Hispanic rights advocate Sam Martinez dies at 66

SUNNYSIDE, Wash. — Sam Martinez, a Hispanic rights and farm worker advocate who helped start the Washington State Migrant Council, is dead at 66.

Martinez, who had homes in this Yakima Valley town and in Seattle, where he and his wife, Maria Rosa Martinez, ran a travel agency, died Monday of a heart attack while attending an environmental justice conference in Albuquerque, N.M., friends and relatives said.

He grew up working in the fields, graduated from Sunnyside High School in 1956 and became a social activist with the advent of the late President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty in the mid-1960s.

In the late 1960s Martinez helped form the Mexican-American Federation in Yakima, which pushed for voter registration among Hispanics statewide.

For several years he directed the Chicano Educational Opportunities office at the University of Washington in Seattle.

A rosary service was set for today at Smith Funeral Home, followed by a Mass on Saturday at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church.