FEATURE STORY — May/June 2008

A Place in History

Virginia Martinez has devoted much of her career to advocating for Latinos, including leading the fight to create Chicago’s first majority Latino aldermanic ward

By Kevin McKeough

When Virginia Martinez’s ’72 LAS father Manuel Martinez was 14 years old, he came to the United States from Mexico by himself, walking across the border to California, where he picked crops.

Having come much further than she once thought possible, Martinez now dedicates herself to working on behalf of people like her father. An attorney with the Chicago office of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a Los Angeles-based Latino advocacy organization, she monitors and responds to actions regarding Latinos taken by state and local governments throughout the Midwest, particularly those relating to immigration.

Her return to MALDEF last February (she previously worked for the organization from 1976-82) brings Martinez full circle at a time of increased public, media and government reaction against illegal immigration—from the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps patrolling the United States/Mexican border to Lou Dobbs inveighing against illegal immigrants on CNN to states implementing laws and policies aimed at illegal immigrants (such as prohibiting undocumented immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses).

“The Latino community is under siege,” comments Martinez, who has spent more than three decades advocating for Latinos, women and children. “It’s not just undocumented people. If I’m walking down the street, nobody can tell if I’m undocumented or not. If they see a brown face, they may react to that. If they hear a [Latino-sounding] name, they may react to that.”

Sisse Brimber/Getty Images

Proof that she could succeed

Martinez, 58, grew up on Chicago’s West Side, where her father moved after coming to the city to work in its steel mills, and later at a printing company. Her mother Juanita raised the family’s six children, then worked as a nurse’s aid and on an assembly line.

After graduating from Harrison High School in the Little Village neighborhood, Martinez earned an associate’s degree through a work-study program at Loop College (now Harold Washington College) and then worked as a secretary at an insurance company. The catalyst for her career came when she took a weekend job as a secretary at a law firm in Pilsen, where she lived with her family.

Seeing people in her community in need of legal services—often because they had signed contracts in English despite being unable read that language—and the social activism of the late 1960s motivated Martinez to enroll at UIC. She studied sociology with plans to become a social worker, attending school in the morning and working at the law firm in the afternoon.

UIC provided “a good education,” says Martinez. It was “a good experience for me to be in a diverse environment that still valued what I thought and valued the experiences of people there.

“UIC [also] allowed me to continue my education but still remain in my community,” she adds. “It was that grounding that allowed me to be successful.”

Even so, Martinez struggled with self-doubt. In high school, one teacher told her and her classmates that they wouldn’t be able to compete with people from Chicago’s North Shore suburbs—a realm so remote from Martinez’s experience that she didn’t even know where or what it was. That comment continued to lurk in her mind as she began her post-high-school education.

“Being able to make it at UIC and graduate with honors was proof that, yes, I could succeed, and there were people from the North Shore there with whom I competed,” remarks Martinez. Her UIC experience gave her the confidence to attend law school at the suggestion of Honoratus Lopez, one of the law firm’s attorneys, despite her mother’s skepticism.

“She said, ‘Why? You have a good job,’” Martinez recalls. “I told her, ‘I’m on the wrong side of the desk. Secretaries do a lot of the work that attorneys get credit for.’”

Martinez graduated from DePaul University Law School in 1975, and that year became one of the first two Latinas licensed to practice law in Illinois. She struggled to be taken seriously in her unprecedented role. During one court appearance, a clerk mistook her for a secretary and told her she couldn’t argue motions. Even Martinez’s own clients at the community law office where she began her career asked her if she was a real attorney.

Despite these frustrations, her commitment to social change—combined with an admitted stubborn streak—kept her going. “I felt that there were problems I could make a contribution to solving, so I wasn’t going to let somebody stop me because I didn’t look the way they thought I should look,” she says. “That’s why whenever I’m asked to talk to kids—high school students, college students, law students, anyone—I tell them, ‘If you want to do something, don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t.’”

“They cut up Pilsen”

A year after finishing law school, Martinez headed west to work in the San Francisco office of MALDEF, returning to Chicago in 1980 to help open the organization’s Midwest office. She soon began work on a case that would literally put her mark on the map, a pair of lawsuits challenging the configuration of city aldermanic wards and state legislative districts on the grounds that they had been deliberately drawn to divide the vote in Latino neighborhoods. “They cut up Pilsen,” states Martinez. “The boundary line was drawn at Ashland Avenue, so the community would be divided in two. There were no Latino aldermen; there were no Latino state legislators.”

The lawsuits—which were combined with similar cases filed by African American and Republican plaintiffs—resulted in a re-drawing of the voting district boundaries to create the first majority Latino aldermanic ward and state legislative district.

“If there’s anyone who deserves a place in history as far as the development of Chicago’s Latino community is concerned, it’s Virginia, because she tore down the wall that prevented Latinos from penetrating the political arena,” says Miguel del Valle, city clerk of Chicago, who was the head of a social services organization when Martinez recruited him to be lead plaintiff in the state legislative redistricting case. Del Valle himself credits that experience with prompting his own entry into electoral politics, which led to him serving 20 years as Illinois’ first Hispanic state senator.

Returning to UIC

Over the next 15 years, Martinez held leadership and counsel positions with several advocacy organizations; ran her own law practice; advised Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan and Commonwealth Edison on Latino issues; did stints as a local television and newspaper commentator; and twice ran (unsuccessfully) for Chicago alderman.

Martinez returned to UIC in 1998 to work at the International Center for Health Leadership Development, where she became director in 2000. Initially funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the program brought together health professionals and community advocates to learn how to work collaboratively and establish partnerships. “You can’t solve health issues just by training doctors,” notes Martinez. When the Center closed in 2007, Martinez rejoined MALDEF as a legislative staff attorney.

In the right place

At the Midwest regional office, which encompasses 11 states, Martinez monitors state and local legislation, policies and regulations affecting Latinos, especially the growing number of proposals aimed at restricting illegal immigrants. She drafts position papers responding to these actions, distributing them to government officials and the media. Martinez also represents MALDEF in everything from television appearances to meetings with community organizations.

One recent morning begins with Martinez attending a gathering of an immigrants-rights organization to help the group plan its initiatives. She then meets in the MALDEF offices with a Chicago alderman who is seeking to increase his knowledge of issues that affect the Latino community. That’s followed by a meeting with women’s advocates in the northern Illinois town of Waukegan, where anti-illegal-immigrant sentiment is running so high that Latino women don’t report domestic violence for fear of being arrested.

“Sometimes I feel overwhelmed,” she admits. “On the other hand, I know this is where I’m supposed to be. There’s this sense of hope, an energy in the Latino community, but it is a very difficult time for everybody.”