Marco Antonio Firebaugh In Memoriam

If you would like to post a statement about Marco Antonio Firebaugh here, please email it to press@chicano.ucla.edu.

I met Marco when he was at UCLA law school and knew immediately that he had the leadership qualities that would take him far. I observed his growth as a political leader and also as mentor to other young Latinos. In Sacramento, he took on the leadership of the Latino Caucus. Not an easy task particularly following the large footsteps left by Senator Polanco. I watched him over time gather the respect and support of his peers on both sides of the aisle. Marco was a successful legislator because he intuitively understood the distinctions and intersections between power, leadership and listening to your heart. The word filtered quickly when Marco became ill, but I like most others was dismayed when we saw Marco in person again. He had lost so much weight, his skin tone was dark and he suffered from chronic tiredness but his mind was as sharp as ever. If you closed your eyes, Marco was just as before. I spent several days with Marco and Fabian Nunez in Mexico two years ago. Fabian had not yet been voted in as Speaker of the Assembly, but he took every opportunity possible to ask for counsel from Marco. I was included in some of those discussions and Marco who could have been Speaker had he not become ill, and provided Fabian not just with strategies to lead the Assembly but also with his observations on the art of negotiation. The last time I saw Marco was just months ago. He hugged me and told me he would be calling soon for some information on the demographics of the Senate district. He told me that he also wanted to speak to me about a program that he was thinking about to train young Latino leaders to participate in electoral campaigns. The call never came...

Leobardo Estrada

Professor

UCLA School of Public Affairs

Marco Antonio Firebaugh was a great advocate for the elderly. When he was elected assemblyman he asked my students to do a needs assessment of older persons in his district. He used that information to champion expansion of home health services. He was truly a person of the
people, deeply committed to social justice, and a decent and good man. His death at such a young age with all the promise and potential that >awaited our community makes this a truly sad and
tragic event.

Fernando Torres-Gil

Associate Dean, Professor

UCLA School of Public Affairs

Marco Firebaugh's Generation: Proud to be Affirmative Action Babies

3/25/2006 DRAFT -- Do not cite or quote without author's express permission.

Laura E. Gómez

How fitting that Marco Firebaugh's life will be celebrated today in the Los Angeles Cathedral. Few leaders in any field can claim to have made their mark before age 39, as had Marco in politics and civil rights.

Though I was his teacher, I was only two years older than Marco. We represent a unique generation of Latinos, for reasons both good and bad. On the one hand, we profited from being third-generation beneficiaries of affirmative action. Government policies that attempted to equalize the playing field between whites and under-represented minorities appeared in the late 1960s, at the apex of the civil rights movement, when we were young children. Marco and I, and others of our generation, entered college and graduate school and entered the labor market during an era in which affirmative action programs were institutionalized and bearing significant fruit.

On the other hand, we were in many respects the last affirmative action generation in California , and so we were a dying breed as affirmative action babies. With the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996, Californians ended racial and gender preferences in state-controlled educational and employment contexts. Our generation saw the dismantling of affirmative action and witnessed the dramatic affects that followed, including 60-80 percent drops in the African American, Latino, and Native American populations of the student bodies of the most prestigious law, medical, graduate, and undergraduate programs of the University of California .

Marco graduated from UC Berkeley and began his legal education at UCLA in the heyday of affirmative action. When he enrolled at UCLA in August 1994, he did so as part of the first-ever majority-minority entering class. That is, the majority of the law school's Class of 1997 was non-white. Marco's class was more representative of the state than any prior law school class at any public law school in California . Under the 15-year stewardship of Susan Prager (who soon will take the helm at Occidental College), UCLA had succeeded in achieving excellence through diversity, rising to become a top-20 law school while consistently graduating higher numbers of minority students (including Asian Americans) than any other highly ranked law school.

In the winter of 1993, I interviewed for teaching jobs at eight law schools, six of which were ranked higher than UCLA. But it was UCLA that was my first choice because only UCLA had a multi-racial student body that was positioned to confront third-generation diversity issues. These issues came alive in the first class I taught at UCLA, a required criminal law course in which Marco was among the 75 students.

At 28, Marco was an older-than-average law student, while, at 30, I was among the younger faculty members. Marco always called me, then and later, "Profe" (slang in Spanish for professor), which I interpreted as his way of signaling our shared ethnic pride as well as his respect for my position, even though I was in so many respects his peer. I think Marco also meant to signal his respect for me as a young woman of color working in a context in which I didn't fit the stereotypical notion of the older, white and male professor imparting wisdom to his subordinates.

Marco was the kind of student a teacher loved having in the classroom. He was, not surprisingly, articulate and at-ease speaking out on issues about which he had an uncommon perspective, such as the relationship between police and those in our society most often arrested and convicted of crimes. His presence, as well as that of his cohort of Latino and Black law students, enriched our discussions of theories of just punishment, the legitimacy of the death penalty, and the social context of homicide.

At that time, we could not have predicted the demise of affirmative action. A few years later, in his third year at UCLA, Marco was one of a few student representatives appointed to the committee charged with revising the law school's admissions policy in the wake of Proposition 209. That committee, co-chaired by Cruz Reynoso -- the former California Supreme Court Justice and now Boochever & Bird Chair for the Study and Teaching of Freedom & Equality at UC Davis, worked to craft a policy that complied fully with the law and tried to meet a variety of pedagogical and public policy goals that had been met previously by a race-conscious admissions policy. Already a veteran of political negotiations from his work for Richard Polanco and other experiences, Marco was, so characteristically, a skilled and tireless advocate on that committee.

As affirmative action beneficiaries, our generation has been unique in several respects. I never had any illusions that race was irrelevant to my being hired by UCLA in 1993, nor do I think Marco had any doubt that his being Latino was a factor in his admission to UC Berkeley and UCLA. But we never thought less of ourselves, and that may have distinguished us from earlier generations. Perhaps because affirmative action had become institutionalized, we didn't waste time thinking about how we'd gotten into these elite institutions. Among my minority peers, I can't think of a single one who felt stigmatized by affirmative action or who wished they'd not had doors opened to them because of it. On the contrary, we felt entitled to be in these institutions. That may have distinguished us from the first or second generations of affirmative action beneficiaries, whom we knew had struggled more than we had. Those earlier generations had struggled because perhaps they were less prepared academically, because they were so often only tokens in any single institution, and because those very institutions were so often downright hostile to their presence. All of these factors, I think, tended to be different for our generation.

More than entitlement to be present, the dominant feeling we had was that we owed back to those communities from which we had come. These communities -- racial minority communities but almost always working class or poor communities of all races -- still were not represented at the tables where political and economic power-brokers sat to do business. Marco was exemplary in this respect: he always remembered his roots and he did not hesitate to fight for policies that improved the position of the most vulnerable segments of our society, even when those policies were unpopular. He entered politics -- even before finishing law school -- with a clear sense of his obligation to make a difference. Pure and simple, that was what he owed back as a beneficiary of affirmative action. Despite becoming a prominent player at the highest level of California politics, Marco never lost sight of that duty.

A decade has passed since Californians voted out affirmative action -- ten years in which we have lost the opportunity to cultivate more leaders like Marco Firebaugh.

Laura E. Gómez is a professor at the University of New Mexcio and is writing a book on 19th century racial politics in the Southwest.