2 Lawyers Team Up to Tackle Problems of the Latino Community

Marco Abarca knew Lee Pliscou by reputation long before they ever met. Abarca was a student at Yale when a classmate, a farm worker from the Imperial Valley, told him how Pliscou had become a teen-age folk hero for his disputes with high school authorities there.

“My friend had read about Lee for years. He came to Yale because of Lee. He said that if Yale was good enough for Lee Pliscou, it was good enough for him,” Abarca recalled.

The remark stuck with Abarca, who was a rebel in his own way.

Six years later Abarca, the product of a Denver barrio, and Pliscou, the son of a civil liberties gadfly, finally met when together they opened the California Rural Legal Assistance office in Oxnard.

That was Sept. 16, 1989, Mexican Independence Day.

Since then, the two young lawyers have infused local Latino activism with a shot of energy that has resulted in 12 months of controversy and accomplishment, both large and small.

In April, they exposed the alleged abuse of dozens of Mexican laborers at a flower ranch in Somis, a case that federal attorneys now describe as the most far-reaching slavery prosecution ever filed by the United States. Reporters from London, New York and Mexico City called for interviews.

They helped save the homes of more than 200 poor Latino families in Oxnard’s La Colonia area after a landlord had announced he was leaving a government subsidy program and was doubling or tripling their rents.

They have submitted seven farm labor cases to Cal/OSHA, the state worker safety agency, and all have been upheld as serious violations of law. One contractor was cited twice and then fined an unusually high $7,500 for providing field workers with the type of short-handled hoe that was banned two decades ago because it caused crippling back injuries.

“They’ve been putting together cases complete with photographs,” Cal OSHA spokesman Rick Rice said. “Complaints are generally not that well put together.”

Abarca and Pliscou have also enlisted a small cadre of private attorneys who now take farm worker cases without pay except for legal fees awarded by the courts.

They have successfully petitioned the city of Oxnard to print in Spanish as well as English the cards citizens must fill out before speaking at city board meetings.

And they have joined commissions and committees countywide and taken key roles in causes ranging from pesticide control to voter registration to low-cost housing and improved health care for the poor.

Along with the big issues, they have performed what Abarca calls “the nickel-and-dime stuff,” intervening on behalf of workers who are sold faulty products and calling employers to clear up disputes over wages.

“They have come to the meetings. They’ve learned and they’ve contributed,” said Sal Gonzalez, city housing director in Oxnard and a member of several Latino groups.

“They have helped the community focus on the issues,” he said. “Oftentimes, people sit around a table and complain, but they have a hard time putting together factual information. Lee and Marco gather that information. We say, ‘Hey, there’s something wrong.’ They say, ‘Here are some potential solutions.’ ”

Abarca, 27, is eloquent and enthusiastic. Pliscou is a quietly deliberate 33-year-old. They have melded their contrasting styles into a low-budget team that has made an impact beyond the scope of their mandate to provide legal assistance to migrant laborers.

Still, their biggest case so far is a classic of alleged farm labor abuse. As a result of complaints filed by the two lawyers with federal authorities, flower rancher Edwin M. Ives, six ranch overseers and an alleged smuggler were charged in May with enslaving hundreds of Mexican laborers at a 50-acre compound on Somis Road during the 1980s.

The Ives case, however, has also produced the young team’s most embarrassing episode. By joining federal prosecutors at a June meeting with former Ives employees in Mexico, Abarca handed the rancher’s attorneys a weapon with which they hope to undercut the government’s case.

Defense lawyers claim that prosecutors improperly shared information with Abarca, who is representing 26 former Ives employees in a civil suit for back pay. They say they will press the issue in court this fall.

There is some question, too, about how successful Abarca and Pliscou have been in penetrating the consciousness of Oxnard’s predominantly non-Latino power structure.

Mayor Nao Takasugi says that he never heard of Pliscou and knows Abarca only because he recently appeared before the City Council to ask that more low-cost housing be included in a new plan for Oxnard’s future. Takasugi said he thinks the plan is fine as it is.

Abarca and Pliscou say they have only begun to lay the foundation for proposals to come. Pliscou says Oxnard is the city where he wants to marry and raise a family. Abarca says it is the best place in the world to be right now. Both say they have embraced Oxnard so completely because of forces that have defined their lives for many years.

Abarca, whose parents immigrated from Mexico to Denver and still run a restaurant there, was the brightest star of a barrio high school and the only Denver graduate admitted to Yale in 1981.

