By: Rebekah D. Mason
Justice Through Joy | Law Day 2025
My mother was born in 1951.
My father, in 1953.
Both born in Texas.
Both Mexican American.
Both born U.S. citizens.
Yet neither was born into a country that recognized their humanity without conditions.
We are Tejanos — the people the border crossed.
And yet, still, we were denied.
Stripped of voice.
Taxed to vote.
Tested for literacy in a language forced upon us.
Poll taxes.
Literacy tests.
Language discrimination.
Legal exclusions designed to keep Mexican Americans and Black Americans from the ballot box.
From power.
From belonging.
They were born into a nation where their citizenship came with asterisks.
And shockingly, I’m just now — truly — coming to terms with it.
Not in college.
Not in law school.
Not even when I passed the bar.
But during the last election, I felt it — in my breath, in my bones — a knowing deeper than words.
The realization that I am not just an advocate.
I am a direct descendant of disenfranchisement and survival. And joy. And systemic oppression.
I’ve been fighting systems my family had to survive.
And now I’m asking different questions.
Not because my family never told me the truth —
but because they never really recognized the systems as fundamentally opposed to their betterment, their empowerment.
It was only a few years ago that I learned my grandmother had picked cotton. Cotton and fruit.
Somehow, I had never been told that story.
I had always known she was different from the grandmothers some of my classmates had —
she couldn’t read or write.
Not in English.
Or Spanish.
She didn’t go to school past the second grade.
I had always heard she’d been pulled out by her daddy for “embarrassing the family” —
they said she had been flirting with boys.
And if a second grader can flirt with boys, maybe my grandmother was the silly one to do just that.
But now I really get it.
She was probably acting too silly.
And for her, it was time to leave childhood behind.
She was ready for work.
And work she did.
Her entire life.
She never learned to read or write.
But she could go to Walmart, sign a blank check, and trustingly hand it to the cashier who would fill out the correct amount.
She wasn’t scammed — not in her Walmart, not on her Island.
That’s the kind of power she built — not with diplomas, but with presence.
She worked in the hospital cafeteria, where her son-in-law — my uncle — was the chef.
She bossed him and everyone else around.
Sometimes, his boss would ask him to remind her she wasn’t actually in charge.
But she was. Everyone knew it.
They called her Supervisor–my grandmother–the woman who had picked cotton and fruit as a young girl and who had raised her kids the best way she knew how, the one who bussed tables in that hospital cafeteria and ran a tight ship.
Her sister, my Tía Mona, had not picked.
Last summer she told me and my partner — with a certain pride — that she never picked.
Not cotton. Not fruit. She never had to.
That was new to me.
I had never understood that anyone in my family had labored in the fields —
and now I was learning that my Tía Mona was one of the few in her generation who hadn’t picked.
She’s 95.
But it turns out my grandmother wasn’t the only one who picked.
While it was just a few years ago that I learned that my Grandmother had worked the fields with her older siblings and her father — picking cotton and fruit, it was only recently as in today, April 30, 2025, that I learned that many of my mother’s older siblings — the generation after my Grandma— had also picked.
My mother had labored there too. And she had never even mentioned it.
As I was writing this reflection, I shared an early version with my mother. Somehow the conversation uncovered a memory of her own: that one summer, when she was in the second grade, she went with her older siblings and her daddy to the fields.
She was too young to work that day, but she wanted to help.
So she carried the water jug to them — to her siblings and to her father — as they worked to earn money for school clothes.
My mom’s older sister, one of my aunts, remembers their father, my grandfather, making tacos early in the morning for them before they were picked up by the large truck that transported them to the fields.
My mom says there’s even a faint memory — maybe a little family rumor — that Grandma might’ve been a little jealous.
Not of the work, but of the moments.
Maybe it stung a little because her husband, my grandfather, was making tacos for the kids. And not for her.
Or maybe she was a bit hurt because she was left behind to care for the youngest ones, no chance to earn a wage outside of the home at that time, no chance for the sun to shine on her face that day.
These stories surface quietly, almost accidentally, when the right question is asked.
And I wonder how much could be lost if I don’t keep asking the right questions.
It was during the first summer of COVID — the summer we lost Grandma —that I had first learned that she had picked cotton. And now, a little more than five years later, I’m uncovering hidden pieces of our past.
It was also in the year that Grandma died that I came to understand that she had been denied the vote because she could never have passed the literacy test.
So even if my family could have saved enough money for both her and my Grandpa Joe to pay both of their poll taxes to vote for Kennedy, her voice would have still remained unheard.
That was the point of those laws: to ensure that women like my grandmother would never have the chance to be fully heard.
I remember the pride in my mother’s voice and the sparkle in her eyes as the memory washed over her and she described that red coffee can in the kitchen window, where her daddy had proudly and over time, saved up his money so that he could cast his vote for Kennedy.
I also remember, vividly the moment of long-delayed mutual realization, where we both paused, her memory softened, I saw it wash over her face: a quiet devastation.
It was after I had said the words aloud, — poll taxes, literacy tests, Jim Crow— we both saw what that memory had held, transform before us and fly away.
