USD Magazine, Winter 2001

ALUMNI ~ GALLERY

•CLASS OF '86, '89• HOMETOWN HERO As a boy in the rural agricultural community ofThermal, Calif.,

Washington, D.C., before return– ing to Coachella in 1992. "Our clients can realize their dreams of owning new homes, and enforcement inspectors are no longer free to run roughshod over the rights of Hispanic peo– ple in our community." For his work on the case, Saldivar received the 2000 Good Samaritan award from Riverside County Catholic Charities. But his real reward, he says, is making a better life in his hometown, where migrant workers often make less than minimum wage, work long hours with– out water or breaks and sleep on roadsides. In addi– tion to working on labor and housing cases, Saldivar helps hundreds of workers apply for U.S. citizenship

David Limon Saldivar saw his parents come home from their farm jobs every night tired and hopeless. Their long days of labor in the fields provided barely enough money for basic necessities, and they endured mistreatment and harassment while working and living in conditions that the word "substandard" couldn't begin to describe. So when Saldivar settled a $21 million housing discrimination case on behalf of thousands of migrant farm workers in Riverside County earlier this year, the victory was a personal, as well as a pro– fessional, triumph. Saldivar - who earned a bachelor's from USD in 1986 and a law degree from the School of Law in 1989 - is the directing attorney for the Coachella branch of California Rural Legal Assistance, an organization that provides free legal representation to farm workers and other impoverished people. In May, Saldivar and CRLA settled a two-year case against Riverside County involving the attempted ille– gal eviction of families from 20 mobile home parks, showing that the

Son of migrant farmworkers wins civil rights battle

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Attorney David Saldivar practices law near the fields where he grew up.

county violated the Civil Rights Act by applying its code enforcement policies "more stringently" in mobile home parks owned by Latinos. In deciding the case, the Housing and Urban Development agency ordered the county to spend $16 million on community projects and low-income housing and awarded $28,000 to each of the families who filed a complaint, helping them to purchase new mobile homes. "This was without question the highlight of my career," says Saldivar, who earned a master's degree in advocacy law from Georgetown University and worked on civil rights cases in

each year, many of them relatives or friends of the people he knew as a boy. "I became a lawyer because I thought I could change the world," says Saldivar, "but I found out that it's just as important to make a small difference in your own community." For more information or to donate to California Rural Legal Assistance, call (760) 398-7261 or log on to www.crla.org.

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