Rep. Raúl Grijalva sits down with The Arizona Republic
Rep. Raúl Grijalva sits down with The Arizona Republic to discuss everything from the environment to house relations.
Arizona Republic
Rep. Raúl Manuel Grijalva, D-Ariz., the son of a Mexican immigrant who rose to the halls of Congress in a public-service career that stretched more than 40 years, died Thursday. He was 77.
A former radical who was unapologetically liberal and often blunt, Grijalva was a fixture of Tucson politics, first as a school board member in the 1970s, then as a Pima County supervisor in the 1990s. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2002 and went on to serve 11 full terms, making him one of the longest-tenured members in Arizona’s history.
Grijalva is survived by his wife, Ramona, and their three daughters.
Grijalva announced he was undergoing treatment for cancer in April 2024. He took time away from Capitol Hill while undergoing treatment. He ceded his position as the ranking member of the House’s Natural Resources Committee when Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., who is about 15 years Grijalva’s junior, geared up to challenge him for the job.
Grijalva continued to miss votes through the beginning of 2025, as President Donald Trump was starting his second term. But his recriminations of the Republican president kept flowing, accusing him of being “on the side of special interests and xenophobes” and putting “billionaires first.”
During his career, Grijalva championed immigrants’ rights, environmental protection, expanded health care and public education. It was a progressive agenda that usually kept him on the losing end of debates, especially in a state that tilted Republican most of his career, but it was an intentional effort to push the policy conversation to the left.
“When you’re in the minority party, you know your life is to be an irritant (to the majority party), but a smart one,” Grijalva said in an April 2013 interview with the Arizona Republic. “I’m not just going to symbolically vote no. I’m going to offer an alternative, try to bring my best game and go down with the fight.”
Electorally, Grijalva almost never lost and didn’t have a truly competitive race in his congressional career. The closest scrapes he had were both due to controversies of his own making.
In 2010, Grijalva called for a boycott of Arizona in response to Senate Bill 1070, the state’s immigration-enforcement law later gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court. That fall, he won just over 50% of the vote.
Grijalva also survived a House Ethics Committee review of allegations that he created a hostile work environment for at least one of his staffers, in part because of what they called his frequent drunkenness. That complaint led to a secret $48,000 payout to the staffer in 2015 that only became publicly known two years later.
Grijalva maintained he had done nothing wrong.
“You know where he stands,” Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, who represents California’s Central Valley farm region, said in a 2011 interview with the Republic. “He doesn’t put a finger in the air to see which way the wind blows. There’s no bull with him. That’s very unusual in Washington.”
Grijalva was born in 1948 in Canoa Ranch, south of Tucson, to an immigrant father who came to the United States as part of the Bracero program that employed Mexican workers on American farms. His mother was from Ajo and didn’t speak English.
He graduated from Sunnyside High School in 1967 at a time of roiling resentment about the plight of Hispanics, most visibly led by Cesar Chavez, the activist founder of the United Farm Workers Union.
Grijalva acknowledged feeling guilt as a teen about his family’s heritage that evolved into a need to take action.
“I think it kept building and building,” Grijalva said in a 2009 interview with the Center for Immigration Studies. “The first reaction was anger. The first reaction was to get even with whoever is doing this. And at the time it was racial.”
In 1970, he was part of a sometimes-violent movement in Tucson to create a “people’s park” from a public golf course in a Latino neighborhood. The City Council relented, giving Grijalva a sense of what was possible.
“It gave me a political backbone,” he told the Arizona Daily Star in 1999.
Grijalva was a community organizer and was active in Raza Unida Party, the 1970s movement that promoted Chicano pride and defended civil rights for Mexican-Americans. He ran for the Tucson school board in 1972 and lost.
Afterward, Grijalva began moderating his message. He won a seat on the school board in 1974 and remained there until 1986.
He helped lead efforts that prompted the city of Tucson to expand services to the south and west sides of town and construct neighborhood service centers such as El Rio, El Pueblo and Fred Archer. He directed the El Pueblo Neighborhood Center from 1975 to 1986.
During that period, he also came to grips with a drinking problem. In 1985, Grijalva pleaded guilty in a drunken-driving case and said his arrest had made him realize that his “drinking was going beyond social drinking.”
He spent 12 days in an alcohol-abuse program in California.
Grijalva left the school board and returned to school, working as the assistant dean of Hispanic student affairs at the University of Arizona. He received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the school in 1987.
In 1989, he was elected to the Pima County Board of Supervisors, where he served until his successful 2002 bid for Congress.
In Washington, Grijalva quickly established himself as a standard-bearer for the left wing of the Democratic Party.
He was co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the most liberal group of lawmakers on Capitol Hill, and a senior member of the House Natural Resources Committee, where he battled mining companies that wanted to develop uranium mines near the Grand Canyon and a huge copper mine near Superior.
He used the position to lead efforts to preserve the Sonoran Desert, especially along the Gila and San Pedro rivers and Cienega Creek.
After Democrats retook control of the House in the 2018 elections, Grijalva became chairman of the committee.
He also served on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, where he helped increase funding for preschool programs for the children of migrant farmworkers and pushed for increases in the minimum wage and in universal health care.
Grijalva opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a consistent critic of then-President George W. Bush. In a sign of his willingness to compromise on immigration issues, Grijalva met with and reached an accord with Bush on ill-fated comprehensive reform legislation in 2006.
Grijalva viewed President Donald Trump with thinly veiled scorn from the start. He skipped Trump’s inaugural and supported impeaching Trump two years before the House actually did. He regularly disparaged Trump, who called for construction of a border wall paid for by Mexico.
After a court stopped Trump from using military funds to build sections of new barriers, Grijalva said, “Trump is not an emperor who can flout our laws and do whatever he wants. … This ruling is a victory for border residents who are fighting against Trump’s monument to his racist policies.”
Grijalva remained a progressive voice when his party regained control of the presidency in 2020. He joined early calls for a ceasefire following the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by the Palestinian militant group Hamas. And he was one of the first federal lawmakers to publicly urge President Joe Biden to end his 2024 reelection campaign, at a time when many Democrats were hesitant to touch the subject.
“What he needs to do is shoulder the responsibility for keeping that seat — and part of that responsibility is to get out of this race,” Grijalva said.
If Grijalva’s language could be sharp, he was open to introspection. He noted regret, for example, in calling for a boycott after Arizona passed SB 1070.
“I should have thought about that more,” Grijalva said in a 2011 interview with the Republic. “I should have listened to the people who told me there would be consequences.”
When asked in April 2013 how he hoped to be remembered, Grijalva said he was a hard worker who was persistent in fighting for what he believed in.
“I hope people know that I never gave up,” he said.
The Republic Washington Bureau contributed to this report.