In Our Voices by Samuel Hernandez “In Our Voices” is a column published in each edition of Trial Lawyer featuring members from underrepresented communities and their personal stories. These personal stories focus on adversity encountered, perceptions, general thoughts with the hope of bringing awareness to the larger legal community. Wake up at 5 a.m. to get practice questions out of the way before driving to school for bar exam prep class. Go to the gym after class and go over legal concepts between sets. Group and individual study until 10 p.m. Sleep. Repeat every day for three weeks. A couple of friends and I had this same routine when studying to take the bar exam in 2010. Our aim was to take the exam only once. Seeing my name on the list of passing students signaled the culmination of what, up to that point, had been a tumultuous and uncertain road. I was now an attorney. I grew up in a small town in Michoacan, Mexico. As a child, I enjoyed doing cartwheels in the dirt, playing with an old bicycle rim with a wooden stick and running through corn fields barefoot. My parents always told us we were poor because we lived in a single-room house made of mud bricks. My mom would tell me stories of how, at the age of six or seven, I would go to our neighbor’s house asking for chores to earn pocket change. We used the money to buy cookies we would later eat with some lemon tea. Sometimes, she would say, that’s all we would have to eat. Our lives were simple, but I never saw ourselves as poor. That’s just where we were at the time. My father was a very driven and hardworking man. Unfortunately, opportunities in our small town were lacking, so he migrated to the United States to provide for his family. After several years, my father made the decision to relocate to Oregon when I was nine years old. I remember traveling in a big white van through long stretches of farmland and high desert, city after city. It was all a grand adventure to me where I got to eat my first hamburger. I learned I didn’t like pickles, but I loved french fries with ketchup. The summer we arrived in Oregon, my father would take me and my older brother to pick strawberries, blueberries, cucumbers and blackberries in order to help pay rent and household expenses. We worked in the fields for two or three years during the summers. I didn’t mind working in the fields because it meant earning money for the family. Besides, I loved the egg and potato burritos my mother made for us every day, and getting to drink an ice-cold soda in the middle of the day was like winning the lottery. After our first year in Oregon, we were evicted from our apartment and homeless. I remember sleeping in the back of the big white van during early winter and later living in a halfway house with other families down on their luck. My mom tells how she would hold back tears while taking us to a nearby park, wondering why things were so difficult. I don’t remember it that way. I remember playing with other kids at the halfway house and walking with my family for hours, exploring the City of Hillsboro from end to end. I never heard my parents complain, especially my father. Rather, I saw my father get up every day to go to work, which I later learned was up a mountain pruning Christmas trees. They were doing everything they could, that’s what I remember. My parents always told us education was the most important thing and would often ask us what we wanted to do. At the time, I didn’t have an answer because I was ignorant of what people could do with their lives. When I was around 12 years old, I found a job, along with my older brother, doing yard work at an attorney’s house in Forest Grove, OR. I remember his home being big and his car new, a white Camero with a drop top. Later, my mother got a job cleaning the offices of a group of attorneys in Hillsboro. Naturally, the kids would go help her at night to get the job done faster. I remember dusting the offices and looking at the law school certificates and professionalism awards on the wall and thinking I could do that. That is why I am a strong proponent of children being shown industries and professions SAM HERNANDEZ specializes in employment litigation, representing employees with claims of harass- ment, discrimination, retaliation, wrongful termination, disability discrimination, unpaid wages and whistleblower. He owns AmicusPoint Law, located at 9600 SW Oak St., Ste. 325, Tigard, OR 97223. He can be reached at samuel.hernandez@amicuspoint.com and 503-974-3037. See In Our Voices p. 16 15 Trial Lawyer | Summer 2024
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