Valorie Vega interview, November 19, 2018: transcript

i AN INTERVIEW WITH VALORIE J. VEGA An Oral History Conducted by Laurents Bañuelos-Benitez Latinx Voices of Southern Nevada Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©Latinx Voices of Southern Nevada University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2018 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV – University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcribers: Kristin Hicks, Maribel Estrada Calderón, Nathalie Martinez, Rodrigo Vazquez, Elsa Lopez Editors and Project Assistants: Laurents Bañuelos-Benitez, Maribel Estrada Calderón, Monserrath Hernández, Elsa Lopez, Nathalie Martinez, Marcela Rodriquez-Campo, Rodrigo Vazquez iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) Grant. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Latinx Voices of Southern Nevada. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iv PREFACE Valorie J. Vega was born in the city of Van Nuys, California. After graduating with from California State University, Northridge with a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish she enrolled at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she earned a Master’s Certificate in Interpretation/Translation. It was through the encouragement a mentor and professor at UCSB that she moved to Las Vegas and became a supervisor for the court interpreters for the Eighth Judicial District Court of Las Vegas. It was while working at the district court that she was encouraged by former district Judge John Mendoza and Judge Carl Christensen to apply to law school. After graduating from USC’s Gould School of Law, she clerked for Judge Christensen. She then became a Clark County Deputy District Attorney for five years and was instrumental in implementing the office’s first Sexual Assault and Child Abuse team. She was appointed to District Court’s Department 2 on February 21, 1999 and retained the seat until her retirement in v 2015. Throughout her tenure she authored numerous improvements to the EDCRs for the improved processing of all cases along with authoring Part XI of the Supreme Court Rules for the protection of evidence that gets lodged in the evidence vault. She is actively involved in the legal profession and the Las Vegas community serving as a Board Member for the Latin Chamber of Commerce and the Latino Bar Association. She has been involved in the Huellas Mentorship Program for future lawyers and has been a volunteer speaker for D.A.R.E. She is a member of numerous associations including the Latino Bar Association, the Clark County Bar Association, and the Southern Nevada Association of Women Attorneys. She is married, has one daughter, and has resided in southern Nevada since 1978. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Valorie J. Vega November 19, 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Laurents Bañuelos-Benitez Preface…………………………………………………………………………………………..iv Judge Vega describes growing up in Van Nuys, California in Los Angeles County. She recounts growing up surrounded by family due to her parents’ large extended families where they would all gather for a large potluck after church on Sundays. Her father was a firefighter with the L.A. County Fire Department, being one of the first Hispanic person to work their way up through the ranks to become Captain. Her mother was a homemaker. She describes her years at school and about learning the process to apply for college. She talks about traveling to Mazatlán, Mexico during winter breaks while at school and about spending Christmas on the beach………………………………………………………………………………………….....1-5 Vega describes her father’s difficulty in getting into the L.A. County Fire Department. Describes her experience growing up in 1960s Los Angeles coming from a biracial heritage. Talks about receiving a scholarship from La Sociedad Progresista Mexicana, which she used towards her studies at California State University, Northridge where she majored in Spanish with a minor in Chicano studies. Tells of her reason for majoring in Spanish and about her experience living in Mexico while studying abroad at La Universidad Iberoamericana. She describes her experiences with the various traditions and foods in Mexico City and the surrounding areas……………………………………………………………………………………………5-10 After Graduating undergrad, she entered into a master’s program for interpretation at UC Santa Barbara. Vega tells of how she arrived in Las Vegas to work as the supervisor of court interpreters for district court in Clark County. Talks about working as a court interpreter in Las Vegas. Describes her first impression of the city and her first apartment on Maryland Parkway and Tropicana…………………………………………………………………….……………….11-15 Describes her various mentors in Las Vegas including John Mendoza and Judge Bob Teuton, Eva Garcia Mendoza and Mariteresa Rivera-Rogers. Talks about what led her to pursue a JD, and her registration for the LSAT. Talks about enrolling in law school at USC and moving back to L.A. Talks about clerking for Judge Carl Christensen, a district court judge and about passing the Bar exam. Describes her career trajectory that ultimately led to her decision to become a lawyer……………………………………………………………………………………..