Juan Cartagena ’81: Championing Latino Civil Rights

In his years as a lawyer, Juan Cartagena ’81 has been steadily pushing forward Latino voting rights, including advocating for redistricting maps that preserve Hispanic voting power, ensuring the availability of Spanish-language ballot information, and keeping Latino and other voters from being improperly dropped from voter rolls.  

But Cartagena’s career path traces a full circle: He began in law school with a 1L summer internship at civil rights nonprofit LatinoJustice PRLDEF (then called the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund). He returned, several decades later, as its president and general counsel. For 10 years, until stepping down in 2021, he led the organization and grew it into a national presence as a champion of Hispanic civil rights. “The best job I ever had in my life,” he says. 

Cartagena entered Columbia Law planning to focus on criminal law—simply because it was what he thought lawyers did. “It was one of the few areas of law that I was exposed to,” he says. “The idea of defense and trial work was just part and parcel of the imagery of lawyering.” But then he participated in a housing discrimination clinic taught by Lawrence Grosberg ’69 and an immigration law clinic taught by Harriet Rabb ’66. “I really liked the work that I was doing,’’ he says.

Cartagena’s summer at PRLDEF cemented his shift to civil rights law. At PRLDEF, he saw how instead of representing one client at a time, lawyers could advance collective well-being through impact litigation and class action suits on behalf of, for instance, all Latino residents in a county, he says. “That’s hundreds of thousands of people. So I took it from there.”

His career following law school led him from PRLDEF to the Community Service Society, a nonprofit with a 180-year-long history advocating for low-income New Yorkers, where he continued to focus on voting rights work as the organization’s general counsel. He worked to eliminate barriers to voting for formerly incarcerated people, led litigation over redistricting that diluted Hispanic voting power in New York City, and advocated for full implementation in New York City of the “motor voter law,” a 1993 federal measure that required voter registration opportunities at state motor vehicle agencies and public-assistance offices.

Addressing Systemic Injustice  

During his leadership of LatinoJustice PRLDEF from 2011 to 2021, the organization’s voting rights work included preventing New York from dropping 1 million “inactive” voters from poll books and requiring Florida to provide Spanish-language sample ballots.  

Cartagena broadened the work of LatinoJustice PRLDEF beyond litigation to include pressing for policy change and legislation, often by partnering with advocacy groups. “I started looking at ways that we can embrace [social justice] organizers in a different way, as opposed to just being 12 or 15 really damn good attorneys,” he says. And he was able to incorporate his early interest in criminal law into the LatinoJustice PRLDEF mission by focusing on disproportionate impacts of the criminal justice system on Latinos, including mass incarceration. 

“The irony was … I was now tying criminal legal systems, and their impact on civil human rights violations, back to the civil rights practice that I’d had for decades,” he says. 

At that time, he adds, “there were very few national Latino organizations that were willing to talk about the issues of the criminal legal system.” For one thing, many Latino advocates were focused on immigration reform—and, he says, did not want to publicly acknowledge that some immigrants were charged with crimes. “Whereas I come from the school of thought that says there is nobody who’s disposable,” Cartagena says. “If we are not prepared to talk about the drug offenders, and if we’re not prepared to talk even about the violent offenders, then we’re not really prepared to dismantle the criminal legal system in a way that makes sense.”

LatinoJustice PRLDEF was part of litigation that restricted the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk practices. Cartagena wrote the introduction to the Spanish-language edition of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander’s book that frames the mass incarceration that resulted from the “war on drugs” as a system of racial control.

“Latinos and Latinas alike are subjected to the worst manifestation of the criminal justice policies of the United States on a daily basis,” he wrote. “Its salience is only dwarfed by the way America treats African Americans. … The counterpart in the Latino experience is a legacy of racialized dominance, conquest, imperialism, and colonialism.”

He also undertook the unglamorous but necessary work of strengthening the organization: crafting a strategic plan, executing a successful capital campaign, and expanding beyond New York by opening regional offices in Florida and Texas.

 “So by the time we finally started getting [grants] to do criminal justice reform work from a Latino perspective, the foundation was already built,” he says.

A ’70s Political Education 

Cartagena was born and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he still lives. His mother, Juanita Aponte, who worked as a sewing machine operator, insisted on the value of education and gave him two career options: priest or lawyer. He chose the latter. “I didn't know any lawyers except for Perry Mason on the black-and-white TV. I wanted to be like him because he won every week,” he says. 

As an undergraduate at Dartmouth, where his city-kid black leather jacket stood out amidst the puffer coats, Cartagena took up drumming—first African, then shifting to traditional Puerto Rican bomba y plena. At Columbia Law, he jammed with jazz musician Professor Kellis E. Parker. In 1989, with his wife, Nanette Hernández, he founded Segunda Quimbamba, a percussion and dance ensemble. Making music “is a wonderful release,” he says. “It grounds me. It provides a lot of joy.” 

Cartagena’s developing political consciousness was nurtured throughout his growing up in the 1970s by his parish priest, Jack Egan, whose support for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers’ produce boycotts of the era meant frequent arrests. “He was an incredible source of inspiration for me,” Cartagena sayş. 

“I saw the riots of Jersey City divide the country after the assassination of Martin Luther King. I knew about Malcolm X, knew about the Black Panthers, knew about the Young Lords. All that and a mix of what I was seeing in my own neighborhood just solidified in me that I was going to use the law as a tool toward social justice and racial justice,” he says. “It became an easy, very easy, connection in my head that lawyering is a major tool of social change in social justice. That thread, which honestly comes from my mother's upbringing and the mentors around me, just became an easy thing to do.” 

Throughout his career, Cartagena has tried to pave the path for Latino lawyers by mentoring and teaching. As a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School, he has taught a seminar on civil rights law and the Latino community, and he has been a long-time adjunct in law at Rutgers University and City College of New York. “I taught the courses that I’d never had a chance to take because they really weren’t offered when I was in school, whether undergrad or graduate,” he says. “So I devised a course about immigrants’ rights, and I devised a course on bilingualism.”  

One lesson he tries to pass on is that the work to achieve social justice is worthwhile but hard. “Major change is a very, very slow-moving tide,” he says. “We should not be surprised at backlash, and the way movements take two steps forward, one step back.”

In a country with “50 sovereign states,” change often has to happen one state at a time, he says, and small victories are to be valued.  

“The incremental ways that we can win in smaller communities, with smaller victories, will lead to larger reform,” he says. “Nothing should discourage us from recognizing that change can happen. Change does happen. The potential to be amazing partners in social justice and racial justice, especially because we have the privilege of a law degree, can never be gainsaid. You can never underestimate that.”