Amazing Grace: Graciela Olivárez, the Nation’s First Latina Law Professor
By Emile Loza de Siles*
“Go, you’ve got a lot to contribute. And so you don’t fall in the water, we’ll lay the plank down for you.” — Graciela Olivárez[1]
The history of Latinas in the United States legal academy is a nascent one, and that history starts with Graciela Gil Valero Olivárez (1928-1987), que descanse en paz. She was the country’s first Latina law professor.[2] It is in her honor that the Graciela Olivárez Latinas in the Legal Academy (GO LILA!) Workshop is named. She was called “Amazing Grace” and rightly so.[3] This brief biography[4] shares a glimpse of Graciela Olivárez’s remarkable life of unprecedented achievements; her powerful and dauntless voice; and her dedicated service toward justice for people.
Born in Phoenix just before the Great Depression, Graciela spent her childhood in Barcelona, Arizona, a segregated town serving the huge open-pit Ray Mine. Her family later returned to Phoenix where Graciela completed her third year of high school. She then dropped out, went to business school to learn secretarial skills, and went to work to help support her family. Within 10 years, Graciela had become a well-known radio host, DJ, and, finally, director of Women’s Programs, reaching some 63,000 Spanish-speaking households across Arizona. That experience galvanized Graciela’s life’s work in two ways. First, it thoroughly equipped her to wield the power of her public voice to speak for the speechless, those muted by poverty, the lack of education and English fluency, sexism, racism, fear, and oppression. Second, it lit a fire in Graciela to advocate and fight, powerfully, for social justice for the rest of her life.
Graciela was repeatedly recognized and appointed to impactful government posts, such as Arizona Governor Samuel Goddard’s Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, and to special government commissions, for example, as vice chair of President Johnson’s Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. She carried out her justice work through a plethora of policy institutes, federal and state government studies, and activism and advocacy efforts, including as a co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Graciela traveled almost constantly, mesmerizing audiences with her many speeches and testimonies and awakening those audiences to the sufferings of others and their duties to help alleviate those sufferings.
On one such trip, she met Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh, the president of Notre Dame University. The conversation so impressed Father Hesburgh that he, together with the president of Harvard University, agreed to waive the otherwise applicable requirements and offer Graciela the opportunity to attend law school at their respective institutions. Citing her Catholic faith, Graciela chose Notre Dame and, with her eight-year-old son Victor in tow, matriculated and, in 1970, graduated from Notre Dame Law School, its first ever alumna.
Graciela later moved to Albuquerque and was appointed to not just one, but two roles at the University of New Mexico in 1972. She was appointed director of its Institute for Social Research and Development. She also accepted a unanimous offer of appointment to become a professor with the law school. After spending a year revitalizing the previously embattled Institute, Graciela taught a two-hour seminar course on corrections at the law school. In this, Graciela built upon insights gained through her earlier work, including as to juvenile delinquency and other social justice impacts of poverty and systemic racism and subordination. She earned tenure in 1974.
In 1975, Graciela again was called to public service by New Mexico Governor Jerry Apodaca to lead as director of the State Planning Office. Two years later, another United States president tapped Graciela to lead, this time as President Jimmy Carter’s director of the Community Service Administration (CSA). As CSA director, Graciela led some 1,000 employees and managed a budget of more than $500 million in the agency’s services and capacity-building support to more than 900 local community action agencies across the country.
In 1980, Graciela resigned her national post to return to her family and home in New Mexico. There, she took up her vision to create the country’s first woman-owned Spanish-language television company. She did so, securing licenses for two stations without investors, but with seven millionaires guaranteeing her loan of almost $1 million. She continued in her public service and entrepreneurial leadership until the very end of her life in 1987 when she died after a two-year battle with cancer.
Today, more than 50 years after Graciela Olivárez joined the legal academy, planning is well underway for the Third Annual GO LILA! Workshop, to be hosted at Berkeley Law on May 21-22, 2024. With la hermandad numbering 260 and counting,[5] we have Amazing Grace to thank. She continues to inspire us forward in power and solidarity. She laid the plank down for us.
*Emile Loza de Siles is assistant professor of law with the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, William S. Richardson School of Law. She is co-founder of the Graciela Olivárez Latinas in the Legal Academy (GO LILA!) Workshop. Among other service, she clerked for the Honorable Judge Sérgio A. Gutiérrez of the Idaho Court of Appeals and the first and, sinvergüenzas, thus far only Latino ever appointed to that state’s judiciary.
An interdisciplinary artificial intelligence and law scholar and teacher, Professor Loza de Siles also works to document and examine the vital contributions of Latina professional legal educators to their students and institutions, the legal profession, and the cause of equal justice before law. Her recent article, “Latinas in the Legal Academy: Progress and Promise,” with Professors Raquel Aldana, Solangel Maldonado, and Rachel F. Moran, appears at 26 Harvard Latin American Law Review 301 (2023).
Mil gracias to archivists and librarians with Arizona State University, the University of New Mexico, the University of Arizona, and other institutions. I dedicate this work to Captain Victor R. Olivárez, USN, ret., Damian “Danny” Gil, and la comunidad valiosa y poderosa de hermanas que encontré in working toward and celebrating the GO LILA! Workshop. A mi familia, amor y animo! Email at eloza@hawaii.edu.
[1] Graciela Olivárez, quoted in Jennifer Mason McAward, Lay Down A Plank: The Path to Law School Diversity, 96 Notre Dame L. Rev. Reflection 222, 226 (2021) (citing John Monczunski, Amazing Grace Olivarez, Notre Dame Times 21 (June 1975), https://magazine.nd.edu/stories/amazing-grace-olivarez/).
[2] See Michael A. Olivas, qdep, Remarks at Virtual Latino Law Professors Gathering (Jan. 5, 2022).
[3] Monczunski, supra.
[4] A fuller and fully cited telling of Graciela’s story will be available online at SSRN shortly.
[5] Emile Loza de Siles, Latinas in the U.S. Legal Academy, Including Puerto Rico (created before Nov. 29, 2021) (last updated Nov. 21, 2023) (unpublished database) (on file with author)