Cristina Maria Riegos; Activist for Immigrant Employee Rights

Cristina Maria Riegos, advocate for Latina immigrant workers who organized the Domestic Workers Assn., has died at age 27.

Riegos, who made an impact working for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights inLos Angeles, died Sunday in her Los Angeles home of lymphoma.

Eldest daughter of a Cuban mother and Mexican father, the Los Angeles-born Riegos graduated summa cum laude from Brown University. Her undergraduate thesis, “The Fire Esta Vez: Latinos, the L.A. Riots and the Transformation of Urban Space,” won the American Sociological Assn. Latino Studies Section distinguished student paper award. That paper was the basis for an article she co-authored for the Latino Studies Journal.

From 1993-97, while a graduate student in sociology at UCLA, Riegos worked for City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg and for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles.

She worked to improve the rights of Latina immigrants who came to Southern California as domestic workers. In 1995, she organized the Domestic Workers Assn. for those domestics, in which members paid dues, ran their own meetings and organized to improve their on-the-job rights.

“There’s a tremendous amount of exploitation,” she told The Times in 1997. “People get paid half the minimum wage. There’s no job security. The way the industry is structured, the employers really don’t like to see themselves . . . as employers. The women have very little leverage.”

Riegos is survived by her parents, Anatolio and Raquel Riegos; two sisters, Raquel Quinonez and Elizabeth Riegos, and a niece and nephew.

The family has asked that any memorial donations be made to cancer research.