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Voces Oral History Project Interview With Norma Cantú
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17:01
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After Harvard Law School, Cantú went back to Texas and worked in the Texas Attorney General's Office, in the Consumer Protection Division under Ann Richards. Specifically, she worked for the Nursing Home Taskforce where she and her colleagues fought for the rights of the elderly who were subject to abuse in retirement homes. Following her time at the Attorney General's office, Cantú and her husband moved to San Antonio. She then began working for MALDEF as an education lawyer. Cantú worked on important cases including Plyler v.s Doe, in which the State of Texas argued that they had the justification to exclude immigrant children from public education. MALDEF won that case.
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Synopsis |
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Voces Oral History Project Interview With Norma Cantú
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44:02
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In response to the ruling of unconstitutionality, before the case was heard at the Supreme Court, the Texas legislature under Ann Richards acted to request a settlement proposal from the border region. This unified the border communities as they came together to decide how much each area needed for higher education. The state approved at total of $660,000,000 to go towards investing in higher education along the border. It was after the allocation of these finds that the case was seen in front of the Supreme Court, where they LULAC lost because the region had already been awarded that money. In the years following, that money was put into master's and doctoral programs as well as the creation of medical schools and other professional schools in cities such as Laredo and Corpus Christi. However, Cantú sees threats to public higher education funding in Texas today.
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Voces Oral History Project Interview With Norma Cantú
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56:23
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Cantú reflects on her career as MALDEF lawyer, citing specific cases and their impact on the state and Latino communities as a collective. She speaks on some of the testimonies during LULAC v. Clements and tells a story about her first time in Austin at the capitol during Vietnam protest. Cantú talks about the sociopolitical climate when she was at Harvard. She also goes into more detail about higher education funding discrepancies, the future of higher education in Texas, and working within the federal Department of Education.
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