Lawyers Review Problems Of Chicanos in Southwest

"We're the best friends President Nixon has. We are trying to help fulfill his dream of making the rural areas of this country better places in which to live. But every time we try to do this, we get into trouble with the White House," Cruz Reynoso, head of the California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), told an audience of 250 at the first Chicano Lawyers Symposium at the Law School yesterday.

Reynoso, along with James De Anda, William Higgs '58, Vicente T. Ximenes and Mario Obledo, were invited to Cambridge by the Chicano Law Students Association and the Law School to discuss the legal, economic, social, and educational problems of Chicanos, the nation's second largest minority group. Reyueso, De Anda, and Higgs spoke yesterday; Ximenes and Obledo will speak today at 1 p. m. in Pound 107.

As head of the CRLA, Reynoso has been concerned specifically with the problems of migrant farm workers, including legal assistance. "The farm workers never had the use of lawyers. Our organization has begun to provide that," he said. "But just when we are trying to get the farm workers the basic ammonites of life we get into trouble. And the complaints seem to come up only when it involves poor people," he added.

The CRLA has been attacked by Governor Ronald Reagan because it has tried to change some of the basic state policies concerning the farm workers. "But not once did I hear the Governor call a press conference to complain about the growers when they were trying to change policy," Reynoso said.

"We go into courts to do nothing more than to make sure everyone in this country obeys the law, including the governor and the growers," he added.

De Anda said the situation is quite similar in Texas. Talking specifically about school desegregation, De Anda said: "Unlike blacks, Mexican Americans have never had specific statutes drawn up to exclude them, but custom and tradition still keep them in segregated schools."

Chicanos have not yet been able to change the status of their segregated schools because state authorities classify them as white. "In one case, the judge wondered how Mexican Americans could be discriminated against if they were white," De Anda said.

Higgs, who is legal counsel to Reies Lopez Tijerina and his Alianza Federal De Pueblos Libres, discussed the history of the land grants issue in New Mexico, tracing the laws concerning them from Spanish Colonial times, through the United States' aggressive actions on Mexico in 1845-1848, the Santa Fe Ring, the U. S. government's Court of Private Land Claims, up until the present. "Whereas the Indian still owns some of his land, the Chicano population, in one way or the other, has lost nearly all the land rightfully belonging to him," Higgs said.