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.”
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