How a historic legal victory 50 years ago led to a historic, June 10 celebration of Latino movement legends.

Marty Glick was a young attorney when he came to work in Salinas in 1966, fresh off two years in the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division bringing voting rights cases and criminal cases against the Ku Klux Klan.

Glick was among the handful of attorneys launching the Salinas office of California Rural Legal Assistance, and one week into the job he asked the community workers what was important, what mattered to them. One of them, Jose Perez, returned with a short-handled hoe – el cortito – which farmworkers referred to as the “devil’s arm” in Spanish.

Not long after, Glick hired an attorney fresh out of law school, Maurice “Mo” Jourdane, to come work for CRLA in Salinas. Jourdane quickly learned about el cortito too when, just a few weeks into the job in 1969 and playing pool after work in Soledad, he asked the farmworkers what was ailing their backs. Sebastián Carmona returned from his truck with a short-handled hoe.

The workers told Jourdane he needed to use it in the fields himself to see how bad it was, and it took him no more than a few hours to understand the back-breaking pain of being hunched over all day.

Glick tasked Jourdane with finding a legal way to fight el cortito, and after spending a day researching at Stanford, Jourdane told Glick he couldn’t find any law, just a state industrial regulation regarding unsafe hand tools.

In that single regulation, Glick saw a way in, and the two attorneys set about recruiting doctors and workers to testify and make a case to the state Industrial Safety Board that the tool was unsafe and injured workers’ backs.

It was a six-year legal fight – Carmona was the lead plaintiff – that culminated with the California Supreme Court banning the use of the short-handled hoe on April 7, 1975, a historic victory for farmworkers.

Fifty years later, Ignacio Ornelas, a Stanford historian and Salinas native, got together with Monterey County Supervisor Luis Alejo in Salinas after an April 18 mural unveiling in Chualar, which commemorated the braceros who died in a 1963 bus accident. In the mural, Alejo saw workers hunched over in a field using el cortito, and it got him talking to Ornelas about another commemoration, one to celebrate the historic 1975 ruling and the role CRLA’s local attorneys played in it.

Alejo had in mind a June 10 commemoration in the Board of Supervisors chambers, and Ornelas suggested a flyer – a friend of his had connections with Los Tigres Del Norte, the legendary San Jose-based Mexican American band that has sold over 32 million albums in the past 50-plus years, and who performed their first concert in the state prison in Soledad in 1968 when they were teenagers. What if the county could commemorate the band at the same time?

Alejo sent out a formal invitation, co-signed by Ornelas, to the band’s management, and three weeks later, they heard back – the band would be coming.

Ornelas worked to make sure Glick and Jourdane would make it, and Alejo worked with county staff to educate them on the event’s importance. CRLA’s Mike Meuter in Salinas helped get in touch with the families of the plaintiffs in the historic case.

Then Alejo was at an event at CSUMB and saw pioneering playwright Luis Valdez, founder of El Teatro Campesino and writer of Zoot Suit and La Bamba, and asked if he would be the keynote speaker at the June 10 commemoration. Valdez agreed.

As everything was coming together, Jourdane and his wife Olivia reached out to famed activist Dolores Huerta, 95, who also agreed to show up.

When June 10 finally arrived and the ceremony began, Valdez kicked it off with an inspired speech, tying current events to the historic struggle, and that victories like CRLA’s fight against el cortito are “the grassroots of democracy.”

“Let us embrace each other, let us teach the young people, the future is theirs if they grab it and work with patience,” Valdez said.

And then, after all the heartwarming speeches, they all gathered – legends of the Latino movement alongside county supervisors and staff – for a group photo.

It could be titled, “Si se puede.”