Texas Observer Highlights Justice Linda Yanez
Appellate Justice Linda Yanez (D-Edinburg), who is running for Place 8 on the Texas Supreme Court, was recently highlighted in an excellent piece in the Texas Observer.
Here is a quick excerpt:
Yañez’s improbable life journey has taken her from farm fields to Harvard University to her current position as the first Hispanic female appellate judge in Texas history. Now she’s on the move again.
Yañez is running to become the first Hispanic woman to sit on the Texas Supreme Court. She’s challenging incumbent Republican Justice Phil Johnson for the Place 8 seat. No Democratic candidate has won statewide office since 1994, but Yañez hopes to ride a Democratic wave sweeping the nation and exploit disgust in Texas over the court’s big-business bias.
Interviewed in May at her Edinburg office, Yañez wore a red dress with a neat white cardigan, white shoes, and a matching white handbag. She’s petite and speaks clearly with energy, often interrupting herself with another thought.
When she was born, her family had lived in Rio Hondo in the Rio Grande Valley for generations, but without connections that could help them overcome their status as working poor. Her parents, both manual laborers and each the oldest in their families, helped put their younger brothers and sisters through school. Jobs in the Valley in the 1960s were scarce for people without much education, so by the time Yañez reached high school, her parents had moved to Illinois for steady factory jobs. Yañez stayed with her grandmother in Rio Hondo, where she thrived as an honor student, cheerleader, and carnival queen.
Her parents and grandparents doted on her. Her well-educated aunts and uncles encouraged her to go to college. In the migrant camps, she and her sisters befriended the crew leaders’ sons, who took the girls on trips to museums in Chicago. For Yañez, new horizons opened.
After graduating from Rio Hondo High School, she stayed in the Valley to attend college at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg. One summer she had what she called the most difficult job of her life, working on an assembly line in a factory that made plastic lids for fast-food cups. She was allergic to the plastic and vomited every day until she quit and took a job at a drug store.
A recruiter from President Nixon’s Cabinet Committee on Opportunity for the Spanish Speaking convinced her to spend a year in Washington scoping out possible careers at federal agencies. The work did not appeal to her. She married and had a child. After a year, she returned to the Valley to raise her daughter. In 1971, she settled in Weslaco and took a job as a first grade teacher.
Teaching by day, she volunteered evenings and weekends with voter drives for the 1972 George McGovern presidential campaign, an effort headed in the Rio Grande Valley by David Hall, now executive director of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. She turned out to be a star political recruiter.
“Linda’s a very engaging personality and doesn’t take no for an answer readily, and she had lots of friends and lots of relatives,” Hall says. “And so we had most of Rio Hondo working on the effort. And they were all a good-looking bunch of women. They could stop traffic on any street corner in the Rio Grande Valley.”
Texas needs strong, competent jurists like Justice Yanez on the Texas Supreme Court. As you can see from recent opinions, the Texas Supreme Court’s rightward turn has gone even farther to the right, something I’m not sure we even thought was possible.
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