Grace Montanez Davis, the first Mexican American woman in Los Angeles to become deputy mayor, was the co-chairperson representing California delegates at the 1977’s National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas. Grace was born on November 24, 1926 to Alfredo Montanez and Mendoza Montanez in East Los Angeles. 

Grace grew up in the community of Lincoln Heights, a predominantly middle-class Anglo-American community in the 1930s, which evolved into a working-class Italian-American community in the 1940s. It was not until the 1960s that Lincoln Heights became a predominantly Chicano community. Throughout her childhood, Grace lived in poverty, was harassed by Italian boys in the neighborhood, and witnessed immigration raids and the deportation of other Mexican immigrants living in the area. She also grew up with strict gender roles at home.
Despite her mother's resistance and lack of support for higher education, Grace graduated from Immaculate Heart College in 1949 with a B.A. in Chemistry and Bacteriology and received an M.A. in Microbiology at UCLA in 1955. In the early 1950s, introduced to political activism by her husband, Grace became involved in grassroots advocacy work and flourished into a leader in her own right. Grace’s involvement at the National Women's Conference in 1977 was not the beginning of her political career but rather a stepping stone in her lifelong commitment to serving the community.  

 It’s important to note that immigration restriction and surveillance is a prominent logic used by labor organizers and activists in the 1940s and 1950s to advocate for fair treatment of domestic workers and workers in the Bracero program. The Bracero program, established in 1942 and ended in 1964, was a labor importation program between Mexico and the United States, which resulted in the migration of millions of Mexican guest workers into the U.S. Far from the fair contract that was promised to them, these workers faced extreme labor abuse and exploitation. As a result, many braceros violated their labor contracts to work somewhere else. In doing so, they became fugitive “aliens” or “wetbacks” or undocumented workers. Farm labor activists and unions believed that it was only possible to protect the rights of Mexican migrant workers and domestic workers if undocumented workers were prevented from entering the U.S to be employed as strikebreakers. This resulted in the exclusion of undocumented workers from the California farm labor movement in the 1950s and the heavy reliance on the state’s surveillance of the U.S-Mexico border. Immigration restrictions at the U.S-Mexico border and the crackdown on undocumented workers were two of the key tenets that labor organizers advocated for in that period of time. 

In 1960, along with Royal, Grace Davis became one of the founders of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA). Because of its predominantly middle-class membership, the organization failed to reach working-class Mexican Americans. The assimilative orientation of Middle-class Mexican Americans in the 1940s and 1950s continued to shape the priorities and principles of Grace Davis’s political career. In 1964, she entered public life as an administrative assistant to Congressman George E. Brown Jr. and later served as a Manpower Development Specialist for the U.S. Department of Labor. She was recruited to work for the city of Los Angeles as the Director of Human Resources in 1973; two years later, she became the first Mexican American woman Deputy Mayor in Los Angeles.