Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,688

This is the grave of Edward Roybal.

Born in 1916 in Pecos, New Mexico, he came from one of these old New Mexican families that made claims to being there from the very beginning of Spanish settlement. This is a huge thing in New Mexico, where people have long tried to claim pure Spanish heritage as a way of claiming whiteness, a phenomenon that goes back to the late 19th century. It’s usually bullshit. But people hold this deeply, wanting it to be clear that they aren’t Indian and they aren’t Mexican either. Well, Roybal’s father worked on the railroad and was blacklisted after a strike in 1922, so he took the family west to Los Angeles and that’s where Roybal grew up. His son was a good student, graduated from high school in 1934, worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps for awhile, and then went to college at UCLA.

After college, Roybal got a law degree from Southwestern Law. But he didn’t go into the law. He went into public health. He got a job in 1942 with the California Tuberculosis Association, doing mostly educational outreach, which is of course critical with tuberculosis. He was in the Army for a bit during the war. Then he returned to public health work, heading health education for the Los Angeles County Tuberculosis and Health Association. While there, he met an organizer named Fred Ross. That guy would really change the world. Perhaps the greatest acolyte of Saul Alinsky, Ross brought a new organizing model into southern California. His most famous recruits were Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, but they were far from the only ones. He recruited Roybal as well to run the Community Service Organization. This banal name served as some distraction from the kind of deep community-based organizing Ross wanted to see happen in these impoverished and disempowered communities.

In fact, Roybal was among Ross’ first two major recruits, along with Antonio Rios. They officially founded the CSO in 1947. A lot of what the CSO did in its early years was get out the vote efforts. Voting among Mexican-Americans in California was exceedingly low and they needed people to understand that change could take place, but they would have to engage in the political process to understand how to do that. Voting was nowhere near the only thing or even the most important thing they could do, but they absolutely needed to vote. What this also did was make Roybal a community leader and so when he decided to run for office himself, he had a real strong base.

Roybal ran for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council in 1947 and came in third. But with two years of CSO work behind him, he won that seat the next time he ran, in 1949. Roybal later remembered at the first council meeting, he was introduced as “our new Mexican councilman who also speaks Mexican.” Speaks Mexican. OK. Thing was, Roybal didn’t even speak Spanish. So he considered part of his mission just teaching white people the complexities of the Mexican American population.

Roybal was just great on the Council. He became a total political force on the Council, really the only representative for the largely Mexican east side of the city. He stood up for what was right too. He was the only person on the council to vote against anti-communist resolutions. He fought hard against the eviction of Mexican Americans to create Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine. His biggest policy position was low-income housing for his community. He also opposed police brutality and we know how committed the LAPD was to beating the living shit out of Black and Mexican folks. His biggest enemy was the vile LAPD chief William Parker and if you are on the side of justice, that’s a great enemy to have.

Roybal developed a taste for higher office, but this proved harder. He was a staunch civil rights supporter in a state that really did not like that. He ran for lieutenant governor in 1954 and won the nomination but the Republican beat him pretty easily. He ran for the County Board of Supervisors in 1958, but lost a very tight and bitter race. But in 1962, Roybal took his local popularity and ran for Congress. He won and would serve in Congress for the next 30 years. Incidentally, the next time a Mexican American would be on the Los Angeles City Council was 1985. That’s kind of wild.

Roybal wasn’t really a massive leader in Congress. He was a good solid liberal who did whatever he could for his community. One thing that was very important about him–he was the first Latino from California to go to Congress since 1879, which is almost amazing given the large Mexican population there. But it goes to show just how disempowered the Mexican population was for a century.

Early in his time in Congress, Roybal served on a variety of committees, trying to find a home that made sense for him. Eventually, that became the Appropriations Committee and he would become a pretty powerful member of that pretty powerful committee. He did a lot of work to push money toward the disabled, the elderly, and Mexican-Americans. He sponsored a lot of legislation that was quite progressive, meaning not that much of it passed, but he tried. A lot of the best work was fighting Reagan’s cuts to social programs. He is the person most responsible for ensuring continued government funding for Meals on Wheels when Reagan wanted that slashed in the 80s. He also restored veterans preference in government hiring when people opposed that. I’ve always been pretty mixed on that issue, having seen the kind of incompetents the National Park Service has to hire over far more qualified people based solely on veteran status, but veterans certainly should get a break so whatever, fine. Not surprisingly, given these policy positions, he became the chair of the House Select Committee on Aging and that remains a huge part of his legacy.

Roybal did get caught up in scandal in the late 70s, during the Koreagate deal, when he did not report a gift from a Korean lobbyist and then testified that he did not remember meeting the guy. He had enough influence to avoid strong punishment from the House but he was reprimanded. It made no difference to his constituents. They reelected him and continued to do so until he retired in 1993. Then his daughter Lucille Roybal-Allard ran to take over part of his district (it had been split up after the 90 census) and she would serve in Congress another thirty years herself, only retiring in 2023.

There is today the Edward Roybal Institute on Aging at USC.

Roybal died in 2005, at the age of 89. The cause was pneumonia, or just being 89 years old.

Edward Roybal is buried in Calvary Cemetery, East Los Angeles, California.

If you would like this series to visit other chairs of the House Select Committee on Aging, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. William Randall is in Independence, Missouri and Claude Pepper is in Tallahassee, Florida. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.