Urquides served in local and federal roles, and received numerous awards and recognitions for her educational leadership and community work.

Hilario was a founding member of the Alianza Hispano-Americana, established in 1894 to protect Mexicans against disempowerment by White American settlers.

In the early 1900s, he filled multiple city roles, being named constable, deputy sheriff, and town jailer.

In 1911, the Tucson mayor assigned Hilario to the last job he would hold, serving for almost three decades as the superintendent of city streets and parks.

[2][8] While at college, Urquides experienced occupational discrimination, being given jobs cleaning the student residence bathrooms until she could secure work singing at a popular local restaurant, La Casa Vieja.

She taught for the first twenty years at Davis Elementary, a segregated school serving Mexican American and Yaqui children.

At her new position, she began to directly observe and question the social and economic differences between schools and the corresponding decisions making about educational practices.

[8] They successfully secured Works Progress Administration funding in order to add a community swimming pool.

[9] Several Mexican American women then came together more formally to start a social improvement group, Club Adelante.

[8] In 1960, she added her name to a short list of community leaders stumping for Senator John F. Kennedy in the local Spanish newspaper.

[8][15][16] While at Pueblo, Urquides became active in broader bilingual curriculum design efforts, as well as national policy development.

[13][17][18] The committee officially visited fifty-eight schools across the southwest (Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas) in order to study bilingual education curriculum models.

[6][19] The study outlined the problems facing Spanish-speaking students, and highlighted successful programs in Laredo and El Paso (Texas), Albuquerque and Pecos (New Mexico), Merced, (California), Pueblo (Colorado), and Phoenix (Arizona), as well as their own model in Tucson.

[19] The survey team was making regular trips to the capitol to give testimony in Congress about bilingual education.

[8][21] The symposium and The Invisible Minority report helped quickly push federal action, including the introduction and passage of the 1967 Bilingual Education Act.

[1][9] In a 1985 interview, fellow Tucson education leader Adalberto Guerrero recalled that Urquides led all of these efforts, and thus rightly earned her title.