José Ramírez has been described as the most politically active boxer since Muhammad Ali and, in his riveting company, it does not take long to understand there is depth and truth to a statement that might initially sound like a snappy soundbite. Ramírez, the WBC and WBO light-welterweight world champion, fights Scotland’s Josh Taylor, who holds the IBF and WBA titles, in a fascinating unification contest in Las Vegas on Saturday night. The winner will become boxing’s only current undisputed world champion. Ramírez knows the challenge he faces against Taylor, and believes he will prevail, but we begin with the reasons for his activism.
Ramírez is an American of Mexican descent and his ethnicity and family’s roots have shaped his political outlook. He explains that, in 2007, when he was 14, he still lived in Avalon, a little town in the central valley of California. This belt of land supplies more than half of the fruit and vegetables the entire US consumes every year. But people here are poor. They are mostly Mexican. José knew the back-breaking work people did on the surrounding farms, picking crops. He wanted new trainers but he didn’t want to ask his parents for money. So he found himself a job in the school vacation.
“I went with my buddy because his uncle was a crew boss and he drove the bus [to the farms],” Ramírez explains. “It was not easy. You wake up at four in the morning, be ready by 4.30am, walk down to the liquor store where he picked us up. On the farm you would spend 10 hours bending down and picking bell peppers for $7.50 an hour. [That’s] $70 a day after I pay $5 for the bus ride. It was hard because the bell pepper plant is only two feet tall so you have to bend down, throw them in the bucket and stick them into the machine. I started to appreciate what everybody does in our community.
“I was very athletic and well-conditioned. My body was new compared to most people working there. After four days my back was hurting so bad I didn’t know if I want to go to work again. But I’m missing $70 if I don’t go. That’s a pair of shoes. I was driven by little things I wanted to buy them myself because I didn’t want my dad covering my personal bills. The others working there seemed old. There were 47-year-old ladies, men of 54. But they wouldn’t ever complain. They showed up every morning and did their work. I was inspired and motivated by their loyalty to the job, the industry, their family. It was a beautiful experience.”
The seeds of Ramírez’s activism had been sown and they would be nurtured by another tough day in the broiling heat of the plantation. “It was around two in the afternoon,” Ramírez remembers. “We start at 5:30am because it gets really hot. The first five hours are OC and you get your lunch break at 11am. After that you’re talking about 110F [43C] heat. The first couple of hours after lunch you feel good but then your back starts hurting, the heat suffocates you.
“At two in the afternoon this 50-year-old woman fainted. She was two rows next to me and my buddy and I ran to help. There were clear signs of dehydration. We took her into the shade. Then we started helping her out so she wouldn’t get behind in her work. We wanted her to get paid the full hours even though there was nothing she could do for the next hour and a half. Me and my buddy came up with a system and shared her row of peppers between us. We got her work done between us, while doing our own.”
Ramírez smiles as if we are back down amongst the little bell-pepper plants under a blazing sun. “I felt good,” he says. “I was thinking about her and everything she went through every day to feed her family. When I got home that night and we had dinner, I told my parents: ‘Man, this job is not easy.’ I told them that what happened to the lady opened my mind to what they did every day to look after us kids.”
The 28-year-old laughs softly when I ask about the exhausted woman. “Guess what? The next morning she went back to work. I got on the bus at 4.30 am and there she was along with everyone else. Smiling and talking with another lady about a whole different subject. She wasn’t fazed by collapsing. No one was asking her: ‘How are you feeling?’ They were having a normal conversation, laughing and joking.”
Ramírez was half the age he is now so what did he think once his teenage eyes absorbed such resilience and strength. The fighter, who has shown these attributes while compiling a 26-0 record in the professional ring, shakes his head before putting his thoughts into a simple sentence of clarity and power: “I appreciate these people.”
That appreciation has driven his subsequent activism. He has raised funds and awareness and lobbied congressmen and local politicians to change working conditions, offer water relief and help immigrant communities. During the long and terrible drought that stretched across the central valley of California until 2016, Ramírez campaigned for water relief while making his way as a fighter. “There’re not many dams for the farms or our communities,” he says. “Most are built for environmental purposes, to balance the water from the mountains and the ocean. We went through a seven-year drought where we had very little water to survive. All this farmland and our communities were suffering because the water that came from the faucet was dirty.”