My mother had grown up in a system that normalized her exclusion, normalized my entire community’s exclusion.
So much so that decades later — even after we had both earned multiple degrees, after she studied systems of oppression and I studied history and the law —neither of us had ever connected the dots.
Not from Jim Crow. Not from Juan Crow. Not to voter suppression. Not to our own family.
Not to what it meant to be intentionally, systemically, erased.
That day on my couch, when I called it what it was: intentional systemic oppression, erasure, designed by law, it hurt.
And so we grieved that red coffee can together.
Years earlier, when I had graduated from law school, my family had been so proud.
When I passed the Texas bar, they were proud again.
And when marriage equality became the law of the land,
I cheered from my tiny Legal Aid office in Washington, D.C., for my cousin who could finally marry her love in Galveston, Texas.
At the time, I hadn’t yet come out to myself as queer. But now I have, and I’m happily engaged to the love of my queer life.
What a difference a court decision can make.
I speak not just for me, but for every ancestor who could not be heard.
I advocate not only as a lawyer, but as the granddaughter of a cotton picker,
and as the daughter of a woman who was told college wasn’t for her — because she was going to get married, and start a family—who later earned her master’s degree in social work.
I stand with and for all the fiercely loving, silly, and steadfast Mexican American women in my family.
I am the first generation in my family born with the unencumbered right to vote.
And I do not take it for granted.
This May 1
This May 1 is a national day of action where we expect thousands of lawyers, judges, and advocates across the country to gather on courthouse steps and in public squares to say that we stand for the rule of law. I stand in solidarity with others across this imperfect and deeply flawed experiment we call democracy —
this system founded through the attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples, built on the backs of enslaved Black people, and sustained through the systemic and intentional oppression of Mexican Americans and Black people and Indigenous people and countless other communities whose lives have been relegated to the margins of this nation’s promises.
To the others — including the lawyers who still believe in the rule of law —to the paralegals, social workers, judges, teachers, admin associates, to the students and the workers, and the artists and the nurses and all those who work tirelessly for U. S. legal system that holds itself accountable to equitable access to justice for all— I stand with you.
I will stand in my body, with the support of my rollator, and with my voice.
I will not remain silent while the rule of law, fought hard for by those who came before me, crumbles around us.
Because the Rule of Law Still Matters
I believe in the rule of law — not as an abstract ideal, but as a living promise.
A commitment that no one — especially not those in power — is above the law.
I believe that justice is not a privilege; it’s a right.
It is supposed to protect not just the marginalized and vulnerable,
but to hold the powerful, the oppressive, and the abusive accountable.
It should stand against those who claim to uphold justice while standing on our necks.
The rule of law should ensure that this democratic experiment — the United States — serves all of us.
Not just the wealthy. Not just the white, the straight, or the able-bodied.
Because the world is supposed to be for all of us.
And so, I will stand for a liberatory rule of law–alongside the rest of you who believe in a just legal system —
this May 1 and beyond.
Will you? Will you defend the liberatory rule of law, the protections democracy has promised but has yet to fully deliver — before it is too late?
P.S. Standing for the rule of law — especially a liberatory rule of law — won’t look the same for everyone. Do right by yourself. Stand how and where you can, safely.
Walk with me — toward justice, joy, and liberation.
Subscribe to Waiting For Lefty for more of my reflections.
Endnotes
Texas implemented a poll tax in 1902, which remained in effect until the 24th Amendment was ratified in 1964. Despite that federal change, enforcement continued in states like Texas and Louisiana until the Supreme Court ruled such taxes unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966). Both states were among the last to dismantle literacy and poll taxes — policies designed to disenfranchise Mexican American and Black voters. Literacy tests and English-only provisions were widely used across the U.S. Southwest to suppress the votes of Mexican Americans. Though often informal or extralegal, these tests were part of broader Jim Crow-style tactics, upheld through cultural intimidation and institutional neglect.
Thousands of Mexican American and migrant children labored in cotton and fruit fields across the U.S. South and Southwest through the mid-20th century. Child labor in agriculture, particularly among Latinx/o communities, remains underreported and ongoing. The trauma of systemic disenfranchisement — from field labor to voter suppression — reverberates generationally. The stories of cotton-picking grandmothers, coffee cans filled with saved poll tax money, and families denied education or civic voice are not only personal: they are legal histories. As historian Natalia Molina and legal scholar Ian Haney López have shown, these are the living legacies of exclusion by design.
About the Author
Rebekah D. Mason is a Chicana storyteller, legal advocate, and playwright whose work centers joy as a form of resistance. A former legal aid lawyer and veterans advocate, she has dedicated her career to uplifting marginalized voices and challenging systemic injustices. Through her blog, Waiting for Lefty, Rebekah shares narratives that intertwine identity, advocacy, and imagination, creating a digital space for healing and sacred resistance. Her one-woman show, They Don’t Leave Veterans Behind, Do They?, premiered at Joe’s Movement Emporium. A proud Tejana, later-in-life queer, and disability justice advocate, Rebekah continues to inspire through her commitment to equity, storytelling, and community empowerment.
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