Every third Friday of the month, lawyer Luis Garcia has a standing appointment with the poor.
After work, the attorney makes his way to a crowded neighborhood off bustling Warner Avenue in Huntington Beach. It's a low-income immigrant enclave called Oak View, once known for its aggressive gangs and scary crime rate. Today the place may be more peaceful, but poverty still grinds away at people packed into apartments with sad stucco exteriors and little landscaping.
Their legal problems are as unglamorous as their daily lives. Bad credit. Domestic disputes. Traffic accidents. Evictions. Immigration snafus.
But they cannot afford legal fees, even for a simple consultation. So they save up their problems and their paperwork and wait for that one night per month to see el licenciado, as lawyers are called in Spanish.
Garcia--who got his law degree when he was in his 40s--came from a community like this one. Now, at 54, he's giving back by volunteering at the Oak View Family Center, which runs a legal clinic and an array of other programs from a cramped temporary building behind the neighborhood's elementary school.
The evening clinic is scheduled for two hours. Occasionally it runs late if too many clients show up. Garcia, a grandfather who lives miles away in Monterey Park, stays until he sees them all. Otherwise, some may never get the help they need.
"I'm the only attorney they have," Garcia said. "If I don't show up, the clinic doesn't go."
I first learned of the program from Rose S. Moreno, an assistant in the paralegal department at Coastline Community College in Fountain Valley. The college co-sponsors the Oak View legal clinic, staffing it with students who learn to interview clients and screen their cases.
More Lawyers Sought for Clinic
Rose, who is Japanese American, appealed for more bilingual attorneys to lend a hand at the clinic. Her husband, Samuel Prieto Moreno, a retired schoolteacher, often helps out as a translator.
The Huntington Beach couple believe immigrants need legitimate advice in their own language. They need to be steered away, said Rose, from "those who make promises, take their money and deliver little or nothing."
The clinic has tried to recruit other attorneys. Only Garcia has stepped forward so far.
"The world is not full of people who want to go out and do pro bono [free] work on Friday night," said Margaret Lovig, head of Coastline's paralegal department. "Luis Garcia is great, and he's wonderful, but I'm sure at some point we're even going to exhaust him."
