Founded in 1968, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) is the Latino equivalent to the NAACP: a source of legal defense for the Latina/o community in cases centered on education, state immigration laws, redistricting, employment discrimination, and immigrant rights. Unlike the NAACP, however, MALDEF was founded by Mexican American activists in conjunction with the larger philanthropic structure of the Ford Foundation—a relationship that has opened it up to controversy and criticism. In the first book to examine this little-known but highly influential organization, Benjamin Márquez explores MALDEF’s history and shows how it has thrived and served as a voice for the Latina/o community throughout its sixty years of operation. But he also looks closely at large-scale investments of the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and others, considering how their ties to MALDEF have influenced Mexican American and Latinx politics. Its story crafted from copious research into MALDEF and its benefactors, this book brings to light the influence of outside funding on the articulation of minority identities and the problems that come with creating change through institutional means.

During the Great Depression, a sense of total despair plagued the United States. Americans sought a convenient scapegoat and found it in the Mexican community. Laws forbidding employment of Mexicans were accompanied by the hue and cry to "get rid of the Mexicans!" The hysteria led pandemic repatriation drives and one million Mexicans and their children were illegally shipped to Mexico. Despite their horrific treatment and traumatic experiences, the American born children never gave up hope of returning to the United States. Upon attaining legal age, they badgered their parents to let them return home. Repatriation survivors who came back worked diligently to get their lives back together. Due to their sense of shame, few of them ever told their children about their tragic ordeal. Decade of Betrayal recounts the injustice and suffering endured by the Mexican community during the 1930s. It focuses on the experiences of individuals forced to undergo the tragic ordeal of betrayal, deprivation, and adjustment. This revised edition also addresses the inclusion of the event in the educational curriculum, the issuance of a formal apology, and the question of fiscal remuneration. "Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, the authors of Decade of Betrayal, the first expansive study of Mexican repatriation with perspectives from both sides of the border, claim that 1 million people of Mexican descent were driven from the United States during the 1930s due to raids, scare tactics, deportation, repatriation and public pressure. Of that conservative estimate, approximately 60 percent of those leaving were legal American citizens. Mexicans comprised nearly half of all those deported during the decade, although they made up less than 1 percent of the country's population. 'Americans, reeling from the economic disorientation of the depression, sought a convenient scapegoat' Balderrama and Rodríguez wrote. 'They found it in the Mexican community.'"--American History

From Barack Obama (Harvard and Chicago) to Bill and Hillary Clinton (Yale), many of our current national leaders emerged from the rarefied air of the nation's top law schools. The ideas taught there in one generation often shape national policy in the next. The trouble is, Walter Olson reveals in Schools for Misrule, our elite law schools keep churning out ideas that are catastrophically bad for America. From class action lawsuits that promote the right to sue anyone over anything, to court orders mandating the mass release of prison inmates; from the movement for slavery reparations, to court takeovers of school funding—all of these appalling ideas were hatched in legal academia. And the worst is yet to come. A fast-rising movement in law schools demands that sovereignty over U.S. legal disputes be handed over to international law and transnational courts. It is not by coincidence, Olson argues, that these bad ideas all tend to confer more power on the law schools' own graduates. In the overlawyered society that results, they are the ones who become the real rulers.

The first casebook of its kind, Latinos and the Law: Cases and Materials addresses a rich array of topics that are relevant to the largest and most diverse ethnic minority group in the United States. Ranging from the legal and social construction of race, ethnicity, and gender, to language, education, immigration, stereotyping, workplace discrimination, and rebellious lawyering, the new edition highlights the Spanish colonization of Latin America to provide further context for the subsequent colonial treatment of its people and leaders by the United States. Beginning with sociolegal histories of the main Latino/a subgroups, early sections of the book contextualize the Latino/a condition within the United States' historical conquest of and hegemony over Latin American peoples, as well as their centurial immigration to the United States. Updated materials on immigration include recent border-control initiatives and rhetoric, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and the controversial separation of asylum-seeking families from Central America. New materials on the workplace feature attacks on unionization, struggles over the minimum wage and fair pay, and one-sided abuse of H-2 visas. The book also contains new coverage of racial insults, stereotypes, popular culture, and inter-group tensions, including an emerging theory of multi-group oppression. Throughout, Latinos and the Law utilizes theoretical approaches that have proven highly useful in understanding Latinos, such as the white-over-black (or black-white) binary of race in the United States, similar concepts of critical race theory and "LatCrit" theory, and the internal colony model of postcolonial theory. With a wide selection of cases, statutes, documents, notes, questions, and bibliographic references, Latinos and the Law updates a vital resource for scholars, teachers, and students interested in understanding the largest and most diverse ethnic minority group in the United States.