United Mine Workers. It expressly says Lopez faced only the aiding-escape charge, not murder, and reports his belief that kinship to Ochoa explained the prosecution. The reported age does not establish a birth date. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n250-NAT-oct-18-1935-DW-Q.pdf#page=5
