Latino civil rights leader Ben Benavídez recalled as strong advocate

For many in the central San Joaquin Valley, the name Ben Benavídez is synonymous with César Chávez.

For decades, Mr. Benavídez, who died April 4 at his Fresno home at age 69, was a force in the local civil rights movement. He also was a controversial figure, criticized by some for his aggressive tactics, including intimidation and refusal to back down.

Mr. Benavídez was national and state president of the Mexican American Political Association in the 1990s and early 2000s. He worked to improve the lives of immigrant families in rural Central Valley communities and across California.

The son of Arizona copper miners, Mr. Benavídez had lived in Fresno since 1962. Apart from MAPA, he worked for Parlier Unified School District, overseeing its Healthy Start and teen pregnancy programs. He also was a member of the Fresno Human Relations Commission.

Mr. Benavídez had suffered two strokes and battled leukemia starting around 2008. Daughter Theresa Benavídez said he went into remission that same year. He started using a walker, then a scooter, and was in and out of the hospital for a short time before dying at home in Fresno surrounded by family.

Theresa Benavídez said her father was a magnet for helping others. During Thanksgiving, he would collect enough donations to feed 500 people at a Parlier elementary school that was named after him in 2004. On Christmas, his children’s gifts didn’t come from Santa – they got leftover toys from the annual giveaway.

“We were poor but not in spirit or generosity,” she said. “He taught us all to be good people.”

While serving as MAPA president, Mr. Benavídez took the organization away from its mainly political functions to focus more on education. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he led boycotts and walkouts that helped more Latinos win city and school board elections throughout the state.

He spoke out in 2002 against Fresno police shootings and called for an independent auditor to investigate alleged police misconduct. He battled with school boards in the Dinuba and Kings Canyon Unified districts to drop at-large elections that he and others believed prevented minorities from being elected. He defended the rights of undocumented immigrant children after three undocumented students were arrested on the Roosevelt High School campus in 1998.

Theresa Benavídez said she and her three siblings were often in the conflicts with their father. They marched, knocked on doors, served plates of food, blew up balloons for fundraisers, set events up and cleaned up afterward.

“Even if he wasn’t my dad, I believed in his cause,” she said. “I believed in who he was as a person. César Chávez was a simple man who changed the world. That’s the same as my dad.”

Luis Ramos, the current president of MAPA, was Mr. Benavídez’s assistant and godson. Ramos said he is following in his godfather’s footsteps by continuing to focus MAPA’s work on education.

Ramos will continue operating the three programs Mr. Benavídez has run in Parlier since 1998 – a parent resource center, adult English-learner classes and a child-care center for teen moms.

“People know that Ben was a man with a huge heart for his community, for the poor, for people that thought they didn’t have a voice,” Ramos said. “He was always there for them. I learned from him to fight for those people.”

Cases and critics

Some didn’t see Mr. Benavídez in such a positive light. Richard Velasco, a former Parlier City Council member, sued the city’s school district in 2004 to stop it from naming the elementary school after Mr. Benavídez. Velasco said it was an insult for the school to be named after someone with a criminal record.

Bee articles from the time say Mr. Benavídez served 14 months in state prison until July 1978 for grand theft. In 1994, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of stealing public funds by making a false travel claim with a federally funded job training program.

A judge disqualified himself at a preliminary hearing for the case, saying he had received derogatory mail signed by Mr. Benavídez in 2002.

When Mr. Benavídez came out of retirement in 2001 to serve again as president of MAPA, three of the 10 members on its board of directors boycotted, citing differences with him.

They criticized his continued influence over the organization they said hadn’t been allowed to grow with a new generation of Latinos.

One of the dissenters was Gloria Torres, who said in a Bee article that board meetings the previous six months had been fraught with infighting and disagreements.

“If you disagreed with Ben, it was worse,” she said then.

Javier Guzman, who spent three years as an organizer for MAPA and now runs the Chicano Youth Center in Fresno, worked with Mr. Benavídez on school board issues. He said Mr. Benavídez was courageous.

“There were death threats on Ben all the time,” Guzman said. “I remember in meetings in Mendota, the people in the audience would make threats to him. They’d call him names and tell him to get out of here, you’re an outsider, we’re going to beat the crap out of you.

“He never flinched.”

Guzman acknowledged Mr. Benavídez was controversial, but said he did what he had to do to get results. Sometimes people felt alienated because of that, Guzman said.

“Ben used some very straightforward, direct tactical approaches,” he said. “There were people that called him a strongman or whatever names they wanted to, but the bottom line is you see where the school districts are now representative of the children they serve.”

In a 2000 Bee article after Mr. Benavídez’s second stroke, he said there are many people to help, but few people willing to fight the battles because of how much the stress can affect them.

Asked whether he would trade his life’s work for good health, Mr. Benavídez put it frankly: “I will fight until the day I die.”

This story was originally published April 9, 2016 at 5:32 PM with the headline "Latino civil rights leader Ben Benavídez recalled as strong advocate."