From Tucson activist to congressional leader: The late Raúl Grijalva's career

In the early 1970s, he was a member of La Raza Unida, a Chicano-based political party born out of dissatisfaction with the issues emphasized by Democrats and Republicans. He was an early supporter of grape and lettuce boycotts organized by the legendary California activist Cesar Chavez and his collaborator Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers.

Grijalva and his wife Mona were also early supporters of the Manzo Area Council, an anti-poverty and immigrant rights activist group headquartered in Barrio Hollywood on Tucson’s west side. He was a frequent critic of the Vietnam War and he and other Chicano activists at the time helped spark a student walkout at Pueblo High School in the late 1960s. 

A student who joined that walkout was Isabel Garcia, today a leading Tucson activist for immigrant rights, back then a high school student and daughter of a union organizer and Democratic precinct committeeman, Rodolfo Garcia, who later helped nudge Grijalva into electoral politics.

After the walkout, Isabel Garcia later joined her father, along with Grijalva, fellow Latino activist Sal Baldenegro and others, in picketing the Pickwick Inn, a longstanding south-side restaurant that was one of the last remaining segregated Tucson restaurants. Later, the restaurant relented and eventually got new ownership by a Latino family, becoming the Silver Saddle Steakhouse.

Grijalva was also an early supporter of MECHA, short for Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, a group formed in 1968 when 10,000 or so students walked out of a dozen East Los Angeles high schools in protest of what they deemed a racist educational system.

The group’s causes spread to Southern Arizona, when an unrelated Hispanic group at the University of Arizona submitted a list of demands to UA administrators calling for increased recruitment and retention efforts of Hispanic students. That group and dozens of other Hispanic organizations merged into a local MECCA chapter, then-Arizona Daily Star columnist Ernesto Portillo Jr. wrote in 1998.

In the 1960s and '70s, "we were dealing with the issue of representation for all Chicanos," Grijalva, by then a Democratic Pima County supervisor, told Portillo. "Almost everything we did was confrontational and loud, but it was a means to an end and we got things done."

So diverse and so fragmented were the various activist movements back then that he first felt they seemed unrelated and disjointed, Grijalva, by then a congressman, told a Tucson Weekly interviewer in 2006.

"But suddenly, it was like a light went on,” Grijalva recalled. “I realized that the struggles of the UFW were related to the other movements. People were trying to make the world a better place for themselves, for their families and for others. The more I read, the more I understood the significance of the struggle and the rightness of it all."

Richard Miranda, a former Tucson city manager and police chief, was a freshman at Sunnyside High School when Grijalva was a senior there in the 1960s, and got to know him somewhat when the two were UA students.

“I’d see him take leadership roles on issues and that made a big impression on me,” Miranda recalled shortly after Grijalva's March 13 death, at age 77, of complications from lung cancer treatment while serving his 12th term in Congress. “We were from the same neighborhood. He seemed so articulate and intelligent on these issues.

“Watching him and just observing him take a leadership role in the community really inspired me. ... It was amazing to me — a kid from Sunnyside becoming a congressman,” Miranda recalled.

"Raúl was there every moment"

Grijalva in 1972 ran for the governing board of Tucson Unified School District and lost, but ran again two years later and won. One of his prime missions was clear: to improve the educational lot of Chicanos and other Mexican-Americans.

A Latino hadn’t sat on the TUSD board for 23 years before Grijalva was elected, the Arizona-Sonora News reported in 2017. Prior to his arrival, "there was never a Chicano perspective” at the district or on the board, Margo Cowan, who was director of the Manzo Area Council, recalled. ”Chicano and Chicana students were seen as statistics. There was never, heaven forbid, Chicano studies, or Mexican holidays, or an understanding of what the holidays stood for. There was never Spanish spoken in school.

“He was the first one who came from (the Mexican-American) community and lived the experiences of community,” Cowan said.

He joined a school board waist-deep in controversy and litigation over school desegregation — litigation that only recently has been settled. While he did for a time support busing at certain schools to achieve racial balance, Grijalva’s longer-lasting contribution was to push successfully to create “magnet schools” of high enough quality that whites and Latinos would want to attend them.

He also pushed successfully to create programs that would help lower-achieving Latinos, African-Americans, Native Americans and other ethnic minorities improve their educational outcomes, recalled Tom Castillo, who served on the board with Grijalva during the 1980s.

“We kept working on it to get the administration to solve that. That is a never ending task,” Castillo recalled.

Board member Grijalva jumped hard and publicly into the immigration issue in 1976, when the U.S. Attorney’s Office raided Manzo Area Council headquarters and filed charges against the council for “transporting, harboring and assisting” undocumented immigrants entering the U.S., Garcia recalled. The charges were later dropped.

“We went and picketed the prosecutor’s house. Grijalva was there on the scene,” recalled Garcia, now a leader of the activist group Derechos Humanos. “Raúl was there every moment. He was a champion of immigrants’ rights from the beginning.”

