Martha L. Melendez
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Martha is a graduate of UCLA Law School and Yale University; she is a life-long Angeleno who attended ELA parochial schools and Immaculate Heart HS in Hollywood, CA.
Her mother is a native of San Antonio, Texas and her father emigrated to California in the late '40s under the Bracero Program. As a young man he worked the fields from El Centro to Salinas; hence when they started a family in Los Angeles they were bound and determined to ensure that their children obtain a good education.
At Yale, Martha was a UFW volunteer and picketed Macy's every Saturday morning during the ILGWA-UFW Farrah Pants boycott; to this day she doesn't own a Macy's Card. She also worked on the successful lettuce boycott at Yale which allowed her to host Cesar Chavez as a Yale Chubb Fellow. After law school, she clerked for the Presiding Judge of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California and then joined an international law firm in L.A. In 1995 she served as President of the Mexican American Bar Association of Los Angeles County. After working in-house for Edison International she joined the California Department of Insurance in 2001 in the Corporate Bureau overseeing insurance holding companies' financial transactions. She has been a SF Raza Lawyers Association member since 2002.