Enrique Lopez, Latino Leader, Is Dead at 65

Enrique (Hank) Lopez, an attorney, writer and teacher who devoted his life and legal skills to Latino causes, died last Sunday of a heart attack.

He was 65 and died at his West Hollywood home, said Lila Lee Silvern, a longtime friend.

Lopez had just been released from the hospital and was preparing to fly to Chicago for a meeting of the American Bar Assn.’s Committee on World Order, to which he had been appointed last month.

Believed the first Chicano graduate of Harvard Law School, Lopez was born in Chihuahua, Mexico. His father was an illiterate soldier in Pancho Villa’s army who moved his family to Denver when Enrique was a toddler.

Silvern graduated with honors from the University of Denver and did graduate work at the University of Mexico before entering Harvard on a scholarship.

He had been told in high school, Silvern recalled, that “Harvard was an impossibility for a Mexican boy. Even middle-class white children couldn’t go there.”

After graduation in 1948, he was encouraged by his teachers to come to Los Angeles where a burgeoning Latin community needed his talents and his penchant for activism.

He went to work here that same year with the state Labor Relations Board and then entered private practice. But soon, and for the rest of his life, he periodically interrupted his legal work to write and teach.

Lopez became a friend and biographer of Katherine Anne Porter and the author of “The Harvard Mystique,” a celebration of the power of his alma mater. His other books and articles explored such disparate topics as differing sex behavior among Jews and Gentiles and a study of how members of a Uruguay soccer team turned to cannibalism to survive after an air crash in the Andes.

Lopez represented American investors attracted to Mexican oil production.