My Personal Disillusionment

My story begins in the cotton fields of Texas. My grandma, born to a pair of poor immigrant workers, spent most of her day picking cotton. Her duty to her family came before all, including her education. With every bulb of cotton she picked, our lives began a new cycle. My abuela had my mother at a young age with a emotionally and physically abusive husband. The cycle would continue for generations. My mother, a high school dropout, married a drug addict and soon gave birth to my older brother. Soonafter, she fled in hopes of providing her children with a brighter future than she was afforded. Courage and perseverance run through my blood.

“Mija, can you read this over for me?” Little did I know, my dad’s simple request on that ordinary fall day would forever alter the course of my life. His appeal came from a need for translation. My young cousin was on trial for a serious drug charge, and my dad was writing a character letter to the judge, a plea for mercy. My father felt inadequate to write such a significant letter and posed the task to me, his thirteen-year-old daughter. This was my first time translating for my community, but it would not be my last.

As I read these back, I am struck by the sense of hope that I felt and the desire for societal change. Now, I sit with a sense of disillusionment with both When I entered my first year of law school, Margaret Montoya’s Mascaras y Trenzas remained at the forefront of my mind. In her Harvard Law Review article, Montoya traces the duality of her experiences as one of the first Latina students at Harvard Law. She recognizes the dissonance between the black-letter law classes she takes and her personal background growing up as a Latina in the Southwest. In the article, she recounts her 1L experience as she struggled with reading a case in Criminal Law while also removing her own level of humanity. Her article ends with a powerful image of her delivering a speech at a legal educators conference where she embraces both English and her native tongue, Spanish. I first encountered this article during my freshman year of college, and I was struck by her optimism for the future. I shared this similar hope, but I soon began to dread the same masks that I was learning to wear in law school. Masks provide the ability to navigate spaces that were traditionally made for white men. Masks that require me to separate my own empathetic being from the law I was learning. These masks link with the disillusionment that I feel about my own law school journey as my desire to create a positive impact feels futile against the luring sirens of big law and wealth.

Identity conflict is almost unavoidable in the first year of law school. That means, of course, different things to different identities, within and among us. No individual experiences are just like any others. But "disillusionment" occurs very often, and has connected roots. One could teach around it, I believe, if helping students learn how to form their professional identities were regarded as a fit subject of teaching. So I do, whether it is so regarded or not.

This disenchantment points to the larger question that Judge Celia Day poses in Lawyerland. There’s a distinction between lawyers and non-lawyers. Judge Day recalls in her conversation with her law clerk about the realization that lawyers view themselves as a distinct class from other individuals, with their knowledge as a sort of superpower. This superpower may be utilized for negative forces when lawyers rely on what she classifies as “spin.” Lawyers spin the story to create lucrative narratives that advantage your agenda, and the courts do not serve as the balancing power. Rather, Day’s argument focuses on the fact that judges occupy an exclusive discretionary function. Upon my first reading of this text, I felt vindicated in my disenchantment with the law. If our judges don’t feel they possess the power to enact systemic change, why would I consider my law degree to offer that?

This paragraph should be clearer.

The next draft should begin here. It is time to start discovering the practice.