Santos Rios Olveranear 3085 Acampo Road

Santos Rios Olvera (1886 – 1961) was a Mexican American boarding house owner in Acampo who gave sustenance and counsel to anyone who asked. As a young widow in 1923, she walked from her home in Nayarit, Mexico to Nogales, Arizona along with five of her children.By the 1930’s Santos Rios Olvera owned an entire city block in Acampo with three cabins and two houses, where she lived with her family and operated a boarding house for farm workers. She vouched for and helped farmworkers who wanted to send a few of the dollars they earned to their families in Mexico. Santos never accepted board money from the farmworkers’ first paycheck. Instead, she asked them to send the money to their families in Mexico and pay her with their second paycheck instead. Santos was kind and generous. She never charged farm workers for a room in any of her cabins; they were free of charge. She also fixed sandwiches and burrito lunches for the “hobos” who would get off at the railroad tracks in Acampo. She did not like the derogatory term hobo and chose instead to call them gente, which means people in Spanish. Friends and relatives who lived nearby often brought gente to her doorstep to receive a meal or whatever food she had on hand. Santos “heavily lectured” her grandchildren to never deny food to anyone regardless of their station in life. Santos Rios Olvera became a role model for her family that today includes Lodi activists, educators, and politicians, including her grandchildren Maria Elena Serna and Joe Serna.