Tag: Suffrage

California’s Latino community has lost its greatest voting rights gladiator. Today, many of us in politics or those sitting as judges owe a tremendous debt to Joaquin Avila’s lifetime of trailblazing advocacy. He successfully won landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases challenging discriminatory electoral systems that diluted minority political power throughout California and the Southwest. He joined the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) in 1974. His leadership quickly led him to MALDEF’s top position as president and general counsel in 1982. Three Latino plaintiffs and Avila claimed that the at-large elections system was unconstitutional and violated the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. District elections, on the other hand, would divide Watsonville into geographic districts in which each would vote for its own representative. It stated that Latinos in California had been subjects of “ubiquitous historical and current racial discrimination.” Avila would use the Watsonville case to successfully challenge other electoral systems and redistricting plans, including the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in the early 1990s. But what is probably Avila’s most transformative work was designing the California Voting Rights Act of 2001, authored by then-state Sen. Richard Polanco. That law now has resulted in nearly 300 cities, school boards and other local governments switching to district elections, most without litigation, to allow more Latinos and other people of color to have more equitable representation.