Barriers to Latinos/as in Law School

Abstract

About two years ago my little boy Antonio, who was then six years old, stopped me and said, "Mami, even a man can be a lawyer." My jaw dropped. He said, "Neil is a lawyer" Neil is the father of one of his close friends. I said, "Well, sure, mijo, even a man can be a lawyer." Since he was three years old, I have been the head of Equal Rights Advocates, a women's legal advocacy organization in San Francisco, and he spends a lot of time in my office. When people from my office get together socially to have a summer barbeque or a holiday party, all he sees are women. He sees Latinas, he sees African-Americans, he sees Asians, he sees lesbians, single moms, married women. In his small world, lawyers are women. I thought, "Wow, my own experience was that I never met a lawyer until I was in law school." In the community where I grew up in South Texas, if there were Latino lawyers, I certainly didn't know them. All of our parents were poor, had very low levels of education, and were fortunate if they had finished high school. As a child, the idea of becoming a lawyer wasn't even on my radar screen. I never thought about it as a possibility for my life it just was not thinkable. If you can't think of something, it's very hard to become it, to be it. Therefore, I think it's extremely important that we have visible role models that our children can see, so they can say, "Yeah, I can do that," or so a parent can say, "Yeah, mijo or mija can do that. She can be a lawyer, she can be a doctor."