San Francisco Immigration attorney Enrique Ramirez has spent his legal career helping fellow immigrants – while also delivering his political messages through song. Joe Rosato Jr. reports.
Enrique Ramirez popped open the guitar case and plucked out his nylon string guitar — dug into a disheveled stack of dog-eared papers until he landed on the right one. He strummed and sang in a tenor voice “Stop the bombing,” a song he wrote about the turmoil in Gaza.
“There’s something magical about music that it connects us all,” Ramirez mused with the guitar safely back in its case.
Since finding his internal voice somewhere between high school and college, Ramirez became a singer of protest songs as well as a legal champion of his fellow immigrants. He has been a Bay Area immigration lawyer for forty years and a musician for longer than he can remember.
“Music became a big part of my life but also politics,” said Ramirez in the living room of his home in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point. “So that led me to think about becoming a lawyer.”
Ramirez was born in Tornillo, Texas, and raised in Torreõn, Mexico — his father picked cotton and his mother cooked and cleaned for the workers. The family uprooted and moved to East Los Angeles where Ramirez entered high school with scant English on his tongue and a young immigrant’s desire to blend in.
Many of his Mexican schoolmates eschewed speaking Spanish and Americanized their names. In a yearbook photo of Ramirez playing football he’s listed as Henry instead of Enrique.
“Recent arrivals from Mexico were attacked,” he said. “We were ridiculed, we were humiliated, we were yelled at, we were jumped. So it was survival that we had to hang together and fight off the abuse.”
In college, the cultural pendulum swung the other way. Ramirez discovered the growing Chicano movement and embraced his heritage in a new way. A turning point came on August 29, 1970, when he joined thousands of other Chicanos in a massive protest of the Vietnam War.
“And these new Chicanos were no longer Mexican-Americans,” Ramirez said. “They were proud of their heritage, they wanted to be Mexican, they wanted to speak Spanish.”
Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news. Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter.
Through the melding of culture and activism Ramirez became active in student marches, walkouts and marches. He discovered the same guitar that he’d long used to strum traditional Mexican ballads or corridos — could also carry messages and political ideas through a song. He began writing protest songs, using politics and humor as his weapon of choice against the injustice and tyranny he was fighting.
His interest in speaking up for those on the bottom wrung of the ladder brought him to San Francisco to what was then called the Hastings College of Law and became a lawyer. Living in the Mission District, he found a need for his legal services in the community of fellow immigrants.
“It gave me such a sense of pride and reward, satisfaction to be able to help and keep a family together,” he said, “or avoid the deportation of a dad or a brother.”
Ramirez thinks of immigrants as the best Americans, because of their love of their adopted country, their hard work ethic and their hunger to understand the laws in the new world. He traces his interest in helping others back to his childhood.
“I had this calling,” Ramirez pondered, “and to practice for equality justice and overall betterment it may have come from when I was a kid in Mexico.”
He credits his mother as his inspiration. His father wasn’t around much, leaving her to raise seven kids mostly on their own.
“She’s the one that pulled us through,” he said.
The other thing that pulled him through, was music. He and his brother played in countless bands, fusing traditional Mexican music with the new protest songs Ramirez wrote.
“At my age I’m still in awe and wondering what the magic of music is,” Ramirez said, his eyes wide as if he was trying to solve an apparition floating in front of him.
Music was not only fulfilling to the soul, it also delivered his political messages and thoughts in a way that reached people in a different way. Even now, he doesn’t know where the song ideas or lyrics come from as he strums his guitar. He is merely the conduit.
“It doesn’t matter how good the music or how bad it is,” Ramirez said. “The fact that you get that inspiration and you come up with some type of a song - it’s magical.”