Ramírez worked with the California Latino Water Coalition to “bring awareness to the politicians so they can finally put a bill together that will grant them money to build dams. In 2014, it was passed as Proposition 1 with 76% of the votes in favour of the bond [which generated $7bn]. I would drive to Sacramento and speak to politicians and advocate for this plan because we needed a backup for the next water crisis. I did many hours going from the board of Sacramento to talking to senators and congressmen. That helped but a lot of farmers invested in this to make it happen. Our job was to create an engineering team and I was donating money to the overall project – to build the new Temperance Dam.”
But local politics can be as messy as boxing and the scheme was blocked by a clash between environmentalists and farmers. “Most of the money went to environmental projects,” Ramírez explains. “California is an environmentally-conscious state and lots of people don’t want to build any dams because they care about the animals living in that area. People badly needed the water and it seemed to be common sense to build the dam. Others saw it as environmental mistake. But, apart from supplying 58% of the crops consumed in the United States, we give 38% internationally [in the form of exports.] In Asia, all the almonds and pistachios, most of the citrus, comes from central California.
“So we hit a problem but, luckily, we started having good rain, so the farmers could survive and transform the lands. But we keep on because the fight isn’t over. Unless we have a dam we’ll always have that fear factor. What if it stops raining? When there is no water there are no agricultural jobs and no construction either.”
During the drought 400,000 acres of farmland lay fallow and around 17,000 people lost their jobs. That reality drives Ramírez to keep fighting for water relief today. He also champions immigration reform by lobbying Congress to pass bills that would expand guest worker programs for farming jobs and grant permanent status and a pathway to American citizenship for immigrants.
“It’s about protecting our people,” he urges. “One way is to assure them they are going to have jobs, another is to assure them they are going to be able to work without fear of being deported. Most immigrant families here have been in the US for many years. America is their home. They’ve got family here. So we must take care of them. Politicians have been playing with immigration to get votes for many years. It’s horrible for [immigrant] people who pay their taxes, give so much to the economy, and they can still be kicked out. That’s why we have this campaign for a bi-partisan deal so both parties, Democrats and Republicans, should be fair to people who have been here many years.”
Ramírez also set up a fund to help young immigrants gain a college education and worked to promote the fight against cancer after he lost his grandfather to the disease. “I’m going to try my best to stay on this path,” he says. “It’s easy to say: ‘OK, I’m for immigration or water rights,’ and just send a couple of messages on social media. But if you believe in change you should go out and talk to your local politicians and tell them exactly what your community needs. That’s how I fight for these issues. I’m not a politician who has to play his cards right. I’m straightforward and I know what’s important to these families. I can speak the truth.”
Taylor is not a socially-conscious fighter. He admitted, and apologised for, making racist and homophobic insults against a doorman at a nightclub in Edinburgh in 2019 and last year he spent a lot of time questioning the threat of Covid-19 while railing against lockdown. Taylor seems the opposite of him outside the ring but Ramírez says: “I stay in my lane and I don’t need to talk bad about no one to make myself feel better. I’m not sure of Josh Taylor’s persona. To be honest, I’m not sure about a lot of fighters or entertainers because they like to be flashy and become someone else in front of the camera. I’m happy to be myself. People like it? Good. People think I’m boring? OK. At least I’m myself.”
There is no disputing Taylor’s outstanding talent and will. He seem likely to offer the hardest fight of Ramírez’s career. “On paper, yes,” Ramírez says, “but I don’t feel he has faced an opponent like me. He had a great fight against Regis Progais [in October 2019 when Taylor narrowly won one of the fights of that year in London]. But if Prograis had been in better shape he would have won. I am fitter and stronger than Prograis.”
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Ramírez is also fighting for a deeper cause than just boxing glory. “I am trying to reach a lot of people. Every person has an opportunity to do something good in the world and hopefully they take it. I know I’ve been really blessed. I have a beautiful family and support from the people who really matter to me in my community. Boxing defines me but I also enjoy sharing some of my glory with the less fortunate. I think they will be even more hopeful after this fight against Taylor. They will have the undisputed world champion in front of them.”