Marc­ Tizoc González on the Role of Gerald P. López’s Rebellious Lawyering in LatCrit, Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory.

“Drawing on the emerging field of critical [geographic information systems (GIS)], and feminist and grounded-visualization approaches, [Denise] Pacheco and [Veronica N.] Velez contribute provocative ideas about “the politics of representation inherent in maps,” and situated knowledges “[that acknowledge] the positionality of the GIS mapmaker in constructing knowledge;” ultimately, they are interested in the possibilities of using GIS in classrooms “as a discursive tactic to create ‘counter­maps,’ or … “subversive cartographies’ [that] challenge dominant representations of the world.” Synthesizing these concepts and practices into a “critical race spatial analysis in education,” presented by Professors Pacheco and Velez with Professor Daniel Solorzano at the 2007 American Education Research Association conference in Chicago, Professors Pacheco and Velez answer directly Professor Francisco Valdes’s adaptation of Professor Gerald López’s famous articulation of the rebellious idea of lawyering against subordination. They assert, ‘In order to adequately respond to social inequity, we must first understand how society functions and begin to envision the society we desire …. [We] must couple our analysis with active participation in the creation of communities that can wrestle with what it means to actually enact democracy and fairness.’”

Excerpted from Marc­Tizoc González, CLUSTER INTRODUCTION: EDUCATION AND PEDAGOGY: COUNTER­DISCIPLINARITY IN THE CRITICAL EDUCATION TRADITION IN LATCRIT THEORY, 8 Seattle J. for Soc. Just. 107 (2009).

Marc ­Tizoc González is Associate Professor of Law at St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami, Florida.

B.A., University of California, Davis

M.A., San Francisco State University

J.D., University of California, Berkeley

Professor González teaches and writes in the areas of property, poverty, social justice lawyering and Latina & Latino Critical Legal Theory. His scholarship has been published in the California Law Review, Harvard Latino Law Review, American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy and Law, Seattle Journal of Social Justice,Florida International University Law Review, University of Miami Inter­American Law Review, and University of California Irvine Law Review. He is a co­-author of the American Bar Association report, Diversity in the Legal Profession: The Next Steps, and a contributor to the forthcoming Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Latino/a Law, Politics and Social Movements.

Professor González previously taught Property at the Golden Gate University School of Law, and law­ related undergraduate courses for the San Francisco State University Department of Raza Studies and the University of California, Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies, where he was named a Chancellor’s Public Scholar, 2010-­11, for his curricular innovation and scholarship about the history of San Francisco Bay Area legal advocacy organizations.

As an attorney, Professor González was active in the local bar, serving as an officer or director of the Berkeley Law Foundation, Centro Legal de la Raza, East Bay La Raza Lawyers Association, National Lawyers Guild (nationally and for the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter), and San Francisco La Raza Lawyers Association. As a staff attorney at the Alameda County Homeless Action Center, he represented individuals seeking federal disability and state welfare benefits and to dismiss infraction citations associated with being mentally disabled and/or homeless. He also engaged local policy advocacy to protect poor people’s access to county welfare benefits and to establish the City of Oakland municipal identification card program. He previously worked at Sundeen, Salinas & Pyle; the East Bay Community Law Center; and Kazan, McClain, Lyons, Greenwood & Harley, PLC, supporting litigation about inter alia asbestos, affordable housing, employment discrimination and trust administration.

Professor González is the treasurer of LatCrit, Inc. (the organization of Latina & Latino Critical Legal Theory) and serves on the alumni advisory board of the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, (where he previously served as an editor­in­chief). He is a member of the Society of American Law Teachers, National Lawyers Guild, Law and Society Association, and Association of Law, Property and Society, and has delivered continuing legal education workshops on affirmative action in higher education, and the elimination of bias in the legal profession.

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