Francisca Graciela Martinez Cavazos was born in Harlingen, Texas on January 29, 1945. She grew up in the southern Texas borderlands. Her mother Paula Cavazos and father Jose Martinez were a farmworker and mason, respectively.
Graciela was the youngest child. She had three older brothers: Jose Martinez, Roberto Martinez, & Ricardo Martinez. She learned English after coming to California. She recalled how she and other children were castigated for speaking Spanish. She graduated from Redwood High School in 1964.
As a youth, Graciela worked as a farmworker alongside her mom on weekends and school breaks. She recalled seeing women be sexually harassed and abused in the fields.
Graciela began her career at the American Friends Service Committee, right out of high school.
A labor contractor who was part of AFSC’s Farm Labor Committee recommended her to a job opening with AFSC and the rest was history. To this, she said: “I guess some people see the smartness in you when you think that you're the dumbest and the ugliest.”
The Farm Labor Project became Proyecto Campesino in the 1960s, and through Proyecto, the self-help mutual housing program began. She liked to say she was “in the delivery room” when Self-Help Enterprises was born. The organization has since built over 6,500 homes with low-income families under the mutual self-help method, and Graciela served on its Board of Directors for many years.
With AFSC, Graciela went to Alabama and marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She was 19. She recalled listening to Dr. King’s speech the night before the march, saying “an injustice to one is an injustice to all.” She brought that lesson home.
In 1965, Graciela went to work with the UFW before it was the UFW, providing administrative support to the legal department and Cesar Chavez. “I didn't know that my education was continuing, but hey, I learned a lot.” She recalled that “Cesar wanted me to write a letter ... [to] write a formal letter asking for funds was a little bit difficult for him in the beginning. I would help with that; I had [a typewriter] at home because typing had been a passion with me. All through high school I'm a super typist, I've been called Machine Gun Grace, and people have stood in awe listening to me clacking my typewriter. My fingers made a very good living for me throughout my years… Sometimes… [I] kiss my fingers and appreciate the fingers of my hands for always getting me where they've taken me.” Graciela remembered the UFW movement as one that was full of art and music. She learned to play the 12-string guitar during this time.
She got to know Dolores Huerta during a strike. She regarded Dolores as the heart of the farmworker movement and always wondered why she didn’t get the credit that Cesar did.
Graciela met Richard Herron in the farmworker movement, who became the father of three of her children. They wound up in Washington DC, where Graciela, as a typist with the Kelly Girls, went to work for NASA in the Telemetry Division, prior to Apollo’s launch in 1969. She recalls that she worked at NASA “long enough to be considered to step to the next level of security clearance... I got the first step, didn't make the second step, and I don't know why… maybe my background showed that I had been out there raising hell with Martin Luther King, and Cesar Chavez, and Dolores Huerta.” Instead, she went to work as a secretary at Georgetown and learned how to do legal research. She recalled filing documents at the Supreme Court a few times, and “I used to love to walk the bridge between Washington D.C. and Virginia, it was walking distance and beautiful.”
Graciela returned to Tulare County in 1966 because she was pregnant with her first child, Richard Edward Herron. He was stillborn on Christmas 1966. A severe infection prevented her from attending her son’s funeral. She went on to have four more children.
Graciela started interpreting/translating for people at social security and welfare appointments, filling out forms. She started a business typing legal documents-- Martinez & Associates in Goshen: “That was me, and my children were the associates because they helped me.”
She also worked for various attorneys & Tulare County Legal Services as a notary/paralegal-- “To me it would have been a dream to become an attorney fighting for rights. I think I would have been an awesome attorney.”
In 1997, Graciela found a job back with AFSC and Proyecto Campesino: “[My business] was an up and down thing because I was serving low-income people, they just couldn't afford to pay, or I'd let them pay me a bit and you can pay it off later on... one morning I was sitting there drinking my coffee and reading the newspaper and for some reason I opened the paper up to the want ads and my eyes went straight to an ad [for] a Program Assistant for Proyecto Campesino Visalia.”
Back at Proyecto Campesino, Graciela started a low-power FM radio station. She hosted a weekly health show and learned to work the radio control switches.
Several years later, she became the program’s first female director. In that capacity, she led local efforts to support AFSC’s nationwide No Human Being Is Illegal campaign, which pushed for comprehensive immigration reform. The program also expanded its citizenship classes and responded to almost daily requests for help from farm workers as they struggled to overcome language and economic barriers to access services and deal with harassment by local law enforcement.
Graciela is remembered for her lifelong passion for farmworker rights and her boundless love. She was a longtime member of Visalia Friends Meeting (Quakers) and a leader in her community of Goshen.
Graciela is survived by her four children: Hannah, Jennifer, Richard, and Rosita. She had 11 grandchildren and one great-grandchild, Joshua.