This content was published on 08 May 2021 – 01:22 PM
Miami, May 8 (EFE) .- Cruz Reynoso, the son of Mexican agricultural workers and the first Latino to become a judge of the California Supreme Court, died this Friday at the age of 90, his family reported, without detailing the causes of death. .
Born in 1931, in Brea, California, Reynoso was the third of eleven siblings, children of two Mexican immigrants who came to the United States from Los Altos de Jalisco to work in the fields.
In 2000, Reynoso received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor awarded in the United States, from then-President Bill Clinton (1993-2001).
“Cruz Reynoso is the son of Mexican immigrants who spent their summers working with his family in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley,” Clinton said at the ceremony at the White House.
“As a child he loved to read that his classmates called him the teacher, the professor. Later, some told him to put aside his dreams of college and told him bluntly that they would never let you in,” recalled the Democrat .
Together with his brothers, the Latino had to study in segregated and low-quality schools, where only Mexicans studied with educational materials left by white children.
“They told us that they sent us to study in those schools because we did not speak English, but that reason never convinced me because we spoke English perfectly,” he told Efe in 2017.
He noted that his family had to fight battles against injustice and discrimination.
Reynoso worked in the fields since he was a child and at the same time he did not stop studying until he graduated from the University of California Berkeley, from where he emerged as the only Hispanic in his class.
Since then he has become a Latino pioneer in the state court system.
The attorney was the first Hispanic director of the California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) organization, which provided legal aid to poor rural workers in the state, and he was also one of the first Hispanic law professors.
One of the highlights of his career came when in 1982 he became a California Supreme Court justice, the first Latino to cross this milestone, after being appointed by Governor Jerry Brown during his first term (1975-1983).
He was also a member for years at the University of California Davis School of Law and vice chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. EFE
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