….16-20 Vega describes her interest in becoming a judge, which started while in law school. She discusses the pros and cons to having elected judges like they do in Las Vegas. Describes her first campaign and the various cases that she saw in both municipal court and district court. Describes her first vii day as a judge and high points in her career, including authoring many local Eighth Judicial District Court Rules. ……………………………………………………………………………....….21-25 Talks about her experience being a female Hispanic judge and about her participation in the Huellas Program, a partnership between La Voz law student and the Latino Bar Association. Talks about community involvement including the Latin Chamber of Commerce and the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program (D.A.R.E.). Talks about her family and her daughter’s life growing up in Las Vegas. ……………………….………………………………………..…………...25-30 Describes how she got a full-time position with the Los Angeles Thunderbirds, a roller derby team, while in law school. Details the importance of enabling and protecting children who testify in court…………………………………..………………………………………………………31-36 viii ix 1 Today's date is November 19th, 2018. I am in the Oral History Research Center. My name is Laurents Banuelos-Benitez and I am joined by... Barbara Tabach. Today we are interviewing... Valorie Vega. Judge Vega, would you mind spelling your name and pronouncing it for me? V-A-L-O-R-I-E. My middle initial is J. And my last name is V-E-G-A, Vega. Thank you. Judge Vega, how do you identify; as Latina, Chicana? Chicana or Mexican American. I'd like to start at the beginning. Where were you born? In Los Angeles. Van Nuys is the town, but it's in Los Angeles County. What was your childhood like? I was the oldest of three kids and both of my parents came from families of six, so I have a lot of aunts and uncles and like a hundred cousins all over the place. We tended to meet at my grandma's house on Sundays after church and do big potlucks. I grew up with a lot of my cousins and family. What kind of food was served during the potlucks? It was kind of interesting. One of the things that I loved was Easter because we'd do the Easter egg hunts and stuff, too. My grandma and grandpa lived across the street from a park, so we would do the Easter egg hunt in the park. My mom's side of the family was not Hispanic and that side of the family would bring ham. My dad's side of the family that was Hispanic would always bring tamales. I thought everybody had ham and tamales on Easter Sunday until I was about in 2 junior high and then I found out from some of my fellow students that they didn't have ham and tamales on Easter Sunday. I felt like they were really deprived. Can you tell me a little bit more about your parents? My mom was a homemaker. My dad was a firefighter. When I was born, he was a mail carrier. He worked for the U.S. Postal Service and then he got on to the L.A. County Fire Department. He was one of the first Hispanics to get in and then worked up through the ranks and became a captain. Did your father immigrate here or was he born here? My dad was born in Los Angeles also. How far back does your family tree go here? The family goes back...My dad's dad came in from—and his mom, too—they were from Arizona and New Mexico. My Grandpa Vega was a seventh generation copper miner. They had been mining copper in what is now southern Arizona, but back when it was part of the Mexican Republic before the boundary line and from there it changed and became U.S. Were they part of the group of Mexicans where they didn't necessarily migrate, but they just found themselves all of a sudden on the U.S. side when things changed? Yes. Did the family ever talk about that experience of suddenly being immigrants even though they didn't move anywhere? No. My grandpa talked about it a little bit, but he passed when I was eleven, and I never got to meet the older generations beyond him. What was school like? 3 I went to public school, L.A. Unified School District, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I enjoyed school. Did you have an easy time at school? Any particular experiences that stood out to you while you were going? I was a good student. I loved to read and I loved to learn. I had an unfortunate occurrence when I started high school. I was in a really large high school and it was very culturally diverse. There were fifty-eight hundred students. It was one of the larger high schools in the United States at the time. All of the courses that I wanted to take, I was able to get into. We had some core classes that we were required to take, but then we had electives also. After I made my selection and got all my courses—they were all solids and I had seven and PE—a counselor called me into the office and said, "You have too difficult a schedule. You need to modify it and you need to drop some of these core classes and take something that is not going to be as demanding and that may give you a route for employment." I asked the counselor why they had that opinion. Had they gone back and looked at my report cards from the past? Had they conferred with my prior instructors? He said, "No, just based off of your gender and your name." What he wanted me to take was sewing and typing instead of algebra and biology. I told him, no, I wasn't changing my schedule, thank you very much, and I left. In my senior year, I had a completely different situation occur. I was at a different school. Because the school I started high school at was so large, they ended up building a new school nearby and I was zoned for the new school. In the new school I got called into the counselor's office and I was like, what now? I had a hundred percent different experience. 