Trini Gamez was born and raised in South Texas, and her father died when she was a child. She married at eighteen and moved to Hereford, Texas with her husband as migrant laborer. She later joined the local PTA and joined the school system as a teachers aid where she began to see discrimination. Thus began her journey to register voters, run for office herself, work for legal aid groups, and promote labor rights.

Alfredo Santos was born in southern California; after spending the first years of his life attending schools there, he moved to Uvalde and started attending schools there. While he had some awareness of disparities and the strains in relations between Anglos and Mexican Americans, he became politicized while attending high school. He joined the local chapter of MAYO, led by Amaro Cardona and Rogelio Muñoz, and was involved in their early direct action activities, including protests against police brutality and their efforts to instill ethnic pride among Mexican American students. While he was no longer attending school, he supported the 1970 walkout. Santos later moved to California and went to college there, majoring in economics at UCLA. While in California, his activism turned to farm workers' struggle (and in the interview he suggested this was his main interest). The next decades, Santos worked in a variety of jobs in different places; upon returning to Texas, he created a network of bilingual publications named La Voz -- one of which was based in Uvalde. Santos currently runs La Voz in Austin and is highly involved in Chicano politics across Texas.