Preferred Citation
Acquisition Information
Sponsor Information
Processed by:
Restrictions
Arrangement and Description
Scope and Content
Forward
Introduction
Historical Note
Access to Collection
Publication Rights
Title: Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund records
Identifier/Call Number: M0673
Contributing Institution:
Dept. of Special Collections & University Archives
Language of Material:
English
Physical Description:
3415.0 Linear feet
(1189 cartons, 2691 boxes, 35 flat-boxes, 12 half-boxes, 55 oversized flat-boxes, 11 card-boxes, 9 photo-boxes, 2 cassette-boxes,
36 large map-folders, 10 small map-folders)
Date (bulk): Bulk, 1968-1995
Date (inclusive): 1967-2000
Abstract: The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund records contain the administrative records, litigation files, and
special program files of one of the most influential and effective civil rights organizations focusing on defining and protecting
the civil rights of Mexican Americans throughout the United States.
General Physical Description note:
3,415 linear ft.
Creator:
Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Preferred Citation
[Identification of item], Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund Records, M0673, Dept. of Special Collections,
Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif.
Acquisition Information
This collection was given by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund to Stanford University, Special Collections
in 1984, 1995, 1996, 1999, 2000, and 2002 (accessions 1984-072, 1995-138, 1996-207, 1996-111, 1999-110, 1999-182, 2000-072,
2000-086, 2001-010, 2002-073).
Sponsor Information
Collection addenda (accessions received 1996-2002) were processed under a grant from the Council on Library and Information
Resources (CLIR).
Processed by:
Steven Mandeville-Gamble, Theresa Mesa, and student processing staff
1993 - 1995; collection addenda processed by Joseph Geller; with Adelina Acuña, Destin Jenkins, Kimberly Koshiyama, Ashley McDonnell
Lawyer, Beth Noyes, Liam O'Hanlon, and Rebecca McNulty Skirvin
2011 - 2013.
Restrictions
A small amount of material that contains privacy and confidentiality issues has been closed for 75 years from the date the
material was created. Within this guide, this material will be marked with a Restricted Material note at the file level, specifying
the extent of the closure period.
Arrangement and Description
Addenda to existing record groups have been added as an additional series to that record group. Materials within an addenda
series or subseries have been arranged alphabetically by box title. Box titles and subtitles may include a general description
(i.e. financial), a format term (i.e. pleadings) a subject term (i.e. immigration), or the name of a specific legal case or
individual person. Legal cases are alphabetized by the name of the primary plaintiff or defendant. As a second level of arrangement,
some boxes have been organized chronologically (i.e. meeting files and similar types of material have been arranged chronologically
when possible and relevant).
The bulk of the addenda received between 1996-2002, has been described at the box level. Descriptions are meant to give researchers
an overall sense of what will be found in the entire box but are not exhaustive and do not list the contents of every folder.
Scope and Content
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund records contain the administrative records, litigation files, and
special program files of one of the most influential and effective civil rights organizations focusing on defining and protecting
the civil rights of Mexican Americans throughout the United States. Included in the collection are more than 2000 linear feet
of litigation case files focusing on such issues as employment discrimination, education rights, reproductive rights, voting
rights, and other related civil rights issues.
Forward
On behalf of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund Board of Directors and staff, I want to personally thank
the library at Stanford University for agreeing to archive our historical records and for producing this excellent guide.
I also thank the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Anheuser-Busch Companies for their generous and continued support.
The new millenium is fast approaching and the importance of these archives becomes more and more evident. The history and
accessibility of MALDEF's civil rights achievements and struggles and that of our sister organization, the Puerto Rican Legal
Defense and Education Fund, is critical in the education and empowerment of those who follow us in the continued challenge
of equality.
As the voice of the nation's 26 million Latinos, MALDEF works unceasingly to safeguard the rights and enable the community
to fully participate in American society. These archives allow the voices of our community to be heard by all.