4 The counselor said, "You're involved in all these different activities on campus. Your grades are excellent. Your teachers have given you very favorable comments. I went through the list of everybody that signed up to take the SAT and you're not on it. I wanted to know why." I said, "Because my family doesn't have the money to be able to afford to send me to college, so there's no point in me taking the SAT." The counselor said, "Well, if I were to help you get a scholarship, would you go to college?" And I said, "What's a scholarship?" That was a counselor that took an interest in me and spent time and went out of their way to help me fill out applications for scholarships and I got one and that's why I was able to go to college. I had a really negative experience with a counselor and then I had a really positive one with a counselor as well. What was school like for your siblings? My siblings were not as interested in academics as I was and they went different routes. They're both doing well. I have a brother in the middle and then a younger sister. She and her husband own their own business and my brother is a professional musician. But they too went through the L.A. Unified Public School system from kindergarten through high school and they both graduated high school and went on to junior college and got AA degrees, but neither of them got a bachelor's degree. I got a bachelor's, a master's, and my JD. I want to bring it back a little bit and I want to discuss—you mentioned Easter. Were there other traditions and holidays that you would celebrate? Oh, yes. Birthdays and Christmas and Valentine's and Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. We always had a really nice Thanksgiving dinner, too. Was your Thanksgiving growing up kind of that mixed foods like Easter was? 5 More traditional American. What about Christmases, do you remember doing anything special for Christmases? Christmases varied every year because of my dad's work schedule. There were times when he worked Christmas Eve. There were times when he worked Christmas Day. When we would celebrate would be when we could have the whole family together. If he was working Christmas Day, we did the celebration the day early. Because the firefighters don't work a traditional nine-to-five Monday-through-Friday schedule and he was always on call for emergency, too, we had to take that into account. By the time I was in Junior High, my dad had more seniority and could get Christmas off. The family then began traveling to Mazatlán, Mexico over the winter school break. For thirteen years we spent three weeks in Mexico over Christmas and New Year’s. It was wonderful. Those years we spent Christmas on the beach in the warm sunshine eating fresh seafood and tropical fruit. It was cold back home that time of year. I want to discuss a little bit of your father becoming a firefighter. Was that an easy route for him? You said he was the first Hispanic. He was one of the first. He had a hard time getting on. He had a hard time getting hired and applied to different departments before he finally got on one. They had oral interviews where they could grade you pretty much however they chose to, which was where he would get knocked down a lot of times. He didn't realize how few there were on the department when he originally got hired until he started taking overtime work because they had him based in East Los Angeles and there were other Hispanics there. But when he started doing overtime and being placed out in the various stations throughout the county, he realized that it wasn't very culturally diverse throughout the department. 6 You said he got knocked down in the oral interviews. Was that because of his appearance or his command of the language? Do you know why? There was a lot of nepotism and favoritism in those early years. He got on about 1960. A lot of the existing people in the upper echelon were hiring family and friends a lot. Since they were mostly Caucasian, then it was mostly Caucasians that were coming in. There were like no Asians and very few African Americans as well. What was L.A. during this time like—or your hometown, I should say? I'm not sure what you mean. Culturally what was the area like that you grew up in? I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and it was predominately white Caucasian, and there were pockets of different towns that had larger Hispanic focus or African-American focus. When I got switched to the new high school when it was built, they actually bussed in from other areas so that that student body would be diverse. Growing up—because your mother, you said, was white? Yes. How did you navigate those two identities? Did you find yourself hanging out with one group more than the other? No. I felt kind of blessed to have some exposure to two different cultures. That was just normal for me. That was