It was the summer of 1964, and Fred Ross Jr. was a 16-year-old who had tagged along with his father to Guadalupe, an unincorporated community in Arizona, home to Yaqui and Mexican Americans. The village had long been ignored by elected officials and lacked the most basic of services, with no streetlights, sewers or paved roads. Fred Ross Sr. was there to organize residents into a political force as he had already done throughout California. Although Fred Jr.’s father would become a legendary figure in the field of community and labor organizing — known above all for recruiting and training Cesar Chavez — at the time Fred Jr., his youngest son, had only a vague notion of how his father spent his days.
“I knew he was helping poor people,” Fred Ross Jr. recalled several years ago. During the summer of 1964, he saw his father knock on doors, listen to concerns, hold meetings and lead voter registration drives. Soon an organization was created; a year later, the group had secured funding to launch a credit union, open a dental clinic and train community health workers. “I watched as people who were once shy now peppered politicians with questions,” Fred Jr. recalled about that summer. “That is when it crystallized how significant this work was.”