Antonia Hernández, President and General Counsel
Introduction
MALDEF is a product of both the modern Civil Rights Movement and the Chicano Movement. The legal victories of the civil rights
era combined with an emerging ethnic solidarity movement among Chicanos in the late 1960s to create an environment for its
founding in 1967. Though the history of advocacy for the civil and legal rights of Mexican Americans dates back to the nineteenth
century, MALDEF stands out as the single most important organization committed to the protection of rights for the nation's
second largest ethnic minority group. MALDEF has engaged in litigation, public policy advocacy, and development of programs
in a variety of areas critical to the well being of Mexican Americans: educational equity, equal employment, voting rights,
immigration legislation, leadership develop-ment, Chicana rights, and others. MALDEF continues to play a key role in defending
Mexican Americans against discriminatory treatment and securing equal rights and opportunities for them in American society.
The Texas civil rights attorney Pete Tijerina was appointed the first executive director, and he and his colleagues founded
the first MALDEF office in San Antonio. During the first five years of its operation, the organization depended largely on
a $2.2 million grant from the ford Foundation. During the early years of its development, the organization relied on a small
cadre of committed staff attorneys and other professionals who laid the foudation for litigating several important court cases,
primarily involving educational segregation and employment discrimination in Texas and in California.
In 1973 Vilma Martinex, who had worked with the organization since 1968, and who had previously served as a staff attorney
for the NAACP Legal Defense fund, assumed the position of president and general counsel of MALDEF. During the decade of Martinez's
leadership, MALDEF achieved greater financial stability by attracting more corporate and foundation giving, and expanded the
scope of its work. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, MALDEF continued to play a key role in several court cases --from
defending the right of Mexican American students to bilingual education and to voting rights cases.
Martinez's able leadership of MALDEF ended in the early 1980s when Joaquin Avila, an attorney with the organization for several
years, assumed the role of president and general counsel. During the periods of change in leadership --from Martinez to Avila
and, after a few years, to the current president, Antonia Hernandez --MALDEF maintained its primary goal of advocacy and litigation.
Throughout its history, MALDEF either took the lead role in litigating many court cases or joined together with other advocacy
and civil rights groups in various legal cases. MALDEF was influential, for example, in advocating for the extension of the
Voting Rights Act during the early 1980s, defending the educational rights of children of undocumented immigrants, and together
with the U.S. Department of Justice, successfully litigating the case leading to the redistricting of the Los Angeles County
Board of Supervisors.
The organizational records of the MALDEF collection will provide a rich source of documentation for scholars to examine the
complex political history of Mexican Americans and other civil rights advocacy groups during the last third of the twentieth
century. The MALDEF collection, together with the other collections housed in the Department of Special Collections at Stanford
University relating to the Mexican American experience, constitutes a treasure chest of materials for understanding the history
of the largest ethnic group in the western United States.
Albert Camarillo,Professor of History at Stanford
Historical Note
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund was incorporated in 1967 by Pete Tijerina, following a meeting convened
by Jack Greenberg of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, between Tijerina, San Antonians Albert Peña and Roy Padilla, and Bill Pincus,
a Ford Foundation representative. When Pincus said that the Foundation would be willing to consider a proposal for funding
a Mexican American legal organization, Tijerina filed the papers for incorporation, conducted research for writing the proposal,
and made an organizing tour of five southwestern states. Tijerina organized MALDEF committees in California, Colorado, Arizona,
and New Mexico, as well as his native Texas. In May 1968, MALDEF received a 2.2 million dollar grant from the Ford Foundation
to be used over five years, and in August 1968 MALDEF began work.
For the first two years MALDEF had headquarters in San Antonio and a branch office in Los Angeles. The board of directors
was comprised of people from the organizing committees of the five states to which Tijerina had traveled; in addition to Tijerina,
Greenberg, and Peña, there was Carlos Cadena, Albert Armendáriz, State Senator Joe Bernal, Gregory Luna, and Father Henry
Casso from Texas; Louis García, Richard Ibañez, and Frank Muñoz, from California; Manuel Garcí of Arizona and Dan Sosa of
New Mexico. The Ford Foundation had included $250,000 in their grant to establish a scholarship fund; a committee was set
up to administer this grant, giving funds to Chicano law students, in the hope of increasing the number of Chicano lawyers
who might engage in civil rights work on behalf of Mexican Americans. Pete Tijerina was MALDEF's first president, and Mario
Obledo was named general counsel of the organization.
