Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund
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| Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund | |
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| Type | non-profit |
| Founded | 1968 |
| Headquarters | Los Angeles, California |
| Key people | John Trasvina, President & General Counsel |
| Industry | Civil rights |
| Employees | 50 |
| Website | www.maldef.org |
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) is a national non-profit civil rights organization formed in 1968 to protect the rights of Latinos in the United States.[1] Founded in Texas, it is currently headquartered in Los Angeles, California,[1] and currently maintains regional offices in Sacramento, San Antonio, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C.
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[edit] Background
One of the most important organizations to win legal victories for Mexican Americans in lawsuits for civil rights, women’s rights, educational issues, and voting rights, MALDEF incorporated in San Antonio in 1967. With the help of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), MALDEF got a $2.2 million grant from the Ford Foundation. This proved both helpful and harmful. The grant provided scholarships for more Mexican-American lawyers. But the Ford Foundation also used the grant as leverage to push MALDEF to relocate their headquarters out of the state and replace their executive director, in part because the foundation perceived some San Antonio staffers to be “militants.” MALDEF relocated to San Francisco and then Los Angeles but kept a regional office in San Antonio.
In its first three years, MALDEF handled mostly legal-aid cases. Then MALDEF took part in employment discrimination and school funding cases with the NAACP, including Supreme Court cases through friend-of-the-court briefs. Demetrio Rodriguez et al. v. San Antonio Independent School District was a defeat, with the court ruling against equal financing of education. White, et al. v. Regester, et al was an important victory. The case created single-member districts for Texas county, city council, and school board districts, ending at-large voting that had weakened minority voting power. In 1989 MALDEF won in Edgewood Independent School District v. State of Texas. The Texas Supreme Court found the state's financing of education unconstitutional and ordered the legislature to change it. This led to the “Robin Hood” funding system, where wealthier school districts had to give to a fund for poorer districts. This did not lead to educational equality, though, since wealthy districts could choose to spend even more on themselves.
[edit] Campaigns
MALDEF also set up an education-litigation project, filed on behalf of illegal aliens’ children barred from public schools. In Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court held these children protected by the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
This would not be the last time MALDEF filed suit for equal opportunity for education. In LULAC et al. v. Richards et al., a 1987 class-action lawsuit charged the State of Texas with discrimination against Mexican Americans in south Texas because of inadequate funding of colleges. In the University of Texas system, the UT campus in Austin (historically the campus attended by more of children of the state’s elites) actually received more funding than all other campuses combined. The jury did not find the state guilty of discrimination, but did find the legislature failed to establish "first-class" colleges and universities in elsewhere in the state. Looking to avoid further embarrassing suits, the legislature passed the South Texas Initiative to improve University of Texas System schools in Brownsville, Edinburg, San Antonio, and El Paso, and Texas A&M University System branches in Corpus Christi, Laredo, and Kingsville. The Border Region Higher Education Council helped pass the legislation and monitored the program's progress. Today the situation has somewhat improved, though UT Austin still receives a disproportionate share of funding.
MALDEF, along with the ACLU, sued Los Angeles County in 1981, accusing the county of arranging voting districts to frustrate Hispanic political power. Considerable changes in the district lines resulted.[1] To get a fair share of school funding for downtown Los Angeles schools, MALDEF filed a lawsuit in 1992 against the Los Angeles Unified School District.[1]