just the way I grew up. Later years when I was in undergrad, I got into an international program through the California State Colleges and University system and I did abroad study in Mexico City and I came back and forth over the course of a couple of years, my junior and senior years in undergrad. It was very easy for me to come in and out of both 7 countries because I was comfortable with both cultures and both languages. I felt like I had the best of both worlds. Going forward again, applying for scholarships for school, where did you apply and where did you ultimately end up going? The counselor had me fill out about a half a dozen scholarship applications. That would have been 1972 or three. I don't remember all of the ones that I applied to. The one that I got was from an organization that was called La Sociedad Progresista Mexicana. I only applied to one school, which was Cal State Northridge. It was the closest four-year to where I lived and I could get there on the bus because I didn't have a car. They took that scholarship and that was great. What did you study while you were there? I was a Spanish major. I started out in biology, but my math skills were not my strength. My language skills were much better. I ended up switching from biology to Spanish and I got a minor in Chicano studies. What was your college experience like? I loved college. College was great. You had a little bit more freedom to pick your classes and what you wanted to study and what you wanted to focus on, and more challenging. I'm curious, how did you choose to become a Spanish major? I was spending a lot of hours working on calculus and having difficulty with it and really putting in a lot of time to get a B-minus. I wasn't taking my English book home nor my Spanish book home and I was getting A's in both of those. I said, I think my aptitude, my strength is in language rather than in math. But I love science, too. It's interesting. You were fluent already in Spanish by talking with your father, or how did that develop? 8 No. My grandparents, my dad's parents, were very bilingual and they spoke Spanish to each other, but they both were employed and in their employment situations they spoke English. They were of that generation that felt that they didn't want their children to be held back by having an accent, and so they spoke English to the kids, but the kids were around Spanish and heard it all the time. Of the six kids in my dad's family, the older ones are more fluent than the younger ones. My dad was the youngest. I really wanted to study Spanish, in part, so I could talk to my grandparents in their native tongue, but I loved it, too. I'll tell you a funny story. When I was in junior high, I was taking a Spanish class. I was reading some of the materials and I started laughing. The teacher came up to me and said, "This is not like you. What is so funny?" It was a little story we were reading about un tren viejo. I was like, ugh, tren viejo, and I started going, "Oh my gosh." Viejo is what my grandma always called my grandpa, and I didn't know she was calling him old man. I just thought that was a nickname. It's like, hey, Viejo. I just thought, oh my gosh, that's so funny. That's what she's saying. I didn't realize it. His name was Guillermo and they called him Memo and I thought Viejo was another nickname like Memo. The teacher said, "No, it's a term of endearment." I was like, "Oh, okay." But I didn't become fluent until I was living in Mexico City. After I had been living in Mexico City for maybe six, nine months, I think, it really solidified for me. What was that experience like, living in Mexico City? It was so much fun. It was great. The international program that I was a part of sent one student from each campus in California. They got us all together before we went down to give us an overview on the program and things that we needed to make sure that we didn't do to keep ourselves out of trouble and not get arrested and deported and all that kind of stuff to avoid, 9 some dos and don'ts, and we all got to meet each other so then when we would see each other on campus, we would recognize each other. But there were very few of them that would be in my classes. On occasion, we would overlap. But we came from all different disciplines or majors, and so we were spread out throughout the campus. We also had an office on campus for international students, and so there were some students that were from Central and South America, there were some Japanese students, and there were students from Canada and all across the U.S. I made some great friends with Mexican students, but also some of the Americans as well as the international students. I was there when I was twenty to twenty-two. I found that the people that I gravitated to and became good friends with back then are still people that I gravitate to and wish to be friendly with. Just last week two of my friends—one was from Cal State Dominguez Hills and the other one was from Cal Poly, Pomona—they both came into town with their wives and we had a little reunion with us three couples and we had to go to dinners at Lindo Michoacán. Some of my friends from that program are on the East Coast and they're in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Florida. Just to clarify, were