He grew up on the city's historic Los Rios Street, born to John Edward Lobo and Esperanza Robles.

[4] His grandfather had brought Walnut trees to the San Juan Capistrano area that were uprooted for Orange groves.

[4] Later in his life, he would express the difficulties of teaching his children about Native people's history, describing it as a "nasty and distasteful task.

[4] In 1946, Lobo traveled on a motorcycle with his wife Bess, who had lineage with Taos Pueblo,[4] to Sacramento as a representative of the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians (Acjachemen).

[4] In 1951, he spoke at a local Rotary Club how "a series of treaties signed in the 1850s between the US government and California's Indian tribes had left out the Juaneno, making them ineligible for their own reservation or to get compensated for land."

"[4] Lobo responded by sending $12.50 to US President Johnson for 25 acres of the Cleveland National Forest, and set up a camp at the site (the Upper San Juan Campground).

President Johnson sent the $12.50 back to Lobo and was told to direct his claim to the Forest Service regional office in San Francisco, where no one responded to his inquiry.

In a 1964 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Lobo spoke how the US Senate Act of 1891 that established the Mission Indian Commission, was supposed to provide native people with 640 acres of land after it had been lost to white settlers in the 1850s, but that the act was broken, like many before: "it is apparently just another treaty made to be broken in the long history of whites take over Indian's lands.

His words were referenced in the School of Social Sciences' Indigenous People's Day acknowledgement in 2022, in which a statement Lobo made in 1966 as he walked on the grounds of what would become the UCI campus, was highlighted: "Our children shall not know the experience of roaming over these rolling hills and listening to the wild birds as they talk to nature.