“We should empower common people to do uncommon things.”
- Cesar Chavez
When I was six years old my mother's union went on strike. We were at the union hall until after midnight one night and I did not understand why. The next day my older brother and I joined my mother and her co-workers on the picket line and I still did not understand why.
Years later, I came to understand that we were waiting to hear whether the negotiating committee had come to an agreement with management. I came to understand that a work stoppage and picketing are two very powerful tools workers have over their employer. When I applied to law school, it was to protect, preserve and promote these basic rights of the workers.
When I was fifteen, I drove two drunk friends home from a party. I borrowed another friend's car because I was the only person at the party who had not been drinking. I did not have a license, nor did I have a safe ride home for myself. After dropping everyone off, I drove to another friend's house in hopes of finding a ride. At one point a police cruiser pulled up behind me and followed me for more than a mile. As I pulled off of the major road onto a darker residential street, the lights on the police cruiser lit up.
Before the officer could tell me why I had been pulled over, I acknowledged that I did not have a license and the car was not mine. I was arrested and taken to a juvenile facility.
To this day, I do not know why I was pulled over. I know that I was a racial minority in a nice car in an upscale, predominantly “White” neighborhood. Did the officer have a reasonable articulable suspicion to stop me? Was I selected as a result of racial profiling? How could this situation have been different? When I arrived at law school, these were questions I began to ask, and hope to address.
In college, I worked as a union organizer with the AFL-CIO. I was in the office one day when I received a phone call from a member's wife—she was frantic. Her husband, an active and loyal union member, had been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As we attempted to calm her, we began to piece the story together.
He worked two jobs. One was his union janitorial job a few nights a week; the other was a non-union janitorial job the rest of the week. The night before we received the phone call, the woman's husband was working at his second job and he injured himself. A co-worker called the supervisor and relayed the incident. At this point the story became fuzzy, and it is unclear who called whom. However, what is clear is that ICE arrested our injured member, and he was deported.
Rather than help him get treatment, the supervisor reported the employee to ICE. I will never forget that feeling of helplessness. The supervisor knew he was an activist, knew that he was a union member, knew that he was undocumented. We knew what the supervisor had done was wrong, but we could do nothing about it. When I volunteer with Voz, a day laborer's organization in Portland, I think about that worker and his wife and family, and work to ensure that it will not happen again.
As a woman, and as a Latina, my mother worked particularly hard with my dad to provide a life for their family. When I look back now at the courage and fortitude it must have taken to support a strike, I am proud, not only of my mother, but of that legacy. It is this legacy that drives me to ensure that others are free to assert their rights.
My experience with police officers has shown me that empowering people with a basic understanding of their rights can have a tremendous effect on how they interact with authority figures. What can communities do to empower people to both question and respect authority? Losing the union activist at the hands of management taught me that workers' rights are worthless without basic human rights and liberties. To that end, the work I will be doing will give people that basic understanding as well as protect the rights upon which the Republic was built.
Our basic rights are being eroded. If we are to stem that tide, we must educate, advocate and litigate at every turn. As a stipend recipient my work will serve specific constituencies as a means to an end, for where liberty is denied to some, justice is not possible; where rights are not known, they will be eliminated. I have not simply a desire, but a responsibility to insure that the world in which I choose to live is not the world in which we are living.
Major League Baseball makes the first major change to the universal cap in more than 50 years. The caps, formerly 100% wool, are now 100% polyester. Granted, it's still not organic cotton, but it's something. 
