Coming Out Swinging

Growing up in Chicago the son of immigrant parents from Mexico, his mother from Guanajuato, his father from Nuevo Laredo, Quintanilla recalls battling discrimination from an early age. Kids were ridiculed for speaking Spanish in school, he says, and white boys would lift his sister's skirts and taunt her. He became a member of a Latino street gang, and later, a leader in the student Chicano movement responsible for walk-outs in schools across the country.

In the '80s, he was executive director of a Chicago nonprofit organization that provided employment services to low-income residents. According to court records, Quintanilla became embroiled in a kickback scheme involving false funding requests to a Chicago brewing company for community sponsorships. In 1990, Quintanilla was convicted on five counts of conspiring to violate federal racketeering laws and transporting stolen property and sentenced to six months in prison. He maintains he was tricked by a co-defendant who devised the scam.

In the years that followed, he worked as a music promoter, continued his activist efforts, moved to Dallas and began importing Mexican handicrafts. The spacious Oak Cliff office he shares with his wife is filled with hundreds of intricately painted pots set out in preparation for an exhibition, turquoise masks and postcards of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.

To him, today's crackdown on illegal immigrants is an extension of the racism he fought as a kid. "It's just a continuation of a national psyche that's anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant," he said over lunch in October. "Farmers Branch is just another battle in a long fight."

In recent years, two of his business ventures involving Mexican vendors—one the Garibaldi Bazaar flea market off of Interstate 30, the other a proposed bus depot—ended with numerous parties suing one another. In the bazaar case, Quintanilla wound up with a settlement of more than $1 million. A search under his name turns up five district court lawsuits in the past five years in which he was either plaintiff or defendant. In 2003, he sued the city of Dallas for $1 million, claiming officials killed a deal to turn the Bronco Bowl in Oak Cliff into a Mexican-style market because they didn't want a business catering to Hispanics. He ultimately dropped the lawsuit.

A year later, Quintanilla made headlines again when he complained that a routine $25,000 contract for production of a county brochure should have been awarded to a minority firm, and a shouting match between outgoing County Judge Margaret Keliher and County Commissioner John Wiley Price ensued. Several months later, he complained in news reports that police unfairly singled him out after a summer fiesta at a market he owned in Irving drew noise complaints from neighbors.

Quintanilla concedes that he can be combative, but he counters that he's achieved results."I think if you look at my life, I've done good," he says. "I'm proud of myself, my family's proud of me, and most of all my community is proud of me."