Joaquin Guadalupe Avila
Joaquin Guadalupe Avila was a lawyer and civil rights advocate who helped break down barriers that kept Hispanic Americans from voting, getting jobs, and going to school.
Avila received a B.A. degree (1970) from Yale University and a J.D. (1973) from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review. Through meticulously crafted legal suits, Avila challenged election systems that functioned to disenfranchise and discriminate against minority voters and their chosen candidates.
Working in a private practice devoted exclusively to the protection of the voting rights of racial and ethnic minority communities, Avila used the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 to increase election fairness for minority voters. But as court decisions weakened the federal Voting Rights Act, Avila conceived of state voting rights acts as the pathway to strengthen minority voting rights. Avila litigated dozens of cases–twice before the United States Supreme Court–that challenged city councils, school and judicial districts, and other local jurisdictions that had tried to dilute the votes of racial and ethnic minorities by annexing white suburbs or electing their members at large instead of by district.
Avila was among a group of civil rights lawyers who in 1990 successfully challenged a reapportionment plan that left the five-member Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors without a member of Hispanic heritage, even though Hispanics comprised more than 27 percent of the county’s population by 1980. An amendment to the 1965 federal act for which he successfully lobbied in 1982 defined election practices as unfair if their effect could be proved to be discriminatory, regardless of their intent. He also drafted a 2001 California Voting Rights Act that provided even greater protection against discrimination at the polls.
He served as president and general counsel (1982–1985) of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). He also taught at Seattle University School of Law, where he was director of the National Voting Rights Advocacy Initiative. In 1996, Avila received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.