Mexican American Legal Defense

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's chief counsel, Thomas Saenz, has been tapped to become president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the organization announced Tuesday. Saenz has been one of Villaraigosa's closest advisors since taking the post in August 2005, recently serving as the mayor's lead representative in negotiations with city labor unions over salary and benefit concessions to help close the city's $530-million budget gap.

On Tuesday, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, will hold its annual awards gala and fundraiser in downtown Los Angeles. The awardees include such indisputable worthies as Linda Ronstadt and former MALDEF leader Antonia Hernandez. The real awardee, though, should be MALDEF itself, whose decades of civil rights litigation have yielded significant gains for Latinos. I haven't always agreed with all of its actions, but I generally find myself cheering it on (as I do its current campaign to create a second Latino-majority district on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors)

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund is wrong in insisting on Latino voting power. The concept is inimical to the basic principles of our democratic government. Mexican-Americans are no different from any other Americans. We all have foreign origins. AUGUST HOFF, Pacific Palisades

Civil rights attorney Hector Villagra will succeed Ramona Ripston as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the organization announced Monday. Villagra, the group's legal director, identified an increasingly anti-immigrant environment as the ACLU's biggest challenge in the defense of individual rights. He also said he expected to make a priority of extending the group's advocacy to the underserved and the vulnerable, including African Americans, Latinos, Muslims and the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities.

Congratulations on the photo essays by Times photographer Rosemary Kaul on the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles. Having grown up in this area, it is refreshing to see a sincere humanistic portrayal of this community by The Times. ARTURO VARGAS, Director of Outreach and Policy, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Los Angeles

Re "For remapping, state is among 'Dirty Dozen,' " Column, June 19 We take strong exception to columnist George Skelton's claim that civil rights groups oppose the "California Voters First Initiative" because we prefer to deal with "our political buddies in the Legislature" during redistricting. Skelton should be reminded that in 2001, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund sued these so-called buddies as a result of their failure to adequately consider the voting rights of minority communities.

Articles on the poor educational achievements of Latinos will always get people like Norma Cantu (director of educational programs for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) to declare that money and bilingual education will solve the problem. I do not believe that this is necessarily the answer simply because we have in our history millions of immigrants and first-generation offspring who have overcome language, poverty and substandard educational facilities to not only join mainstream America, but in many, many instances, leap-frog it. Since the mental capacities of Latinos are the equal of any other group, the answer has to be cultural.

I am outraged at the events surrounding the court-ordered county redistricting. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are representing Latinos and the supervisors are defending themselves, but who is representing me, a member of neither group. The arguments of both the court and the plaintiffs are just arrogant hypocrisy. One claim is that the district lines have been gerrymandered so that a Latino cannot be elected as a supervisor (the almost certain election of Sarah Flores disproves this)

Richard A. Ibanez, 97, a retired Los Angeles County Superior Court judge who specialized in family law and dependency court, died Nov. 30 of cardiac arrest and coronary artery disease at his home in Los Angeles, said his son Leon. The death was only recently reported. Ibanez, who had been an attorney in private practice since 1937, was appointed to the bench by Gov. Jerry Brown in 1975 and served through 1994. In 1968, he helped found the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and was a board member of the Latino advocacy group.

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Ralph Abascal (March 20). A year ago, we were both honored by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He was recognized for his civil rights achievements and I for my affirmative action work as a member of the UC Board of Regents. I later shared with my children that more than my MALDEF recognition was the opportunity to share the evening with a civil rights giant, a person who saw hope for the hopeless and struggled in a legal world to make real their rights.

Several civil rights organizations filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to halt a controversial new Arizona law that requires local police to enforce federal immigration regulations. The lawsuit is at least the fourth filed since Republican Gov. Jan Brewer last month signed the law, which makes it a state crime to lack immigration paperwork in Arizona and requires police to determine the status of people they suspect are illegal immigrants. The federal class-action claim contends that the law will lead to widespread racial profiling, infringes on the federal government's ability to set immigration policy and violates the Constitution's 1st and 4th amendments.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's chief counsel, Thomas Saenz, has been tapped to become president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the organization announced Tuesday. Saenz has been one of Villaraigosa's closest advisors since taking the post in August 2005, recently serving as the mayor's lead representative in negotiations with city labor unions over salary and benefit concessions to help close the city's $530-million budget gap.

Re "For remapping, state is among 'Dirty Dozen,' " Column, June 19 We take strong exception to columnist George Skelton's claim that civil rights groups oppose the "California Voters First Initiative" because we prefer to deal with "our political buddies in the Legislature" during redistricting. Skelton should be reminded that in 2001, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund sued these so-called buddies as a result of their failure to adequately consider the voting rights of minority communities.

Richard A. Ibanez, 97, a retired Los Angeles County Superior Court judge who specialized in family law and dependency court, died Nov. 30 of cardiac arrest and coronary artery disease at his home in Los Angeles, said his son Leon. The death was only recently reported. Ibanez, who had been an attorney in private practice since 1937, was appointed to the bench by Gov. Jerry Brown in 1975 and served through 1994. In 1968, he helped found the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and was a board member of the Latino advocacy group.

In a preview of California's looming court battle over same-sex marriage, scores of religious, civil rights and conservative groups filed briefs on both sides of the issue. Filing in support of the right of gays and lesbians to marry was a broad coalition of more than 250 organizations -- including the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, women's groups and Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist leaders.

The Latino civil rights establishment suffered a major setback last month when a panel of three federal judges unanimously dismissed a voting-rights suit filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The judges found that "California's political system is far from closed to Latinos" and that the contemporary record painted a "far more encouraging picture of racial voting attitudes" than it did a decade ago. This ruling is not only a milestone in Mexican American history, it also opens up an opportunity for ethnic Mexican organizations--and the mainstream foundations and corporations that fund them--to shift their priorities.

In regards to the article "Crash Victim's Coma Ends, But Not Troubles," (March 3), I would like to say to Mr. John Palacio of Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund that he is way off base when he says that this illegal (immigrant), a felon, lawbreaker and intruder, has like everyone else in this country the right to full and complete health care. Send this illegal (immigrant) to Mexico and see if the Mexican government will help him. What a fat chance. SAL JUAREZ Santa Ana The plight of Roberto Morales is indeed a tragedy.

It is interesting how often one story clarifies another. On April 28, you ran a front-page story, "Latinos Call on Rohrabacher to Apologize." The following day you had a story, on Page A4, titled "Legislators Ask Congress to Help State's Economy." In the first article, Latino leaders, ostensibly representing American citizens, urged Dana Rohrabacher to apologize for a remark he made about illegal aliens who, of course, are not citizens and are, presumably, outside the field of interest of a Latino citizen group.

Even as Latinos have gained political clout in recent years, the Los Angeles County Grand Jury, which investigates everything from capital murder cases to government waste, remains a throwback to an older, whiter Los Angeles. Latinos make up 20% of the Los Angeles City Council and county Board of Supervisors, but there isn't a single Latino among the 23 members of this year's grand jury. For a dozen years, Los Angeles County's predominant minority--now more than 40% of the population and nearly a quarter of the pool of eligible jurors--has been so underrepresented on the grand jury that a new statistical analysis concluded that the scant numbers could not have occurred by accident.

El Cambio, a communal ranch on the outskirts of Torreon in northern Mexico, is a good place to be born, with a canal running through it, a school for the children and bountiful harvests. It is a good place to grow, this huge ranch house full of family and good times. And it is where memory starts for Antonia Hernandez. As her story winds to the present, the beginning suddenly seems prophetic.