From Erasure to Justice:
A conversation with Alegría De La Cruz

We are thrilled to welcome Alegría De La Cruz to the DRLC team as the new Director of our Civil Rights Litigation program. Alegría brings to this role decades of personal and professional experience as a thoughtful and strategic public servant, a creative legal scholar, and a lifelong advocate raised in the heart of the farmworker justice movement.

We have enjoyed getting to know Alegría since she joined our team a few weeks ago. She was generous enough to sit down with us and share about her history, her vision for DRLC’s litigation team, and her personal life with us. 

Meet Alegría.

I feel drawn to serve communities that are experiencing a compounded need for representation and for championing—people experiencing intersectional challenges, including income, documentation, age, or language. I began my career as a lawyer for farmworkers who speak indigenous languages that predate the languages of colonizers. They experience double discrimination—in Mexico and in the U.S.—and that impacts their pay, their housing, and their educational rights. Having the privilege of learning to truly represent these workers and their children to secure justice and respect from their employers in state and federal courts cemented my commitment to social justice lawyering.

When people feel respect, they feel pride, and that pride doesn’t go away. That is an important moment of transition—from erasure to justice, from violation to accountability, and from harm to remedy.

Women lawyers of color are still woefully underrepresented in the profession and in the courts. There have been many moments in my career where people did not believe I was a lawyer, but I have learned that you have to roll your shoulders back, straighten your spine, and proudly take up that space of privilege and power. We have to be ready and clear to face the injustices directed at us to be the best advocates for our clients.

As a child of the farmworker movement, I was taught histories that were not taught to me in school. It is my responsibility as a justice worker to make sure that we are grounded in the experiences of those who came before us.

We are living amid attempts to erase ordinary people who changed the world from our history books, to eradicate our very humanity, and to keep us from celebrating our place in history. But the attempts to erase us do not make us invisible. How do we tap into the magic of ordinary people being fed up? Learn those stories and continue representing brave people who have had enough.

As justice warriors, we need to create sustainability in this work. Two things deeply ground me: I love trail running and hiking, because I need to get my feet on the ground, and I am a danzante (Aztec dancer) because this healing indigenous practice keeps me powerfully connected to my people, to a larger collective identity, to our history, and to our future.

It is deeply inspiring to take up the mantle for an organization that is the oldest cross-disability law center. To be a litigator, in this time, is both deeply meaningful and powerful. Litigation pushes our legal system, structures, laws, and interpretations forward and keeps justice alive in our communities.

Because it is beautifully inclusive in a unique way, disability law provides a powerful frame to create broad transformational change. Especially in light of severe, hateful attacks on so many communities that experience deep marginalization, I am excited to use this frame to hold close the communities in which I feel deeply grounded, to co-design remedies to those harms.

Filing a lawsuit is not something done lightly—not by us, not by our clients. Our clients have done everything they can to be seen, and litigation can feel like their last hope for justice. It is an honor to craft cases with our clients and our partners, to ask: “What could a remedy for this pain feel like?”

In deciding to join DRLC, I wanted not just to defend our rights but also to lift up the future that we can still imagine together. This felt like the right moment to join DRLC.