Oscar Gutierrez is Controller of one of Indiana’s wealthiest cities and has an impressive record of service in the U.S. military. And yet, as a child, he never wanted to come to America. His childhood in Toluca, a bustling town near Mexico City, was comfortably middle class, thanks to the money his father—a beneficiary of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 under President Ronald Reagan—sent back from a job cooking in a Los Angeles restaurant.
Tragically, in the winter of 1990, everything changed for Gutierrez and his family. His mother died suddenly, and the 11-year-old boy and his two younger brothers were whisked across the border on tourist visas to live with their father.
The boys began school in southeastern Los Angeles, but shaken by the Rodney King riots, their father moved the family to Rockford, Illinois. “It wasn’t until we moved there that I realized what it really truly meant to be a minority,” Gutierrez recalls. “I could count on one hand how many brown people I knew.” Bussed across town to attend a school in an affluent, predominately white school district, Gutierrez struggled with bullying, learned to suppress his accent, and gave up playing soccer in an attempt to fit in. This urge to assimilate—and to have the same clothes, sneakers, and backpacks as his well-off friends—led the 14-year-old to get his first job, washing dishes in the same restaurant where his father worked as a cook.
He kept the job until he was 17, at which point, his father—now a permanent resident—filed the necessary paperwork to get his son a green card. It was a game-changer for Gutierrez: Legal residency opened the door to military service, and within two months of receiving his papers, he had enlisted in the United States Air Force.
He served for four years, received a college education on the GI Bill, and then re-enlisted, working as a budget manager for a Department of Defense agency. The military helped Gutierrez fast-track his citizenship application; it also helped him find his calling as a financial manager. He took dozens of accounting courses during his second tour of duty, impressed his senior officers, and was soon busy giving financial briefings to senior executives and other top military officials.
Gutierrez took those skills with him when he returned to civilian life as a financial manager for the federal government and then as a city controller—first for the city of Lawrence, where he turned a big deficit into an impressive surplus, and later as the first controller of the newly incorporated city of Fishers, Indiana.