Our Stories My Awakening By Amalia Meza Retired San Diego County Superior Court Judge
ambushed. I remember my siblings and I played in that old vehicle before my father returned it to Mexico.
I left home in 1971 to attend Yale University when Ivy League colleges were being pressured to desegregate and admit women and people of color. It was here that I began to appreciate my father’s lessons and see the class disparities in our country. After my mother passed away in 1990, my father came to live with my family in San Diego where he lived until the age of 100. I too learned to advocate for social justice, becoming a prosecutor and a superior court judge. With his dinner table questions, my father planted the seeds of a spirit for social justice that became my life’s moral compass.
My father Arturo Meza’s dinner question for his three children was, “What did you learn at school today? As the youngest, I would bravely respond because I was convinced what I was learning was the only version of history and current events. My father would ask if we
understood the issues saying, You need to open your eyes.”
He applauded my spirit in defending my beliefs, explaining it would serve me well in life. With age, I began to understand.
Amalia Meza
My father became a soldier in the Mexican Revolution at the age of 12, fighting with revolutionary leader Pancho Villa in seeking social reform. My grandfather also fought in the same war and died in the 1914 Battle of Zacatecas. The night before my grandfather had finally reconnected with his son—my father. In 1916 my father fled to the United States. But he returned to Mexico where he met my mom, Amalia Balderas. They eventually made East Los Angeles their home in 1951 where our neighbors were mostly Mexican American and immigrants. My father began a gravestone business.
Arturo Meza holding his grandson – 1993 (Photos courtesy Meza family archives)
He retained ties to the Villa legacy and was entrusted to retrieve from an LA museum the bullet riddled car in which Pancho Villa was
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San Diego Latino Legacy – Timeline • Milestones • Stories
Chapter 2 – Rebuilding Lives, Against All Odds
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