Well before meeting Fania, Roeder had shown interest in leftist causes. As a freshly minted college graduate Roeder had traveled to Mexico during the Revolution which began in 1910. He had sided with Pancho Villa as a volunteer, and at one point was captured "by Mexican counter-revolutionaries and was stood against a wall to be shot. For some reason the order to fire was not given and he survived." During the 1930s Roeder researched and wrote three books on Italian history, but by the late 1940s he again turned his interest to Mexico. During the 1950s with McCarthyism on the rise at home, the Roeders moved to Mexico City. Here "Ralph continued work he had begun in New York for the Exiled Writers Committee"