James deAnda, 81; Worked to Establish Mexican Americans’ Constitutional Rights

James deAnda, a retired federal judge who as a lawyer on a pivotal 1950s case established that Mexican Americans were entitled to the same constitutional protections as other minorities, died of prostate cancer Sept. 7 at his vacation home in Traverse City, Mich. The longtime Houston resident was 81.

DeAnda was the last surviving member of the four-man legal team behind Hernandez vs. Texas, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 3, 1954. The Hernandez decision, which overturned a murder conviction by an all-white jury, for the first time gave Mexican Americans status as a distinct legal classification entitled to special protection under the Constitution.

The youngest member of the team, deAnda researched and wrote the briefs for the case, the first tried by Mexican Americans before the nation’s highest court.

He went on to wage successful legal battles challenging substandard schooling for Mexican American children in Texas and helped found a leading Latino civil rights organization: the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He became a federal judge in 1979.

“He was our Thurgood Marshall,” Michael A. Olivas, a University of Houston law professor and the editor of a recent book about the Hernandez case, said in comparing deAnda with the first African American Supreme Court justice.

The Hernandez case was eclipsed by Marshall’s triumph as lead attorney in Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation ruling handed down two weeks later, May 17, 1954. Yet the Hernandez case represented a watershed moment in Latinos’ struggle for equal rights -- one that has influenced other high court decisions, including the Bakke affirmative action case in 1978.

“I can’t think of another case as important for the Hispanic community as Hernandez,” said Norma Cantu, a former assistant secretary for civil rights in the Clinton administration’s Education Department who now teaches law at the University of Texas in Austin.

“The legacy of the Hernandez case includes voting rights, education and employment cases. All of these efforts to work within the system to secure a place at the table resulted from Judge deAnda’s work” in that case, Cantu said.

Described as modest and unassuming, deAnda often failed to received credit for his contributions to the Hernandez victory. “He has flown under the radar” of history, Olivas said, “but he was right in the thick of it. He was an equal partner to all the others.”

Born in Houston, deAnda was the son of Mexican immigrants. He attended Texas A&M; University and served in the Marines during World War II, before receiving a law degree from the University of Texas in 1950.

He passed the bar that year, but white firms would not hire him, especially after they learned that his heritage was Mexican. He knocked on doors looking for work but did not succeed until 1951, when attorney John J. Herrera offered him a chair in his Houston office and $25 a week.

One of the new lawyer’s first assignments was to prepare a challenge of a grand jury indictment in Fort Bend County based on the exclusion of Latinos from juries. DeAnda found that no Latino had ever served on a grand jury there, despite a sizable Latino population.

He believed he had solid grounds for a motion to quash the murder indictment against Aniceto Sanchez, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals disagreed. It maintained that Mexican Americans were white and that because the jury was white, there had been no discrimination.

DeAnda was incensed. “I wanted to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, but neither my client nor I had the money,” he told Olivas in an interview many years later.

The opportunity he sought came two years later, when Herrera asked a junior associate to help him defend a migrant cotton picker named Pete Hernandez, who had been accused of fatally stabbing another man during a bar fight in the east Texas town of Edna.

When Hernandez was found guilty by an all-white jury in Jackson County, the attorneys appealed on the grounds that no citizen of Mexican descent had served on a jury there in 25 years. Once again, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals could not be swayed.

The court relied on the same reasoning it had used in the Sanchez case: that Mexican Americans were not a separate classification from whites and therefore were not entitled to special consideration under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The constitutional amendment, passed after the Civil War and the end of slavery, had been used chiefly to uphold the rights of African Americans.

This time, deAnda and Herrera had the resources to continue the legal battle. Two civil rights groups -- the League of United Latin American Citizens and the American GI Forum -- stepped forward with enough money to take the case to the Supreme Court. Herrera invited two seasoned civil rights lawyers, Gustavo C. Garcia and Carlos Cadena, to join the case and present the oral arguments.

The high court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, “looked beyond the surface into the heart of Jim Crow Texas,” Olivas said. Warren was especially struck by the signage cited as evidence by the Hernandez team, including one from a local restaurant that read “No Mexicans Served.”

Another such nugget was discovered by deAnda after he had gone in search of the men’s room in the Jackson County Courthouse. A Spanish-speaking janitor told him the only lavatory he could use was in the basement. There he found the facility posted with a sign that read “Colored Men” and “Hombres Aqui” (Spanish for men here).

“It was devastating,” deAnda said of the impact of that sign -- an irrefutable symbol of the perceived inferiority of Mexicans that clashed with the Jackson County judges’ pronouncements that they were the same as whites. Warren cited the signs in the written opinion as evidence that Mexican Americans occupied a classification of people distinct from whites in east Texas society.

He further noted that “it taxes our credulity to say that mere chance resulted in there being no members of this class among the over six thousand jurors called in the past 25 years. The result bespeaks discrimination.”

The court unanimously overturned Hernandez’s conviction. He was retried and convicted again, but this time the jury included two Mexican Americans.

The second conviction was considered “a triumph,” Olivas said. “The point is: All Mexicans ever wanted was to be part of the process.”

DeAnda went on to handle a series of important school desegregation cases, among them Hernandez vs. Driscoll Independent School District in 1956.

It challenged a school system that required children from Spanish-speaking families to spend three years in the first grade because of a presumed need to learn English. The lawsuit was brought on behalf of a Latino child whose parents had deliberately taught her only English but who had been denied entry to the white school. DeAnda won the case, and the school district abandoned its two-track system.

In 1979 deAnda was appointed by President Carter to the federal bench in the Southern District of Texas. He was the nation’s second Mexican American federal judge and served for 13 years, including four as chief judge.

DeAnda is survived by his wife, Joyce, and four children. He practiced law with Solar and Associates in Houston until late last year, when he was diagnosed with cancer.

According to Olivas, deAnda was delighted by the Supreme Court’s action in June striking down a Texas redistricting plan that discriminated against Latino voters. The victory depended on deAnda’s work half a century earlier that gave Latinos visibility in the eyes of the court.

It also brought another milestone.

“For the first time, both sides in a Supreme Court case were argued by Latino lawyers,” said Olivas, who spoke to deAnda shortly before he died. “He took such enormous pleasure out of that.”

elaine.woo@latimes.com