Latinos and the Law

This article uses Critical Race Theory and LatCrit Theory as analytical and discursive frameworks.The United States is a society that is crisscrossed by law, legality, and illegality. Law — with its legal structures, such as courts and legislatures, its strictures about social norms and values, its stilted jargon and rigid hierarchies about who or what matters and who or what doesn’t — determines many borders and boundaries of our lives, just as it did for our antepasados, our ancestors. Historically, in the U.S. law is revered as a force and an instrument for emancipation, justice, autonomy, and equality. Paradoxically law must also be recognized as a force and an instrument for oppression, injustice, subordination, and inequality. For example, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted federal citizenship to thousands of Mexicans who gradually gained full citizenship through the admission of the various states. The conquest of half of Mexico’s territory in 1848 is both a story of an unjust war and one of new beginnings for many who became U.S. citizens and whose children and grandchildren lived to enjoy lives of opportunity and improved fortunes.The push and pull of justice and injustice, these contradictory tensions in the law, deepen our understanding of what it means to make a democracy, the broader theme for this essay about Latinos and the Law. On the one hand, making a democracy has nation‐building dimensions exemplified by the consolidation of the landmass comprising the transcontinental federation of states. On the other hand, making a democracy also encompasses the project on cultural citizenship, which, in the words of Professors Renato Rosaldo and William V. Flores, is the right to be different (in terms of race, ethnicity, or native language) with respect to the norms of the dominant national community, without compromising one’s right to belong, in the sense of participating in the nation‐state’s democratic processes. The section on land begins with the U.S.Mexico War that, as mentioned above, ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and concludes with a description of the marital property rules corresponding to the ten community property states, which are also a vestige of the Spanish and Mexican civil law systems. The section on water briefly describes the raging disputes over the rivers in the west and the corresponding compacts and agreements to divide the scarce water in a region that is largely desert. This section on water and law also describes the acequia culture of New Mexico, a quasi‐legal system of irrigation ditches and water management that has persisted and proven resilient, since the earliest days of the Spanish occupation.The final section on law and housing briefly examines the mortgages that were made available under the G.I. Bill after World War II and the extent to which Latino veterans were benefited. Recently, many immigrants have been forced to live in border communities called colonias that lack basic utilities, blighting the lives of workers and their families. On the other hand, the last decades saw millions of Latino families reach for the American Dream by moving into the ranks of homeowners. However, when the financial system collapsed in 2008, the subprime mortgage debacle fell heaviest on Latino and African American communities that had been targeted by the megabanks with predatory lending practices.