This Saturday, 3L Helen Toloza, a native of Los Angeles, will virtually cross the Oregon Law graduation stage with an extra sense of pride. She will not only be the first in her family to graduate college, but the first to get a law degree as well.
Looking back on her journey, Toloza shares how she grew up in a single-parent household, raised by her mother. Her mother only spoke Spanish and found that the only positions that would hire her were in the restaurant industry. Although employed, she was often denied sick time, overtime and even maternity leave.
Seeing the struggle of what her mother went through, Toloza developed a passion for protecting the rights of employees who didn’t have a voice in their workplaces.
“At some point, all I could do was be an advocate but didn’t have the legal knowledge to help workers with their terrible working conditions,” Toloza said.
This passion led to completing her undergraduate degree from the University of California Santa Cruz in Global Information Social Enterprise Studies while becoming increasingly involved with workers' rights organizations. On campus, Toloza worked with Food Systems Working Group which championed for food industry workers’ rights. She also interned for the Food Chain Workers Alliance in Los Angeles and learned to organize collectively for the rights of all workers along the food chain.
“I knew I wanted to go to law school when I became involved with organizing unions. I loved organizing, but over time became frustrated with the limitations I encountered,” Toloza said.
To better serve the labor community, Toloza was inspired to seek out fellowship opportunities with private law firms. This avenue proved fruitful when she was selected as a fellow by Munger Tolles & Olsen in Los Angeles. The fellowship program helped students of color apply to and attend law school. Toloza says their mentorship and financial support was the sole reason she was able to attend law school at the University of Oregon.
Gracias a mi mamá, a mis tios, y mi familia que son la razón por la que pude alcanzar mi sueños de ser abogada. Thank you to the few radical professors and amazing friends that made surviving law school a way better time. Lo hicimos classe de 2020! - Helen Toloza
At Oregon Law, Toloza has thrived despite dealing with imposter syndrome. In addition to earning a Pro Bono Certificate, she participated in the Hispanic National Bar Association Moot Court Competition. Toloza’s leadership roles included service as editor-in-chief for the Western Environmental Law Update and secretary for both the Latinx Legal Student Association and the National Lawyers Guild. Most of all, she says discovering Creating Connections, a graduate student organization to provide graduate students of color with community building opportunities, was key to her success.
But underlying everything, Toloza’s passion to succeed has been driven by the desire to be a role model for her family members.
“As the only person in my immediate family to graduate from college and attend graduate school I’m kind of it,” Toloza said. “My family expects me to show my younger cousins that being a working professional is a possibility. They expect me to pay forward all of the sacrifices they made for me to become a lawyer.”
Today, in addition to taking on mentorship in her family, Toloza encourages fellow first-generation students to apply for fellowship opportunities, like she did, to help navigate higher education. She voices a poignant truth, “First-generation students are just as capable of being successful in law school as non-first-generation students”.
Toloza takes this knowledge to heart as she continues to blaze trails in her education and career. Following graduation, Toloza will accept a labor law firm position in Portland with McKanna Bishop and Joffe LLP. There she will fulfill her dreams of being part of the labor movement and working with unions.
By Anna Johnson, School of Law Communications