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March planned to support affirmative action: Latino law students and professors confront threat of limited access
By Roberto Rodriguez
Jul 12, 2007, 04:31

Albequerque, N.M.

A gathering here last month of organizations representing Latino law students agreed to form a national organization to support a pro-affirmative action march, scheduled for January in San Francisco, being organized by legal educators.

The conference, attended by representatives of nearly twenty law schools -- from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., to the University of Texas (UT) and the University of California (UC) -- was held in a near crisis atmosphere.

Margaret Montoya, a professor at the University of New Mexico (UNM) said that the movement against affirmative action is an effort to keep universities White and to maintain the status quo in the legal profession.

"Affirmative action is an effort to remedy a wrong -- an effort to dismantle White supremacy," she said.

However, citing the Nixon White House as the first administration to actually implement it on a large scale, Montoya added, "Affirmative action was never intended to bring about real change.... The power centers have not been meaningfully integrated."

Montoya is a member of the Society of American Legal Teachers (SALT). She said the organization has decided to counter the anti-affirmative action movement through various methods.

The CARE march in San Francisco, scheduled for January 8, is one of those methods. CARE stands for "Communities Affirming Real Equality." The march, in which participants will be asked to wear academic gowns, is intended to be a demonstration of disgust with perceived distortions being perpetrated by opponents of affirmative action.

Marching under a banner which will read, "We won't go back," Montoya said, "We as law professors will lead the march."

One of the biggest obstacles to remedying segregation, in Montoya's opinion, is standardized tests, which came into wide use in the 1970s. The tests, she said, simply function as a means of "allocating social goods" -- whether in employment, educational opportunities, housing, or public contracts.

"The tests create a false sense of social justice," she said. "They create the impression that the social goods have gone to those who deserve it."

Although the group has many reservations about standardized tests, Montoya emphasized, "We're not against merit."

According to Montoya, the objective of SALT and its allies is to create diverse institutions and to redefine merit so that the a new definition includes skills that will benefit society -- such as the ability to speak different languages, the ability to form affiliate bands, and the ability to get along.

At the conference, students voiced concerns that what has happened at the University of Texas and University of California systems, where affirmative action has been eliminated, is but a harbinger of things to come.

An example of their concern is a new lawsuit by White students at the University of Michigan alleging that they were passed over in favor of minorities. In addressing the audience, New Mexico Court of Appeals judge Michael D. Bustamante warned that the mood of the country and the recent actions of the courts nationwide did not hold out much hope for the future of affirmative action.

As for the perceived distortions, Montoya said, "Whites tell altered histories. They often act as though they don't know the history of slavery against African Americans; of genocide against American Indians; of invasion, land theft, and conquest against Mexican Americans; and a history of exclusion against Asian Americans."

Montoya said that legal histories are formulated -- or misformulated -- through the process of exclusion. A casualty of this exclusion is the lack of knowledge of legal battles against segregation by Latinos since the turn of the century. One of the most prominent of these cases was the 1946 Mendez v. Westminister case, which effectively ended segregated Mexican schools in California.

Citing the case of Felix Longoria -- a World War II hero who was refused burial in his hometown of South Texas and eventually was buried in Arlington, Virginia -- Montoya noted that sometimes people who are unaware of the history of segregation against Mexican Americans act as though the victims should not be entitled to restitution or legal remedies.

"Yet, Latinos do have a legal and moral claim," said Montoya. "We need to recapture that history. There has been a collective wrong [against Mexican Americans]. And it continues."