Workers in the Field and Lawyers in the Court: The CRLA, Poverty Law, and Environmental Justice in Modern California

Abstract

As part of the War on Poverty in the mid-1960s, the federal government under President Lyndon Johnson began funding dozens of legal service agencies throughout the nation. The largest of these agencies was the California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), which mainly served impoverished Mexican American farmworkers. Despite Governor Ronald Reagan’s support of traditional agribusiness, the CRLA helped farmworkers change many agricultural policies and practices that reinforced their poverty. To name just a few victories, CRLA litigation led to the end of the Bracero Program, the defeat of the short-handled hoe, free lunch milk and mandatory bilingual education for farmworker children, safer pesticide practices, and sanitation stations for workers in the fields. One of the agency’s most innovative endeavors was environmental poverty law, which used traditional poverty law to tackle environmental hazards. Through environmental poverty law, the CRLA helped ban or regulate numerous pesticides, and it helped farmworkers create agricultural environments that were far less dangerous to their physical health. The CRLA’s practice of environmental poverty law laid the legal groundwork for the environmental justice movement in rural California. For over fifty years now, CRLA litigation, including environmental poverty law, has helped lead the fight for greater civil rights and environmental justice for farmworker families.