On Tuesday evening, California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) launched its 60th anniversary celebration with a live kickoff event highlighting decades of legal advocacy and community impact. The event traced CRLA’s history, from its founding during the civil rights movement to its continued role in addressing inequality across California, and concluded with a panel discussion reflecting on both past victories and ongoing challenges.
Founded in 1966, CRLA emerged at a time when access to legal representation was largely reserved for those with financial means. Its founding attorneys set out to change that reality by providing free legal services to individuals who had been denied representation or could not afford it.
“CRLA took on that anti democratic culture where people with wealth and privilege could access protection under the law, and those without wealth couldn’t,” said Jessica Manriquez Jewell, President and CEO at CRLA.
CRLA’s early work was marked by bold legal action against entrenched systems of inequality. In the late 1960s, its advocacy was widely criticized as radical, with opposition coming from powerful political figures, including then-California Governor Ronald Reagan.
In 1967, just one year after its founding, CRLA filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Harvey Morris, a disabled farmworker, challenging the state’s unlawful defunding of Medi-Cal. The case resulted in the reinstatement of health care coverage for 1.5 million Californians. Reagan later attempted to defund CRLA in response, but those efforts ultimately failed, allowing the organization to continue its work.
As CRLA celebrated its 60th-anniversary event, it also included a live panel discussion featuring board member Honoria Carrasco, CRLA immigration attorney Gabriella Navarro, and Executive Vice President and Deputy CEO Marisol Aguilar.
In the panel, they reflected on what brought them to CRLA and how the organization has evolved.
For Carrasco, she was drawn to CRLA due to the need of having to serve as a translator for the people around her from a very early age.
“I also wanted to come here because as I always say, I speak an Indigenous language and I always use that to support my indigenous community to support them with language…Ever since I was a young girl, I would support my mom, and since my mom always speaks Mixteco, she is very limited with Spanish, so ever since I was a very young girl, she would tell me, ‘could you please go ask this in Spanish,’” said Carrasco.
Similarly, Aguilar also decided to join CRLA due to having to translate for other people in an effort to bridge the language understanding gap.
“My path here to CRLA started ever since I was a young girl, just like Honorina, I needed to translate for several people, so I was really young. From a very young age, I started seeing my mom, who would advocate for changes at school…Seeing how she was a community leader, that she could talk to other people, and that together they could create a change that would help the community within the school. I always get that with me. That image stayed with me when I was a teenager in high school,” said Aguilar.
As CRLA enters its sixth decade, the panelists reflected on the evolution of the organization.
“60 years ago, the majority of the attorneys were white English-speaking males. And now, we have a lot more diversity. Our attorneys are also coming from the communities that we serve. There’s a lot more linguistic diversity in the attorneys that work here at CRLA,” said Aguilar.
Navarro noted that it is no coincidence that the panel is made up entirely of women, and although they have finally gained that presence, significant work remains.
“It’s not surprising that on this panel, we’re all women. I think that what we’re facing right now is the fact that we’ve always wanted to have a voice and a seat at the table,” said Navarro. We now have it. But we still have a lot of work to do. We have to constantly be reminding people that we are equals, and it’ll take time for that to happen.”
The meaning of justice has a very different connotation to everyone; to Carrasco and Navarro, justice means allowing advocacy for everybody regardless of language or status.
“For me, justice means that people are treated fairly not only at work, as to linguistically; to treat people with justice means to interpretation in their own language. That they are being given fair treatment wherever they are in any area, for me, that is justice,” said Carrasco.
Navarro agreed and shared a story of the first case she ever handled as a lawyer. A civil rights case where a man was killed, she noted in that case, there was a monetary award that felt “empty,” mentioning that the real award was the changes in policy.
“One of the other things we were able to accomplish is change policies in the way that they deal with people that are mentally ill, and it took groups that partnered with the local law enforcement so that they could have a voice in the community as well,” Navarro said.
Navarro also stated that there are injustices happening every day, and with every case that fights those injustices, there is a justice in itself.
“I’m witnessing that on a daily basis in immigration court when people are just denied their right to be able to advocate for themselves, have an attorney be able to seek asylum when they fear returning to their home country,” said Navarro. “I hope with every little case that we’re working towards that eventually it’ll bring us back to just the fundamental right that everybody has the right to have their day in court.”
