Tim Steller's column: Raúl Grijalva built dominant political machine in Tucson

She told me she planned to run for county supervisor.

It was a surprise to me since I hadn’t seen her around town for years. In my mind, I questioned her prospects.

Then she said the magic words: She had Raúl Grijalva’s endorsement.

And I knew she was in, that the next year she would win the District 3 supervisor’s seat for Pima County.

Which, of course, she did.

In the last years of his life, Raúl Grijalva remained at the top of a power structure he built over decades. A competent local candidate with a Grijalva endorsement could count on winning.

This dynamic became so much a part of the Tucson political landscape that it’s hard to imagine local politics without it.

People refer to it as “the Grijalva Machine,” and I’ve always struggled to find another way to describe it. The word “machine” sounds pejorative, and often is meant that way, but it also represents something strong and productive. Politically, it has been both.

The son of a bracero, Grijalva grew up to create a political machine that came to occupy the Tucson mayor’s office, City Council seats, Pima County Board of Supervisors seats, and seats on the school boards of Tucson Unified School District and Sunnyside School District, among others.

What’s hard to remember is that it wasn’t inevitable. It took skill and will to build.

When Grijalva was a young activist marching on El Rio Golf Course and running for Tucson Unified school board, he was an upstart Chicano activist and an underdog. He was pushing his way into an Anglo-dominated political structure that ran Tucson.

I didn’t meet him until his school-board career was past and he had won election three times to the Pima County Board of Supervisors, becoming a political fixture already. I would see him in the bacon-scented cafeteria in the basement of the county building downtown, a plate of eggs in front of him and a smoking break in his near future.

It was in those Pima County supervisor years, 1989 to 2002, that the “Grijalva machine” of volunteers, elected officials and other political allies was really built. It didn’t have to happen; he did it.

When a new seat opened in Congress in 2002, Grijalva stepped down from that supervisor’s seat to run in a crowded field of Democratic aspirants. And it was that year that the phrase “Grijalva machine” started appearing in Tucson’s newspapers.

Opponents talked about it as a bad, intimidating thing. Others viewed it as a positive political reality.

When Grijalva won the September, 2002 primary election, functionally launching his 22-year congressional career, the banner headline in the Star announced “Grijalva’s machine cruises.”

Over the years, the machine won mostly through the usual political skills of building a network, mobilizing campaign volunteers, mentoring younger candidates and turning out voters.

What it produced beyond political power deserves some questioning. Grijalva was great at bringing home federal funding for priorities from parks to housing, and a leader at setting aside public lands, but he didn’t have a towering record of legislative achievement.

Opponents and rivals also sometimes accused Grijalva and allies of intimidation.

Jesus Romo, a local attorney who challenged for the congressional seat Grijalva won in 2002, accused him of making threats after a debate, something Grijalva denied. In 2010, Republican Ruth McClung’s campaign accused Grijalva’s right-hand man, Ruben Reyes, of stealing signs during the 2010 campaign. (Reyes said he only had the McClung signs because someone put them up in his yard in an apparent prank.)

When I was writing about the Sunnyside school district back in 2013 and 2014, board member Daniel Hernandez, also a Latino Democrat but not allied with Grijalva, got lots of pushback for standing up against Grijalva-aligned members and then-superintendent, Manuel Isquierdo.

You could call it keeping people in line.

It happened to me too. Although readers may assume I was allied with Grijalva or close to him politically, I wasn’t. I appreciated his political skill and liked the man personally. We would talk occasionally on the phone. But I also saw now and then how he tried to keep order.

The last time I spoke with him, Oct. 1, he started the conversation by questioning whether he should talk with me since I had written something he didn’t like. It wasn’t the first time I’ve received friction from Grijalva or his allies over my more critical writing.

But usually, the pol who loved people and a good conversation always emerged anyway, as it did in that conversation Oct. 1. That’s when he told me he didn’t plan to run again.

In the end it was these social gifts of gab, of organizing, of mentoring and of discipline that helped Raúl Grijalva do the unlikely and build Tucson’s strongest political machine.