Downtown Phoenix Voices was an ongoing series of profiles on the many diverse and inspirational voices in the downtown Phoenix community that the Downtown Devil has decided to bring back. To read the previous installment in the series, click here.
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A crowd of 200,000 people gathered at the grounds of the State Fair one day in 2006, the largest demonstration in Arizona’s history. In the midst of the throng, Phoenix civil-rights activist Roberto Reveles looked around, only able to rotate his head. His arms were pressed firmly to his sides by others’ bodies. He felt like he was in a pressure cooker.
At the top of a State Fair building, state officers stood with automatic weapons — a sign of how fraught the event was with potential for danger.
“I kept hoping no one would be foolish and throw a firecracker,” Reveles said. “Anything could have a created a horrible mob scene.”
Reveles took charge with other leaders from immigrant-support organizations Unidos en Arizona and Somos America/We Are America and began the march. Watchers on rooftops applauded and cheered the marchers.
“I think that was one of the most challenging and most fulfilling events in my years of organizing, even though there are a number of other instances that were high-water marks,” Reveles said.
Fortunately, the event went off without any arrests or fights, and the neighborhood said the marchers left the grounds cleaner than they’d been before.
Reveles, who campaigned for Congress with Cesar Chavez, has spent his life championing the underdog. On Saturday, he received the Orgullo Award at the Stylos Awards event at the Pressroom for his contribution to the Latino community.
The award recognizes a lifetime of service to the community and his impact on increasing the quality of life for Latino families.
Reveles spent 24 years in Congress as a staffer, working alongside Arizona representatives Stewart Udall and Morris Udall. From there, he continued on to his second career with Homestake Mining Company, retiring to Arizona in 1992.
“I came home to find the horrible political environment had developed in Arizona against undocumented immigrants and in general against the Latino community,” Reveles said.
He joined the Arizona Hispanic Community Forum, where he set up a working committee on community empowerment. Its task was to work with the immigrant community and help immigrants develop their own organizing skills and leadership capacity through setting up their own committees, which led to Unidos en Arizona.
The organization brought many small community groups together at the height of anti-immigrant legislation that was being proposed not only in the state but at the federal level as well.
“We felt it was time for the immigrant community to illustrate the disastrous impact on the lives of the immigrants. They were afraid to go out,” Reveles said. “We would hear from ministers that said attendance at the churches was declining.”
Reveles, alongside Unidos en Arizona, organized the first of two big marches in Arizona. The first was in April 2006. Less than a month later, the march expanded in partnership with the larger coalition Somos America.
“The immigrant community needed to see there was other support for them in the general public,” Reveles said.
About 20,000 marchers turned out for the Unidos en Arizona march; the second, under Somos America, made history.
“It demonstrated that it is important for us to protect people’s right to peaceably assemble,” Reveles said.
From the demonstration came the commitment to engage in civil activities to empower people through the voting progress.
Reveles joined the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona as board president in 2010.
“I saw a very strong need for ACLU activity, so I joined and focused my energies on helping immigrant-related issues,” Reveles said.
Reveles encouraged the ACLU to reach out to the undocumented community and identify some of the civil-liberty issues that were developing there.
Alongside his work with the ACLU, Reveles volunteered to take water to the desert and taught citizenship classes.
Reveles left his position with the ACLU in 2013 due to exhaustion. His successor, Zenaido Quintana, said Reveles encouraged Quintana to be more involved in the union’s community outreach.
Quintana shares a similar background with Reveles, Quintana said.
“When you’re a kid, you don’t get a sense of discrimination or deprivation, but as you grow up, you find out there are some built-in discriminatory practices that kind of make it more difficult for poor kids, or poor Latino kids, to get an education,” Quintana said. “Both he and I broke out of that and got an education, so I identified a lot with some of his experiences.”
Today, Reveles has taken up the cause of rooting out injustices in the sheriff’s office in his home of Pinal County. In February, Reveles said, sheriff’s officers unjustly shot and killed a Mexican-American man who’d been joyriding with a relative’s car.
Reveles has been attending Pinal County Board of Supervisors meetings to speak to the public about the behavior of the sheriff’s office. Henry Wade, chair of the Pinal County Democratic Party, said Reveles has also helped move information between the Board of Supervisors and the party, which Reveles works closely with.
“He is a person that when he walks in the room, whether you saw him or not, you can feel his presence, especially when he is about to get up to speak,” Wade said. “He is an unassuming, humble man.”
Reveles continues in his retirement to fight for the Latino community and civil liberties for all.
“He is a very positive influence in the community, which comes of his sense of fair play — all people should have an opportunity to participate,” Wade said.
Contact the reporter at Melanie.Whyte@asu.edu
