Ed Pastor’s character forged in small mining town of Claypool

“To you, he’s Congressman Ed Pastor. To me, he’s Ed Pastor, who happens to be a congressman.”

Former U.S. Rep. Ed Pastor grew up in Claypool, a hamlet 90 minutes east of Phoenix where most of the residents were Mexican-Americans who worked in the local copper mines, belonged to unions and lived amid extreme discrimination.

Pastor, who died suddenly at the age of 75 after suffering a heart attack Nov. 27, is being remembered as Arizona’s first Latino member of Congress.

But it was growing up in a MexicanAmerican mining community that forged Pastor’s character as a trailblazing Latino leader, lifelong friends say.

A Democrat, Pastor served 23 years in the House before deciding not to run for re-election in 2014. He was known as a quiet but effective workhorse in bringing federal resources to Arizona to fund local projects, large and small — among them, the restoration of the old Bullion Plaza School, built in 1923 in Miami, Arizona, as a segregated school for Mexican-American students.

Pastor’s father, Enrique worked at the Inspiration mine.

Fred Barcón grew up with Ed Pastor. He has a vivid memory of the former congressman’s father, nicknamed Kikes, working at the mine.

Pastor’s father worked as a furnace tender at the smelter, which emitted huge plumes of sulfur smoke.

“I remember Kikes, Pastor’s dad, standing in the smoke, thick sulfur smoke. All you could see was his silhouette, smoking a cigarette,” Barcón said.

Pastor’s father died in 2003. It was a terrible death, Barcón said. “His lungs were all eaten up from the sulfur smoke.”

It was not a their children.

“Our parents would come home and tell us, ‘You are not going to work in that mine. You are going to do something. You are going to go to college,’ ” Barcón said.

Pastor, the oldest of three, was the first person in his family to attend college. He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Arizona State University Pastor, life miners wanted for and taught at North High School. He later earned a law degree from ASU.

Pastor was a straight-A student and a star athlete, Barcón recalled.

Back then, the Inspiration Consolidated Copper Co., where Pastor’s father worked, offered a $1,000 college scholarship to top students, enough to cover the cost of college, Barcon said.

But Pastor had no chance of receiving the scholarship, despite his academic achievements.

“Back in our day, minorities were not awarded scholarships,” Barcón said. The Inspiration mine scholarship “only went to the white kids, the Anglos.”

Barcón remembers that as a kid, Pastor delivered newspapers to earn money, which helped him earn a scholarship from to pay for college.

At ASU, Pastor lived at Irish Hall B. “That was probably the lowest-income dorm on campus,” Barcón said. “The reason I know that is I had a room right under Ed.”

Barcón remembers seeing Pastor working at the cafeteria “washing dishes, cleaning tables, helping the cooks” to earn extra money despite his scholarship.

Pastor’s father was an officer in Mine-Mill Local 587, the local branch of the Mine-Mill and Smelters Workers Union that represented Mexican-American miners, said Alfredo Gutierrez, 73.

Gutierrez was a lifelong friend of Pastor’s and grew up in neighboring Miami, Arizona, which locals pronounce, MeAM-ah.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a lot of discrimination against MexicanAmericans, Gutierrez said.

Mexican-American miners were paid less than Anglo miners and their children attended segregated schools, he said.

It was Mine-Mill Local 587 that advocated not only for employee rights on behalf of Mexican-American miners but also for rights on behalf of the entire Mexican-American community, Gutierrez said.

“The important thing is that it was an atmosphere where people organized and fought back,” Gutierrez said. “The status quo was not acceptable. There was always an effort to make things better. To organize the community, whether it was about integrating the schools or paving the canyons. It was always a constant organization, and that is the atmosphere we were brought up in and that is what I think contributed to Ed and his brother Robert.”

Still, few people who grew up with Ed Pastor envisioned that one day he would run for Congress and serve 23 years in the House of Representatives, Gutierrez said.

If anything, it was his younger brother, Robert, who people thought would run for office one day.

Robert “was the activist,” Gutierrez said. “He was the one who was very charismatic.”

Then Robert Pastor was killed in a car accident in the early 1970s. Robert’s death inspired Ed Pastor to run for the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Gutierrez said. He was elected to the board in 1976.

“I think Robert’s death had a huge impact on Ed and frankly on all of us,” Gutierrez recalled.

He was referring to a group of Arizona Latino leaders who came from MiamiGlobe, twin mining communities — among them Gutierrez, who served for 14 years in the Arizona Legislature, powerhouse political consultant Ronnie Lopez, and Pastor.

“They jokingly called us the Miami Mafia,” said Barcón, 74, founder and owner of Barcón Corp., a general-contracting company in Globe.

After earning a law degree, Pastor went to work for then-Arizona Gov. Raul Castro enforcing workers’ rights under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

During the 1970s, Pastor became deputy director of the Guadalupe Organization Inc. and was inspired by the Chicano movement and its charismatic leader, Cesar Chavez, according to Roll Call.

Pastor believed Mexican-Americans needed more decisive political leadership, Roll Call said, and volunteered for the campaigns of Mexican-American candidates in Arizona.

On Oct. 3, 1991, Pastor was sworn into Congress after winning a special election for the seat that had been vacated by longtime Rep. Morris Udall, D-Ariz., who stepped down because of declining health.

As the first Hispanic from Arizona to be elected to Congress, Pastor was a role model for Latinos.

“He opened a lot of doors for a lot of aspiring elected officials,” Edmundo Hidalgo, former president of the Latino social-services agency Chicanos Por La Causa, told in 2014. Pastor helped CPLC grow into the third-largest Latino social-services agency in the nation by helping the organization tap into federal funding, Hidalgo said.

When he decided not to run for reelection, Pastor was the most senior member of Arizona’s House delegation and served on the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

But he never forgot his roots, Barcón said. As congressman, Pastor secured federal funding to help rehab the Bullion Plaza School, which served as a segregated school for Mexican-American students until the 1950s.

The former school is now a cultural center and museum. Pastor was scheduled to attend a reunion there this Saturday, Barcón said.

Barcón recalled that Pastor threw a giant party in downtown Phoenix every December. While attending the party one year in the late 1990s, Barcón recalled telling Pastor he could not stay for dinner because he was going deer hunting early the next morning.

Pastor wanted him to stay but didn’t make a fuss. An aide, however, chastised Barcón on the way out.

“How can you say no to the congressman?” Barcón recalled the aide saying.

“Easy,” Barcón told him. “To you, he’s Congressman Ed Pastor. To me, he’s Ed Pastor, who happens to be a congressman.”