When friends want to visit the grave of the late, immigrant rights advocate Roberto Martinez, they sometimes have a hard time finding it in the San Diego cemetery where he was buried more than a year ago.

Martinez's widow, Yolanda Martinez, and his family did not have the money to buy a headstone when he was buried in May 2009. So when friends and fellow advocates learned about the situation earlier this year, they decided to begin raising money to help the family pay for one.

On Friday, Yolanda Martinez went to the cemetery to order the headstone, she said.

"I know how Roberto would feel, he would feel embarrassed," she said. "He would have said, 'I know there's somebody who deserves it more than me.' That's the way he was."

Roberto Martinez was a tireless advocate for immigrants in San Diego County. Over the years, he helped expose abuses against illegal immigrants by employers, authorities and others.

He served as San Diego director of the American Friends Service Committee for 18 years before retiring in late 2001 because of failing health. He often faced threats against his life during a 30-year career that also was marked by receiving numerous awards.

He died of complications from diabetes. He was 72.

Christian Ramirez, who followed in Martinez' footsteps as San Diego director of the American Friends Service Committee, said he and others who wanted to visit the grave on the one-year anniversary of his former mentor's death couldn't find it because it is unmarked.

"He was a very humble man, and he died in poverty," Ramirez said.

Yolanda Martinez said the family was making payments on the burial plot and the headstone as part of a package, when friends found out. She said that she didn't want to publicize their situation, but word soon got out and the community began to pull together.

Enrique Morones, an immigrant rights advocate and longtime friend to the Martinez family, said he was talking with Yolanda Martinez shortly after he returned from a trip to the Holtville cemetery, where many of the immigrants who die in the desert east of San Diego are buried.

Most of the plots in the section of the Holtville cemetery where the migrants are buried have no name or headstone. Their remains are often found without documents to help identify them.

Morones said that when he was telling Yolanda Martinez about the cemetery, she mentioned that Roberto didn't have a marker, either.

"I said, 'What are you talking about?'" Morones said recalling their conversation. "I was shocked."

After hearing the news, Morones, who heads the immigrant rights group Border Angels, began organizing a fundraising campaign with the help of other groups, including the Chicano Park Steering Committee in Barrio Logan.

An event held recently at a private home helped raise nearly $2,000, Morones said. It was attended by about 50 local activists, musicians and artists, he said.

"For me, there's not greater advocate for immigrant rights on either side of the border," Morones said. "Roberto is at the same level as Cesar Chavez, except he was quieter than Cesar."

Shortly before his retirement, Roberto Martinez recalled his early years growing up in the barrio in Carlsbad where his grandfather, a farmworker, settled after moving to California from Texas in 1915.

In 2001, Roberto Martinez led a march on City Hall and delivered a letter to Mayor Bud Lewis asking for long-term solutions to a shortage of farmworker housing in Carlsbad.

He said in an interview with the North County Times shortly before he retired that he grew up in a time when Mexican-Americans were routinely rounded up in the streets and deported.

A fifth-generation American, he was captured and taken to the border many times in the 1950s and was only let go after officers found out he had difficulty speaking Spanish, he said.

His career as an advocate began in the 1970s, when neighbors asked him for help after several Latino children were beaten by white youths, and school officials refused to take action.

Yolanda Martinez, 60, who also grew up in the Carlsbad barrio, said her husband was deeply religious and felt deeply that he needed to help those who could not defend themselves.

"That was his conviction," she said. "It was his zeal."

The two raised a family of eleven children, she said. Five were his children from a previous marriage. Four were hers from a previous marriage and two others were her niece and a nephew.

Neither earned much money, she said. She worked for the Chicano Federation, a nonprofit, Latino advocacy and social service organization.

The little money the two had saved was spent helping to partially cover his funeral costs, Yolanda Martinez said. But the reward that they received for the work came from a large number of people in many difference ways, she said.

Every once in a while, the couple would go out to dinner and a waiter or a cook would recognize him and pay for their meal because he helped them once, she said.

"It was things like that that made us rich," she said.

To help, write to Yolanda Martinez at P.O. Box 86598, San Diego, CA 92138.

Call staff writer Edward Sifuentes at 760-740-3511.