“When you grow up and you’re the one person in the entire system who makes it, there is a feeling that you are responsible to your community,” Abarca said. “It’s outrageous to see the failure all around you. I didn’t know anyone who had graduated from college. But then you see that with your skills, you can do something about it.”

Before graduating with honors from Yale, Abarca studied the Indians for a year in Peru, pursuing his father’s lifelong passion for Latin American anthropology. Then he came west to Stanford Law School, partly because it was in California.

“In this world there are always places where things are happening. Paris in the ‘20s, Mexico City in the ‘30s and New York after World War II,” he said. “Southern California right now is that cutting-edge place. And Oxnard in its own way is at the vanguard of the change.”

The way Abarca sees it, multicultural America is being invented in his adopted city right now. The ancient languages of Mexico can be heard on the streets. Cultures he could only experience as an outsider in rural Mexico walk through the door of his spare B Street office when Zapotec and Mixtec laborers need help.

“It’s a true adventure all the time,” Abarca said. “We get to experience a world that is not really ours. It’s a world of migrant farm workers and honky-tonk bars, of illegal aliens and smugglers--of people living on the edge. I’ve lived all over the world, and this is the most interesting place by far. And it’s small enough so I can participate in it.”

Pliscou shares with Abarca the feeling that he is now where he can make a difference. It is a good feeling, he says, after years of standing out for one reason or another but never really fitting in.

At Holtville High School in the Imperial Valley, Pliscou was the valedictorian of his graduating class, a good athlete and the president of the student body. But he was also Norm Pliscou’s kid and it meant that he tended to see the world differently than those around him.

Holtville was a conservative farming community and Norm Pliscou’s views--repeated in letters to newspapers as far away as Los Angeles--were radical enough to prompt the San Diego chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union to name an award after him.

His son followed along, filing suit against his high school because it charged $5 for a student body card and denied students who refused to pay the right to vote in campus elections.

Lee Pliscou also prompted the cancellation of spring sports during his senior year by invoking a U.S. Supreme Court decision and refusing to cut his long hair before a tennis match. His coach resigned in protest and so did the rest of the school’s coaching staff.

Pliscou then boycotted his own graduation after the principal insisted that the student try out to be the commencement speaker, breaking a 50-year tradition of granting that honor to the valedictorian.

“As a family, we were kind of isolated from the rest of the community because of this gadfly syndrome,” Pliscou said. “As a result, we developed a belief that the nuclear family was extremely important, and our ability to trust and reach out was pretty limited.”

After graduating from Yale, then Hastings Law School in San Francisco in 1982, Pliscou joined the U.S. Coast Guard.

“I had the idea that the practice of law should be helpful to the world, and it didn’t seem to me that putting on a three-piece suit and going to work for some environmentally apathetic company was going to do that.”

Not until his father died in 1986 and Pliscou went home to Holtville did he come to grips with what he would do for the rest of his life.

“For so long I was my dad’s son,” he said. “When he died, I had to figure out where I fit in. And I realized that in some ways I am like him. I’m committed to leaving this world a little bit better than I found it.”

Pliscou joined the CRLA in nearby El Centro, worked there for two years, left for a lucrative private practice in West Los Angeles, then returned to public-interest law at the CRLA’s Oxnard office last year.

“Here, I’ve found this feeling of an extended family which I lacked when I was growing up,” he said. “This is growth in the real world. I’m learning how to have friends and be part of a community.”

Oxnard has taken to Pliscou and to Abarca as well.

“They have both contributed a great deal to raising the consciousness of our Latino community to legal and civil rights issues,” said Marco Vargas, executive director of El Concilio, a Latino community service group in Oxnard.

Both Abarca and Pliscou are advisers to Padres Unidos, which is made up mostly of Latino parents from Oxnard who are concerned about the quality of their children’s education.

And Abarca is an active member of a local Latino group participating in a statewide effort to change the way local school boards and city councils are elected, Vargas said.

In his most public display of activism, Abarca helped organize a large rally three months ago where Latinos protested an Oxnard plan for future development because it provided for little new low-income housing.

“That was one of the greatest evenings of my life,” said the young lawyer. “We had 250 people out there as a unified body. They all came out of the council chamber and were sitting in a circle. Everybody made little speeches. This was the first time in their lives they had had a chance to participate in this country. And it was beautiful.”