you studying in UNAM in Mexico City? No. I was at La Universidad Iberoamericana. It is a private Jesuit school. The campus that I was on is no longer there. The buildings collapsed during an earthquake a number of years back. The last time I was in Mexico City, I went by and the land had been completely redone. The university was gone. A huge insurance facility was built, like Allstate or State Farm; a big insurance company had their headquarters on that site. The university still exists, but they relocated to the north end of Mexico City in an area called Santa Fe and I didn't get a chance to visit the new campus. What was your favorite experience while you were in Mexico City? 10 I can't say just any one. There are so, so many. One of my roommates had done a high school exchange program in a small town called Nueva Necaxa, N-E-C-A-X-A, which was just outside Mexico City, and she took me there for Day of the Dead. They did a whole community thing where they had this huge, huge pot that was on firewood and everybody contributed to the pot. They made turkey, guajolote, with...the mole poblano sauce that is a combination of chocolate and chiles—and nuts, peanuts and the pumpkin seeds. Everybody put into this big, big pot. It was one of the most delicious things I ever ate. Then they did a very traditional Day of the Dead with the cempaspuchitl (or zempoalxochitl in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs). They take the marigold flowers and they peal the petals off and they make a path from the cemetery where the gravestone is to where an altar is in the house and they put the loved one's favorite foods on the altar. I got to see that whole experience, how they do that, which was something very different from my "Halloween trick-or-treating in Los Angeles" kind of experience. That's one thing that really stands out in my mind. Did you ever track relatives? This day and age everybody is into their ancestry and all that. Did you ever try to connect with relatives of Mexico? No. My dad's mother's family has roots from the Tarahumara Indians and they were up in the mountains above Chihuahua, Chihuahua. When I was in Mexico City, I was in a history class and I did a paper on the Tarahumara because I wanted to know more about them and learn a little bit more about my roots that way. The family that was on my dad's mother's side, they had come down from the mountain and been involved in railroad and also in the mining. People were kind of spread out. We didn't have access to genealogy the way we do now. My mom and my dad spent some time in Salt Lake City doing research on family genealogy, and so I had that information from 11 both of them. My mom's family was much easier to trace than my dad's was. My dad's side of the family, everybody had a nickname and it's not the name that's on the birth certificate and it's not the name that's on the death certificate. Everybody was Chato or Chino. Everybody had nicknames. My dad's mom they called Calola. Her name was Carolina. It was just really difficult because of that. When did you graduate from college? I graduated from undergrad in '77. What were your plans after? I went into a master's program in interpretation translation. Straight into it? I graduated in June and I started it in September, so I had a summer break in between. When I graduated I knew already that I was admitted and that's where I was going to go. Why interpretation? Back to my language skills. I thought it was a good way for me to use both my English and my Spanish. You were describing it and it was on the tip of my tongue, but it wasn't mole or pozole. Pozole is great. I learned to make pozole when I lived in Mexico City. I lived with a Mexican family and they had three daughters. The mom was a really good cook. She taught me how to make chile rellenos and she taught me how to make pozole. Did you bring any of that cooking back home? Oh, yes. My sister's family always asks me—Christmastime we usually do with my sister's family—they're always like, "Will you make a pot of pozole?" It's like, "Okay." Did your family make the food before you went to Mexico City? 12 No. We did tamales. We always did tamales. My grandma and her friend Della for years did tamales. They would plan it for months in advance and they would go into downtown L.A. to the market to get special chile and the husks to wrap, the corn husks. They would simmer the meat for I don't know how many hours, and then they would get the whole family together. It was like a Ford production line; we would make tamales all day. Then we would have them through the holidays and then freeze them and have them off and on throughout the year. How did you arrive to Las Vegas? By car. What brought you to Las Vegas, I should ask? A job. What job was that? The supervisor of court interpreters for district court in Clark County. I was doing my master's program at UC Santa Barbara. My professor was a member of some national professional organizations for interpreters and translators. He came into class one day with a publication from one of those professional groups and it had a job opportunity listing in the back. He showed it to me and he said, "You're the only one of my students that doesn't own a home, isn't married, doesn't have kids that are