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Reviewed by:
  • Everyday Injustice: Latino Professionals and Racism
  • Michael A. Olivas
Maria Chavez. Everyday Injustice: Latino Professionals and Racism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. 267 pp. Cloth: $29.59. ISBN: 978-1-4422-0919-0.

For some time, I have believed and written that the first Latinos to argue a case before the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) were the lawyers of the Hernandez v. Texas case, who did so in early 1954, close to the time that the Brown lawyers re-argued their case (Olivas, 2006; Olivas & Lopez, 2008). I have also written that the 2006 Voting Rights Act case LULAC v. Perry was the first U.S. Supreme Court case where Latinos and Latinas were on both sides of the case: Nina Perales, Puerto Rican, on the MALDEF side, and Teodoro Cruz, Cuban, on the State side (League of United Latin American Citizens [LULAC] v. Perry; Mendoza, 2011; Olivas, 2011). It turns out that I have been wrong in both instances. I am happy to correct this record, and do so here in actual print for the first time.

Doing so in the context of this review of Maria Chavez’s erstwhile Everyday Injustice: Latino Professionals and Racism allows me the space to fill out this record as well as to recommend her interesting book on Latino/a lawyers to readers. (I officially am getting out of the first-Latino-to-do-such-and-such business, for the obvious reasons. Nonetheless, I do think that doing this kind of research is an important, if imperfect, undertaking.)

There are likely some Puerto Rican lawyers who argued Puerto Rico cases that came to the U.S. Supreme Court before 1950, and someone needs to examine these records, but I have not done so. One Puerto Rican attorney who signed a number of the briefs on behalf of the Department of the Interior in cases involving Native American tribes before the U.S. Supreme Court was Pedro Capó-Rodríguez. He was born on the island, studied law in the states, and became a member of the Vermont bar. It is unclear whether he actually tried the cases. He published articles on the cases in the American Journal of International Law in the 1910s, an unusual level of access to this publication (and other law reviews) for someone not an academic. (See, e.g., Capó-Rodriguez, 1915, 1919, 1923). Other Latinos/as may have served as government lawyers during these years, and the identification of Latino ethnicity is, as always, an art, not a science.

In 1951, Manuel Ruiz Jr. (1905–1986), a Mexican American lawyer and prominent civil rights activist in the Los Angeles area, argued Buck v. California, This case predates the Hernandez arguments and decision in 1954. I have looked at the Ruiz files, which are archived in the Stanford University Special Collections. The MALDEF collection is also housed here, and I have used these papers for several years to trace the Plyler case (Olivas, 2012). However, I was not researching Ruiz per se, so did not go through the files as carefully as I might have (or will, next time).

Interestingly, neither the Stanford collection headings nor the extensive introductory biography mention Ruiz’s having argued Buck, a case involving taxi licenses and international licensing. (His clients lost in a 5–4 decision.) While Ruiz’s civic involvement is well known and has been examined by several leading Latino scholars of the period (Griswold del Castillo, 2008, pp. 148–158; Sanchez, 1993, p. 250), his argument before SCOTUS has not, to my knowledge, been mentioned in print. As a very minor note, he appeared in 1963 public records as the family law attorney to socialite Joan Tyler in a paternity suit involving actor George Jessel, suggesting that he was a well-connected, prominent, and successful lawyer across several fields (“Girl Is Born,” 1961; Joan Tyler Profile, n.d.).

I spoke about the Hernandez case quite extensively with one of the four Mexican American lawyers involved in the case, the now-deceased [End Page 133] Judge James DeAnda, and he had no knowledge of any Latino/a attorney who had argued before SCOTUS before that case...

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