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Those events were among the defining moments and symbols of a 55-year-old fight over the west side’s El Rio Golf Course that led to a major win for ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥â€™s burgeoning Chicano rights movement — with no little help from then-University of ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ student and activist Raúl Grijalva.

Grijalva, who died Thursday at 77 years old after a year-long battle with lung cancer, was among many activists and west side neighbors who successfully pushed ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ City Hall to set aside a healthy section of the golf course’s western edge as a park — now known as Joaquin Murrieta Park. Living on ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥â€™s south side but already active and steeped in west side issues, he both helped organize and marched in the effort to create the park.

He and his colleagues also persuaded city leaders to build the El Rio Neighborhood Center on a parking lot on the golf course. It was the first of many neighborhood centers to spring up in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ over the next few decades. The successes followed both a brief takeover of the golf course by activists and other neighbors, rallies and playful ceremonies both inside and outside the course and later, arrests of some participants.

It was not the first or last political cause Grijalva would embrace as a University of ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ student in his early 20s, before he made his first venture into electoral politics when he ran unsuccessfully for the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Unified School District governing board in 1972 and then successfully in 1974.

He had already worked in support of César Chávez’s United Farmworkers and demonstrated against the Vietnam War. Later, he would burn his draft card on the UA campus, recalled Lupe Castillo, a retired Pima Community College history professor and longtime friend who worked closely with Grijalva during his activist days.

Grijalva fought for bilingual education and other programs to better the schooling of Latinos who had been forbidden to speak Spanish at school during Grijalva’s elementary school years. He also got involved in a successful fight to save nearby Davis Elementary School west of downtown from closing, as the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Unified School District governing board was proposing. He also was an early activist in the fight for what he saw as the rights of undocumented immigrants.

To Sal Baldenegro, a Chicano activist in the 1960s and 70s who with Grijalva were among the leading organizers of the El Rio drive, the effort “was a historic phenomenon, a defining moment in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ history,â€� Baldenegro wrote in a column for the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Citizen shortly before the newspaper closed in March 2009.

“It proved a united community can indeed move City Hall. And it fundamentally changed the political landscape and dynamics of ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥,â€� Baldenegro wrote.

In 2012, Arnold Palacios, then executive director of ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Youth Development, a social service agency, told Star columnist Ernesto Portillo that the El Rio conflict “was the focal point of social justice for all us in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥.â€� He also marched on the golf course back in 1970.

But “in a way we didn’t see it as victories,� Castillo said of their successes at El Rio. “We saw it as a process we were going toward. We had the total sense of keeping our eyes on the prize that this is what we’ve done now to go forward,�

The next steps were Baldenegro’s unsuccessful run for the City Council’s West Side Ward 1 seat in 1971, and Grijalva’s efforts to win a seat on the TUSD board, she said.

“The idea was to open the possibility of leadership among Mexican-Americans,� Castillo said. “We didn’t see these things as victories and we didn’t see them as defeats. We saw it as part of the process of going forward.�

‘El Rio was the tip of the iceberg’

Baldenegro later ran a social service agency for youths and worked for the UA as assistant dean for Hispanic student affairs before retiring. He has written about and given an oral history about the El Rio events in the past. But he didn’t respond to requests from the Star through a family member and a friend for an interview about them.

But in an interview the day after Grijalva’s death, Castillo made it clear that the fight over El Rio was part of a much broader struggle for Latinos at the time.

“El Rio was the tip of the iceberg, and underlying that were the greater issues,� Castillo said. “It wasn’t just simply wanting a park for the sake of a park. It represented the symbol of retaking territory, that underlay all other issues we were confronting at that time — poor education, poor health services and poor infrastructure.

“There was no question that discrimination and segregation and racism were very embedded in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥. We could see it and we saw it very clearly with what became destruction of barrios“ in downtown ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ to build the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Convention Center, she said.

As Castillo and Baldenegro recall, Barrio Hollywood, the Latino-dominated neighborhood just across Speedway from the golf course, had in the late 60s no paved streets or sidewalks and many of its residents had relied outhouses due to a lack of sewer service in the neighborhood.

“And there was nowhere for kids to play — nothing at all,â€� Baldenegro said when giving an oral history interview in 2011 for the state-run ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Memory Project. “I grew up there. We played in empty lots or on the streets, period. Now, we could have gone to Oury Park (on 600 W. St. Mary’s Road, but Oury Park was, for the most part, a swimming pool. It really wasn’t a major park.