"He put all those pieces together"

Joining the Pima County Board of Supervisors in 1989, Grijalva expanded his horizons to issues of zoning and preservation of desert habitat from development. Through the middle 1990s, he was usually one of two votes on the five-member board to oppose a wave of rezonings that opened up much of the ironwood forest on the Tucson area's northwest side to subdivisions of four houses per acre and up.

Later, when he was joined on the board by more sympathetic colleagues, he was a prime mover in crafting the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan to buy and preserve hundreds of thousands of acres of desert on the county’s fringes. His most noteworthy contribution, however, may have been his efforts to save Canoa Ranch south of Green Valley, where he was raised as a child and later mastered the art of compromise.

During World War II, Canoa Ranch participated in the U.S. government’s Bracero Program, which allowed the owners to employ immigrant Mexican workers to help offset the loss of American ranch labor serving in the armed forces. One of the workers, Raúl Noriega Grijalva, lived there. His son, Raúl M. Grijalva, was born in the U.S. in February 1948 and lived at the ranch until he was about 5 years old.

Fifty-one years later, Grijalva led a successful effort to block a big developer’s plan to build 6,100 homes, golf courses and a hotel on the ranch's 6,000 acres. But in the end, he accepted a compromise deal in 2001 to allow 2,000 homes on part of the ranch while the county bought the remaining 4,800 acres — a deal that ended a six-year dispute.

Grijalva said he decided to compromise because he feared more delay could allow a future board to approve a bigger development, or let Green Valley incorporate and approve one.

Since then, the county has steadily restored the ranch’s historic buildings and drilled a well to bring back a recreational lake that existed during the 1930s and ‘40s. It's now called the Raul M. Grijalva Canoa Ranch Conservation Park.

“He understood how to put together a coalition of environmentalists, homeowners, men of faith and labor. That coalition has served many many people, not just him. But he put all those pieces together,” recalled Christina McVie, a longtime Tucson-area activist who worked closely with Grijalva for decades.

Something she most admired about Grijalva was that he was not like many politicians who tell their constituents what they want to hear, she said.

“He would come up to me and say ‘Christina, you’re not going to like this. But here’s the deal.’”

"You can achieve great things"

On entering Congress, his vision expanded again, particularly in the conservation arena.

Grijalva quickly took up the not always popular cause of fighting global warming, and in his last years strongly backed President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which funneled tends of billions of dollars into programs to build or grant incentives to sell heat pumps, electric vehicles, solar energy farms and household solar panels, to name a few.

The Tucson congressman spent 17 years successfully pushing to create a national monument north and south of Grand Canyon National Park to preserve 917,000 acres of public lands, and countless tribal artifacts and other cultural resources. Biden designated the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in 2023, over objections of some companies that had wanted some of the land opened to uranium mining..

"What Grijalva showed us is that with persistence, fortitude and some degree of patience, you can achieve great things," said Ethan Aumack, executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation group that pushed for the monument's creation.

Grijalva also fought hard against the proposed Rosemont Mine in the Santa Rita Mountains, which was later stopped in federal court, and a separate proposal by Resolution Copper to build a larger copper mine at Oak Flat near Superior. While the Resolution proposal remains active and the Rosemont Mine has morphed into the Copper World Mine to Rosemont's west, Grijalva did have a major conservation success in getting the Great American Outdoors Act passed during the Biden Administration.

That act for the first time provided a guaranteed annual source of $900 million in federal cash for land acquisition efforts through the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund. It also has provided hundreds of billions of dollars annually for improving infrastructure such as  water pipes, visitor center upgrades, bridge repairs and the like.

At the same time, Grijalva pushed hard to get money funneled into his district to build infrastructure, recalled Miranda and Ana Ma, who was chief of staff during Grijalva's first six years in Congress.

"He was very instrumental in getting the streetcar to Tucson," recalled Miranda, noting that a streetcar stop across from the Mercado San Augustin Plaza was named after him.

Grijalva obtained money for a new, $400 million port of entry for the city of Douglas on the Mexican border whose construction will be starting soon, Ma said. He also helped obtain money to upgrade the often damaged and leaky Nogales International Outfall Interceptor, an 8.5-mile wastewater pipeline from the Mexican border to the Nogales International Wastewater Treatment Plant in the U.S.

He also helped get federal money to upgrade water infrastructure in Tolleson near Phoenix at his district's northwestern edge, Ma said.

Speaking on a personal note, Miranda recalled that in August 2015, his father-in-law Tony Figueroa was in ill health and wasn't expected to live much longer. When family members looked through Figueroa's old military records, they learned he was supposed to have received two medals for his Navy service on Midway Island during World War II. But when asked about the medals, Figueroa told the family he never received them, Miranda said.

"We contacted Raúl’s office about the matter. He looked into it and the Navy acknowledged that the medals were never served. Raúl advocated for the medals to be served to my father-in-law. And when they were received Raúl himself came to a luncheon we held for my father-in-law, and pinned the medals on him," Miranda said.

Four months later, Figueroa died.