Teenage Roy Benjamin Cazares spent his summers in the 1950s reading to his siblings in their National City bedroom cramped with bunk beds.
“He would do that for us and that gave us all a love of reading,” said his younger brother, Allen Cazares. “And that’s very unique for a 12-, 13-year-old.”
Reading came easy to the teenager, who at that age was already reading at a college level, a Granger Junior High School counselor told him, Roy Cazares said in a 2002 interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune.
The academically inclined boy from South County was destined for scholastic achievement, family said last week. His resume proved that: a graduate of Southwestern College, San Diego State University and Harvard Law School.
He became one of few Latino attorneys in San Diego County in the 1970s and later a San Diego Superior Court judge.
Cazares , 81, died Jan. 9 in his Eastlake home from complications of a stroke suffered years ago.
He was ed as a respected jurist and mentor to many across the county, particularly to Chicanos in the legal community.
“The enormous impact Judge Cazares had on our legal community cannot be overstated,” Nadia Bermudez, former president of the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association, said in a statement.
“His distinguished career included taking on unpopular civil rights cases as a lawyer, serving as a founder of San Diego La Raza Lawyers in 1976, and being appointed as a judge. We owe so much to Judge Cazares for decades of public service, which were accomplished with extraordinary integrity and excellence,” added Bermudez.
Even after retiring from the bench more than two decades ago, Cazares has served as a source of inspiration for younger generations, his niece Lisa Cisneros among them. She was recently appointed as a U.S. magistrate judge for the Northern District Federal Court in San Francisco.
“My uncle Roy’s career was remarkable,” she said.
But, Cisneros added, the path was not linear.
Cazares , who was born March 31, 1942, in Mexico and raised in the San Diego region, was placed in vocational classes while at Sweetwater High School as many Mexican students were at the time.
In the 2002 interview, he said the classes were “really designed to keep Latinos in the workforce. When I say workforce, I mean blue-collar workforce.”
But unlike his father, who worked on ship engines in wartime San Diego, Cazares was not very proficient with tools. His grades began to suffer and he dropped out of high school.
He later went to adult school, taking classes by night and working at a tomato-packing plant by day. In 1961, he received his GED and then spent two years in the U.S. Army.
When he returned, he went to Southwestern College and then to SDSU, where he successfully helped recruit more Mexican American students from all over Southern California. He graduated with honors from the university in 1970 and three years later from Harvard, where he also pushed to have more Latino students and faculty.
His legal career began in the mid-1970s with criminal defense work, later moving into labor law, personal injury and civil rights litigation.
One notable civil case he took on led to the rehiring of nearly one dozen San Diego police officers of color who had been wrongly fired. It had been a time when many law enforcement agencies were sued over their hiring practices, which later led to increased hiring of Black and Latino officers via federal consent decrees.
Then, in 1982, Gov. Jerry Brown appointed him to the South Bay Municipal Court. He retired in 2000 as a Superior Court judge. Cazares also was an instructor at Southwestern College and SDSU and served on various boards, including for San Ysidro Health.
He was one of 11 children who became successful professionally. Cazares’ late older brother, Carlos Cazares, was also a Superior Court judge.
“It’s a legacy family,” said Mixim Murchison, one of Cazares’ four daughters. “We have many lawyers, judges, principals, teachers, you name it. We had good role models. And most of us have a sense of social justice and community at the heart of our careers and I think that’s an important legacy of my dad.”
In addition to his daughters and siblings, he is survived by his wife, Maria Cazares, and more than a dozen grandchildren.
A burial service is scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 24, at 11 a.m. at the Miramar National Cemetery, located at 5795 Nobel Dr.
