Anthony Rios Dies; Built Latino Political Power

Anthony P. Rios, a trailblazing activist who helped Latinos find their political voice and nurtured leaders such as former Rep. Edward Roybal and the late Cesar Chavez, died Wednesday of complications of pneumonia at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Baldwin Park. He was 84.

Rios was a founder of the Community Service Organization, a statewide group formed in 1947 to mobilize Mexican Americans for community action.

The group’s first success was electing Roybal to the Los Angeles City Council in 1949, making him the first Mexican American in 70 years to serve on that body.

A labor organizer before he devoted himself to political action, Rios was remembered Friday as a dedicated veteran of battles to build what he often referred to as “barrio power.”

“He was a pioneer in helping empower the Eastside community,” said Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles), Roybal’s daughter. “What made him effective was he really believed in what he was doing. It wasn’t about Tony Rios. It was about empowering the community.”

Born in Calexico, Rios began organizing when he was a lemon picker in Santa Paula in the early 1930s. His co-workers wanted help to survive during the winter when there was no work, and chose him to represent their interests before the growers.

Although he was only a teenager, the other workers looked to him for leadership because “he was the only one who was bilingual,” said Rosie Vasquez, Rios’ wife of 26 years. “He got the company to deduct some of their wages for a fund for workers to tap during the winter months, to get a doctor or to buy food.”

Later, Rios was involved in successful efforts to unionize the steel industry in Los Angeles.

In 1947, after he had moved to Los Angeles, he joined a small group of Boyle Heights residents who wanted to improve their community. Discovering that the route to success was through the ballot box, they began registering voters, eventually signing up enough new voters to create 15 new precincts, Vasquez said.

The group supported Roybal in his first attempt to capture a City Council seat in 1947. Rios said in a 1972 interview that Roybal’s narrow loss--by about 300 votes--galvanized the group to start a permanent organization to spur more Latinos to be politically active.

The result was the Community Service Organization, which over the past 50 years has sprouted 30 chapters across the state, mainly in rural towns.

Cesar Chavez was an organizer for the group for 10 years before starting the United Farm Workers in 1962. Other leaders who emerged from its ranks include UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta, former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, Assemblyman Gil Cedillo and Los Angeles school board member Vicky Castro.

Reynoso, who was active in the group’s El Centro chapter and was statewide vice president in the 1960s, described the Community Service Organization as the seminal political action group for Latinos in the 1950s and 1960s. “The United Farm Workers was basically a spinoff” of the Community Service Organization, which was the training ground for the leadership of the farm workers union, he said.

Reynoso called Rios “an exceptional person who provided great leadership at a time when it was desperately needed, particularly in the Latino community.”

The Community Service Organization eventually branched out from an initial emphasis on voter registration and local elections to build an infrastructure for political action, including development of a community credit union, a cooperative buying club and low-income housing.

Although many of its early leaders moved on to other arenas, Rios remained single-mindedly dedicated to building the group he helped establish. He regarded the development of Latinos’ political power as a long-term process.

In the 1970s, as the Chicano power movement spread, he took pride in the awakening of a younger generation of activists. But he also was critical of some of the more militant activists’ tactics, particularly what he saw as a tendency to “just demonstrate and talk tough.”

“Youth sometimes acts with impatience,” he told an interviewer in 1974. “They simply have to learn about the long, slow process of building barrio power and learning how to use it.”

Rios is survived by his wife, brother Armando, five children, 10 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

*

Services are scheduled for 10:30 a.m. today at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Church, 820 N. Garfield Ave., Montebello.

MORE OBITUARIES: A26