In 1970, the Ford Foundation told MALDEF that further funding was contingent on the organization making certain changes. The
Foundation asked that the positions of president and general counsel be merged, that the organization's headquarters be moved
to New York or Washington, and that the litigation strategy not be like that of a legal aid office. The Board of Directors
complied with the merging of positions and named Mario Obledo head of MALDEF. They also moved the main office to San Francisco,
retaining the San Antonio office as a branch office. Obledo added impact litigation and community outreach to MALDEF's programs,
and added staff to handle administrative and fundraising activities. MALDEF added new branch offices, in Denver in 1971, and
in Albuquerque and Washington in 1972.
In 1973, Obledo resigned, in part because of negative rulings that MALDEF received on important litigation under his leadership.
The board hired Vilma Martinez to replace Obledo; Martinez had been a lawyer for the NAACP-LDF, served on MALDEF's board,
and assisted with fundraising. Her first priority on taking the position was to "reorganize to increase effectiveness", and
to that end she created an intern/extern program for lawyers, instituted a Chicana Rights Project, and a Voting Rights Project,
during her first two years in office. She focused litigation on important test cases, as the NAACP-LDF had done, to develop
a body of favorable precedent on which to argue more far-reaching cases.
In 1976 MALDEF createdthe Community Education and Activation Project, with a Public Policy Research component, which later
spun off into a separate department. Both programs, while non-legal, were intended to enhance what MALDEF accomplished legally:
CEAP was to inform the Mexican American community of both newly won rights, and those that they were not currently exercising,
while the program that became the Policy Studies and Research Department in 1978 was to conduct research into what litigation
was required to accomplish certain goals most effectively. The Leadership Development and Advocacy Program was also a spin-off
of CEAP, and was created in 1980 to prepare a pool of Chicanos for appointments to commissions and boards by increasing their
sophistication about the political process in their communities.
AS MALDEF continued to grow both in program and in personnel, Martinez reorganized the reporting structure once again in 1980,
creating three vice presidencies: a vice president for legal programs, a vice president for research, development, and public
affairs, and a vice president for finance and administration. In 1980, MALDEF also added a regional office in Chicago, replacing
a small program office that had been set up there in 1979 to do a census awareness project. In 1981 Maritnez announced she
would be resigning in 1982.
Joaquin Avila was named president and general counsel in 1982; he had been with MALDEF since 1976, serving as a staff attorney,
as the director of the Voting Rights Project, and as the Associate Counsel in charge of the San Antonio office. Avila led
MALDEF’s efforts to extend the power of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) by advocating for the addition of an amendment that changed
the definitions of discriminatory practices, thus opening the door to future voting rights litigation that would allow Latinos
greater access to the political process. During his tenure, Avila also made significant contributions to the further development
of MALDEF's growing leadership programs.
Avila was succeeded by Antonia Hernández, who became president and general counsel in 1985. Hernández began working for MALDEF
in 1981 as a staff attorney in its Washington, D.C. office. She later became employment litigation director in the Los Angeles
office prior to beginning her tenure as president. Under Hernández’s leadership, MALDEF continued pursuing strategic advocacy
programs related to employment, immigrants' rights, education, and language rights, with a particular emphasis on the importance
of increasing political access and representation for Mexican Americans.