enrolled in school. You could pick up and go and this is a really good opportunity." So, I look at it. I was thinking when I graduated I would move back to L.A. and work in the superior court system in Los Angeles because they had a great need for bilingual Spanish-English interpreters and translators. You worked on a per diem basis. But this was a full-time position. It was salaried with benefits. So, I went, hmm, I got medical, dental, paid vacation and a steady paycheck. I thought, well, I can come in and do this for a couple of years, 13 build up my resume, and then maybe I could get a supervisory position in Los Angeles instead of starting at the bottom and working my way up. What I thought was going to be helpful in my career progression as an interpreter/translator actually opened the door to me becoming a lawyer. What was that experience like working as a court interpreter here in Las Vegas? It was very busy. I did the majority of the Spanish work myself, but I also had assistants because if you had multiple things going on at the same time, you had to be able to cover the different courtrooms. You'd maybe have a trial going in one courtroom and a preliminary hearing in another courtroom and then maybe a civil deposition. I had what we called a bank of interpreters and people that worked freelance. I had that for all the languages. I did the training for Spanish and did the testing for Spanish, but we didn't test in the other languages. I had to try to find people that were bilingual in Japanese, different Chinese dialects, Vietnamese, French, German, so many different languages, and sign language too. I worked with those people mostly on legal vocabulary and the ethics of interpreting and translating, the dos and the don'ts, but I could not train them linguistically obviously and I didn't know sign language. Sign language is now kind of off in a different realm than the foreign languages are. Over time we've been learning to test in more languages, but Spanish is still the number-one called for language in Southern Nevada in the court system. Do you have a memorable experience translating for the courts, some funny way that didn't get translated right? I was working with a Japanese interpreter who came in from Los Angeles. The case involved a situation that had occurred in McCarran Airport. The defendant had gotten very upset and had 14 referred to a police officer as a—this is not politically correct—as an F-ing pig and the interpreter said copulating swine. That was an unusual situation. Most of the cases are fairly serious, though. There's not a lot of funny stories to tell. A lot of sad stories to tell. One of my earlier ones, a young man worked for one of the linen companies and got his paycheck and decided to find a female on Fremont Street to take to a hotel room and he was the victim of a trick roll. After he was undressed she took off with his wallet. She threw it in her purse and took off running down the street. He came out in just his pants, running down the street after her. A marked patrol unit happened to come by. He's thinking, oh good, I'm going to get some help. But he didn't speak English and the officer didn't speak Spanish. The female, he caught up to her and pulled her purse away from her just as the police officer pulled up. Well, he got arrested for stealing her purse. I worked with him and his public defender and his family members and we had an investigator and we were able to go back and find where they had checked into the motel and where the motel had found his shirt and his shoes. He ended up being acquitted of the charges. The family was very, very grateful. What was your first impression of Las Vegas when you arrived here? Were you ever here before you moved here? Yes. My parents used to come to Las Vegas a couple of times a year and they actually got married here. They did an anniversary trip usually and then they would usually do one other vacation trip and on occasion they brought us. Sometimes we would be from here and then going up north because we had family up in Carson City and friends in Virginia City, too. I had been 15 here a number of times. I spent some of that time in the arcades and hadn't really spent a lot of time, maybe a day or two, here or there. When I moved to town I got to explore more and see some of the surrounding areas and watched the town grow, oh my gosh. Did you ever think you would actually end up living here those few times that you were visiting with your family? No. It didn't cross my mind until the professor walked in with that job notice and I started thinking about it and I was like, that could be a good step in the right direction for me. But once I got here, I just loved it. I made friends real easily. I did not miss the traffic and the congestion of Los Angeles. It was nice having stuff open twenty-four hours. There were a lot of benefits. Where did you first live when you moved here? Very close to here, actually, pretty much Maryland Parkway and Tropicana, in an apartment. I rode a bus that went straight up Maryland Parkway into downtown and dropped me off a block away from the courthouse. It was not air-conditioned. The courthouse wasn't air-conditioned? The bus wasn't air-conditioned. The courthouse was. The bus was not. How would you des