“But in order to get there, we had to cross a [busy] street. Or we could have gone to Menlo Park on the south. But in order to get to there, we’d have to cross St. Mary’s, which was a major thoroughfare.�

The nearest parks to the golf course — Menlo, Oury and Estevan — averaged three to seven acres, compared to 122 acres for El Rio, wrote Jordan Javier, a UA graduate, in a peer-reviewed history of the El Rio controversy published in 2018 in Footnotes, a journal published by UA’s History Department.

The course itself was seen by the activists as a symbol of ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥â€™s racist past. It was ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥â€™s first grass golf course, built in the late 1920s, and was a private course and country club until the city bought it in 1968.

It hosted the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Open from 1945 to 1962. Ben Hogan, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Arnold Palmer, Byron Nelson and Sam Snead were among the leading lights of pro golf who played at the open during those years, according to a history of the course on .

But as Barrio Hollywood residents recalled it, the only time they could go on the course prior to their demonstrations and takeover was to be caddies.

Palacio told Portillo that when he first set foot on the course as a university student in 1970, he found a huge contradiction.

All around him were lush fairways and putting greens, filled verdant beauty from the golf course’s manicured grass and abundant, watered trees. The golf course was an island in stark contrast to the well-worn working class barrios surrounding it, he told Portillo.

The dichotomy reflected the disparity between the barrios and most of ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥. The golf course “crystallized the condition of the community,â€� said Palacios, a long time educator.

“It was distressing for parents walking their children from any of these parks while El Rio lay so close yet unattainable. It would continue to appear to be unattainable considering the stalemated pace of negotiations between the El Rio coalition and ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ City Council,â€� Javier wrote in his paper.

“Among the few Chicanos able to visit El Rio (caddies and restaurant workers) the lush beauty of El Rio expressed the discrepancy between their undeveloped neighborhoods and this park with green grass, ponds, and trees,� Javier wrote.

In the late 1960s, candidates for the Mayor and City Council came to the west side to campaign and were told by residents they wanted their commitment for a park and neighborhood center, if they were elected. They promised to do that, but never followed through, Baldenegro said in his oral history.

Neighborhood leaders decided they had to ratchet up their efforts a step further.

‘El Rio belongs to the people’

Much of the organizing work that led to the El Rio takeover by residents happened at the Chicano House, a place where leaders of the burgeoning Mexican-American rights movement met regularly to hatch plans and strategies for dealing with issues of neighborhood concern. The “house’’ actually had three different locations during its existence, including one owned by Baldenegro’s mother, Castillo said.

She and Grijalva were both active in the Chicano house and that’s where they first met, Castillo said. While Grijalva never lived in Barrio Hollywood, he and his wife Ramona were very involved in neighborhood issues.

When the neighborhoods served by the Chicano House and women there who had children were trying to set up a little school there, “Ramona was very involved in that,� Castillo said. As for the El Rio controversy, “I can’t remember not being at a meeting where he wasn’t there participating,� Castillo said.

Also active there was the El Rio Coalition, representing barrios closest to the golf course, including Barrios Hollywood and Anita.

The golf course takeover began during a rally and march that was called after negotiations with the city proved fruitless, Baldenegro said. About 600 residents had marched through Barrio Hollywood neighborhoods to get to the golf course, and started a rally with seven speakers. Baldenegro was about to start making the seventh speech when a woman in the crowd cried out, “Enough talking. Let’s go to our park.�

For the next few hours, kids were running and adults were marching up the park, stunning golfers, one of whom threw a golf club at kids, Baldenegro recalled in his oral history. Then the adults decided to toss a picnic.

“We went home, got the grills, and went and bought meat and tortillas and whatever, and we grilled, and we just had a picnic — took over the golf course — because the golfers left. The golfers got mad, got upset. Some diehards stayed and tried to play golf, but they couldn’t,� Baldenegro recalled.

And then from that point on, for the next three or four months, the neighbors tried to take over the course once a week, but city police were now on the scene, complete with riot gear, and from then on, kept them from entering, he recalled.

At times during those attempted takeovers, there were arrests and some violent incidents. But eventually, the city and the neighbors settled on building the neighborhood center and creating the park.

The neighborhood center, once built, was designed to provide services demanded by the community, recalled Castillo: “a day care center, a senior center, a public library, an auditorium for neighborhood meetings and spaces providing services such as health care and room for students to study, she said.

“It became a model that served for establishing neighborhood centers across the city,� she said.

The center also was quickly decorated by some of ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥â€™s early murals, first painted by Antonio Pasos and later by David Tineo. Both became renowned muralists over the next few decades.

The most important one at the center, by Pasos, showed neighborhood members of the El Rio Coalition marching forward, “saying El Rio belongs to the people,� Castillo said.

“It was murals that expressed the desires of justice and the identify of people and their pride and their history and who they were,� she said. “That’s where it started. Right there in El Rio, at the neighborhood center.