Significant litigation from this period included Overton v. City of Austin, a voting rights case aimed at improving political
access for Latinos. MALDEF also continued work on Gomez v. City of Watsonville, which argued that the Latino population was
not adequately represented in local government. Successful litigation related to employment and immigration issues included
International Molders' Union v. Nelson, a case in which MALDEF represented a class of Latino workers in the Bay Area, who
were victims of workplace raids by the INS. The trial court held that the that open-ended warrants the INS was using to search
workplaces suspected of employing undocumented immigrants were unconstitutional and found that the INS had instituted a systematic
policy of Fourth Amendment violations including unlawful detention, unreasonable force, and discrimination against Latinos.
MALDEF also continued working for education rights through lawsuits such as Edgewood v. Kirby, a case relating to public school
financing and educational equality, as well as other notable education cases including U.S. v. Texas, LULAC v. Richard/Clements,
and Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, CO.
During the mid-1980s MALDEF monitored the impact of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) and worked to reduce
its negative effect on immigrants. MALDEF also continued to monitor the Voting Rights Act to ensure the enforcement of measures
aimed at increasing the political voice of Latinos. In the late 1980s MALDEF also launched an ambitious program to encourage
Latino participation in the 1990 U.S. Census, through their campaign: “!Hagase Contar! - Make Yourself Count!" Other special
projects that grew during this period included the development of the Law School Scholarship Program and Parent Leadership
Program. During the 1990s, the Washington D.C. office also spearheaded further expansion of the Policy Analyst Program, aimed
at developing effective lobbying programs to address the impact of state and federal policy on the civil rights of Mexican
Americans.
Access to Collection
The materials are open for research use. Audio-visual materials are not available in original format, and must be reformatted
to a digital use copy.
Publication Rights
All requests to reproduce, publish, quote from, or otherwise use collection materials must be submitted in writing to the
Head of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California 94305-6064. Consent
is given on behalf of Special Collections as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission
from the copyright owner. Such permission must be obtained from the copyright owner, heir(s) or assigns. See: http://library.stanford.edu/depts/spc/pubserv/permissions.html.
Restrictions also apply to digital representations of the original materials. Use of digital files is restricted to research
and educational purposes.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Apodaca, Jerry.
Armendariz, Albert.
Avila, Joaquin.
Baca, Paul.
Baca, Polly, 1941-
Bakke, Allan Paul.
Baller, Morris J.
Barnett, Peggy Hynd.
Bell, Griffin B., 1918-2009
Bernick, Michael, 1953-
Cadena, Carlos C.
Cantú, Norma V.
Carter, Jimmy, 1924-
Chavez, Cesar, 1927-1993
Contreras, Joel G.
Couch, Jane.
de Necochea, Fernando.
Dimas, Nicasio.
Espino, A. Michael.
Estrada, Carmen.
Estrada, Esther.
Exelrod, Alan.
Fajardo, Ricahrd P.
Galarza, Ernesto, 1905-1984
Greenberg, Jack, 1924-
Hanten, Linda.
Hayes-Bautista, David E., 1945-
Heidelberg, James.
Hernández, Antonia.
Huerta, John E.
Idar, Eduardo.
Kantor, Michael, 1939-
Kantor, Valerie.
Kauffman, Albert.
Klutznick, Philip M., 1907-1999
Korbel, George.
Lozano, Ignacio.
Luna, Gregory.
MALDEF.
Marenco, Eduardo.
Martinez, Vilma S.
Martínez, Virginia.
Mendelson, Michael.
Méndez, Miguel A.
Nabarrete, Charles D.
Navarro, Susana.
Nogales, Luis G.
Obledo, Mario G., 1932-
Oliveira, Annette.
Ortega, Joe C.
Peña, Albert.
Peña, Federico.
Reyes, Remigio Pete
Rocha, Juan.
Rodriguez, Maria
Romero, Raymond G.
Roos, Peter
Rosen, Sanford Jay.
Samora, Julian, 1920-1996
Sanders-Castro, Judith A.
Sonnenberg, David F.
Soria, Juan.
Steiner, William.
Tijerina, Pete.
Velarde-Muñoz, Felix.
Vásquez, Patricia M.
Wong, Linda J.
Mexican Americans--Civil rights.
Mexican Americans.