By Andrew Cohen
The silent responses spoke volumes.
During the annual Graciela Olivárez Latinas in the Legal Academy Workshop (GO LILA) held recently at Berkeley Law, former UCLA dean Rachel Moran asked the audience: “How many of you are the only Latinas on your faculty?” A number of hands went up. “How many of you are one of two?” A few hands went up. “How many of you are one of three?” A couple hands went up. “Anyone here one of four or more?” No hands went up.
“That’s problematic — we’re always an outlier because of these demographics of the faculty population,” Moran said. “We’re nearly invisible in so many aspects of American life … and in law schools we’re a tiny part of the population. So you deal with struggles not being normative in your own institution.”
Dozens of Latina law professors from across the country gathered to discuss such challenges and brainstorm strategies for collective and professional development. The two-day event featured plenary discussions, a keynote address, issue-focused breakout sessions, and networking activities from writing sessions to painting.
While Latine students make up about 14% of the law student population, diversity in faculty and senior-level leadership positions — especially Latina representation — lags far behind. Latinas comprise just 1.6% of tenured and tenure-track law professors and only a handful have served as law school deans.
Panelists addressed the need to prod law schools to hire and nurture talented underrepresented faculty, in particular those who bring perspectives historically excluded from the legal academy. Berkeley Law Professor Victoria Plaut, UC Berkeley’s vice provost for the faculty, recalled being asked to co-chair an equity in student experience task force charged with delivering four action items for the campus.
“As we started to dig in, we realized it was an impossible task,” she said. “We couldn’t do just four things, we identified needs for institutional transformation across every facet of the university. What was a four-bullet point assignment turned into a report with 60-plus recommendations, some with multiple parts.”
Across several areas, panelists described the series of structural problems that Latina academics face, which result in careerlong challenges.
With little leadership or representation in law school academia, these barriers include having to uncover that such a career is possible. Once in law school, Latinas are an often isolated group. And when they reach a position to teach, they face institutional hurdles to climb into leadership positions.
Workshop participants described how they’re often torn between mentoring a growing Latine student body and other underrepresented groups and taking on additional faculty job requirements. Frequently, there’s not widespread institutional acknowledgement that such efforts are a form of leadership, nor a recognition that faculty priorities should include supporting students from many backgrounds.
“Who’s in the room making faculty hiring and curriculum decisions is really important,” Plaut said. “Participate in faculty governance to help shape the policies of your institution. It can feel like invisible and uncredited work serving on such committees, and it can be a hard position to be in, yet it has to be done and done well.”
Swimming upstream
The professors also discussed growing attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at universities and elsewhere, and on teaching critical race theory. They noted how gatherings such as GO LILA wouldn’t be possible had people retreated amid backlash to similar issues in the past, how Latina academics need to work collaboratively to help one another, and how vital it is to show students they too can be leaders because — not in spite — of their background.
One participant described needing a police escort to her classroom after receiving threats from a neo-Nazi group for addressing race issues in class. Another said she was stopped by a campus security officer when returning her robe after her school’s commencement; when she asked two white colleagues of a similar age if the same thing happened to them, they said no.
Berkeley Law’s Clinical Program helped navigate such challenges by coordinating and leading conference discussions. International Human Rights Law Clinic Co-Director Roxanna Altholz ’99 and Clinical Program Director Laura Riley co-chaired the planning committee, leading this year’s workshop and helping it come to fruition. Policy Advocacy Clinic Interim Deputy Director Rachel Wallace, Clinical Professor Stephanie Campos-Bui ’14, and Clinical Supervising Attorney Mariana Acevedo Nuevo LL.M. ’20 served on the planning committee and led different activities.
“Professor Graciela Olivárez, for whom the workshop is named, is quoted as saying, ‘Go, you’ve got a lot to contribute. And so you don’t fall in the water, we’ll lay the plank down for you,’” Altholz said. “This year’s planning committee took those words to heart and aspired to create enduring connections among participants that will serve to scaffold creative and impactful careers.”
Riley co-led a session on teaching evaluations in which participants discussed how and why aspects of student evaluations carry implicit bias, and ways to counteract them.
“Most student evaluations are not designed to elicit information that would truly be helpful to teaching,” she said. “They need more questions that let students actually talk about their experience in the classroom, not comment on pedagogy. It’s a design and use problem.”
The session offered myriad suggestions — including tailoring evaluation questions more specifically to what is being assessed, explicitly acknowledging the possibility of bias in them, considering evaluation questions that inquire about the school’s mission, and practical ways to work in institutions to reform evaluations if necessary.
Discussing issues Latinas face in teaching evaluations and dynamics generally, participants noted tensions between developing pedagogical tools and perceptions in the classroom. They offered a range of recommendations, including preparation and teaching excellence, course expectation transparency, ways to encourage high response rates, and trying to ensure that evaluations aren’t handed out right before final exams amid peak student stress.
Compelling keynote
U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judge Ana de Alba ’07 brought some audience members to tears and all of them to a standing ovation during a heartfelt keynote address that echoed some of their obstacles.
The daughter of Mexican immigrant farm workers, de Alba recalled summers toiling in the fields with her parents as early as age 6, lacking access to clean water, and seeing supervisors harass her mother. She recounted helping her mother clean houses in which the owners would follow them from room to room, worried they would steal something.
A standout student, de Alba got scholarships to UC Berkeley and Berkeley Law, and worked 15 to 30 hours a week as a student to help make ends meet.
“I count myself as extremely lucky to have attended both, even though I found it to be incredibly isolating. Most classmates never grew up teetering on the edge of poverty … I remember one sending a brief she’d written to her father, a lawyer, to review, while my own father could barely read. Unlike many of my peers, there was no one to offer guidance on my work.”
She returned to California’s Central Valley after graduating, representing low-wage and immigrant workers, convinced her firm to ramp up its pro bono commitment, and became the first Latina in its 63-year history and the only woman among its 11 partners. She was appointed to a Fresno County Superior Court judgeship, then to the federal bench as the Eastern District of California’s first Latina judge, and confirmed in November 2023 to the Ninth Circuit.
At a professional lunch event early in her career, de Alba was uncertain of the table setting protocol and took the bread belonging to the person beside her. She recalled how curt the woman was in pointing out her mistake, and how hollow it made her feel.
“I’d gone to a great law school and had many achievements, yet grabbing the wrong bread made me wonder if I picked the wrong profession,” de Alba said. “I called my brother Fernando, and to paraphrase he said, ‘I don’t know anyone who outworks you. By the time you were in middle school you had a better education than both our parents. Don’t let anyone with rude table manners make you doubt yourself.’”
A decade later, de Alba returned to the same event — as its keynote speaker — and saw the same woman there. During her talk de Alba told the story of what happened, without mentioning names, while discussing the importance of eliminating bias and of women professionals actively supporting each other.
“There are many ways that people subtly let us know they don’t want us here, but we didn’t get this far to just stop at the door,” she said. “I realized I possessed all the skills to be a successful attorney, they were just packaged differently than most of my colleagues. We need to let our students know their experiences matter and encourage them not to shy away from bringing their perspectives to the table.”
