“I got this from having lived and being raised by my father — and my mother,” Olivarez said. “But my father was very much into issues in the Chicano movement and justice. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to complete the university because he came home to take over the family business when my grandfather fell ill. He would talk about having gone to the university and having this positive experience, but not being able to graduate and finish. I always sort of carried these messages of education and justice with me.”

After high school, Olivarez headed to the University of Texas – Austin where she earned a degree in education and then started a career as a first grade teacher at Odom Elementary School in Austin. But it was her teaching experience that led her to a different calling in life.

“I became a teacher falling in the footsteps of my mother,” Olivarez said. “In the classroom, I saw a lot of disparity from the kiddos who were in my bi-lingual classroom and the kiddos in the rest of the school. A lot of the students whom I was serving had parents who started to come to me with letters from immigration and asked me to translate them for them or to write letters of support because they were at risk of being deported. And I knew a lot about the immigration system growing up on the border. But I hadn’t seen it from this legal side before. And to see these families really struggle with deportation of their families, I decided that instead of being in the classroom, I wanted to be in the courtroom. And I knew that meant going to law school. And I was always interested in issues of justice, issues of access to justice and social justice issues. And so, it felt natural to be able to make that leap to apply for law school.”

Olivarez was admitted to UW-Madison Law School in 2013. It was another world for Olivarez, essentially going from being in the majority to now being in the minority. And law school proved to be a different world for her as well.

“The law school was a steep learning curve for me, being in a space where I grew up not knowing any lawyers or anyone who had gone to law school,” Olivarez said. “It was something brand new to me. I wasn’t sure at all what to expect. Luckily I identified some really good friends early in the process who helped to support me through three years. Definitely the amount of reading and the amount of writing and thinking in ways that I hadn’t thought before were really different for me. It was really intimidating. And there were days — I’m not going to lie — in my first year where I wanted to quit. I was thinking it wasn’t the right fit. I didn’t know if I could keep going. But again, I had a good support system that really convinced me to keep going.”

Olivarez also immersed herself in the world of immigrant law.

“I was able to be a part of the Immigrant Justice Clinic and I was a volunteer at the Community Immigration Law Center where I am the managing attorney now,” Olivarez said. “I was able to volunteer there and I was able to really get involved starting my first year in law school volunteering. And I knew right away that direct representation, serving people, doing immigration work is what I wanted to continue doing. I was also part of the Defender Project, which allowed me to work at the Madison Trial Unit of the Public Defender’s Office here in Madison for a year under the tutelage of Attorney Luis Cuevas who was an amazing mentor for me as I navigated getting ready to graduate and go into a career in law. He never coddled me. He threw me into the fire. ‘Here, you are going to learn this way.’ And I have a huge appreciation for everything that he did for me during that time and the way that he mentored me during that year at the Madison Trial Office.”

In addition to becoming the president of the UW Law School Latino Student Association, Olivarez and her partner also had a baby after her first year in law school, which changed her life once again.

“I realized that I had to slow down,” Olivarez said. “There were different priorities. There were some things that she fit into and some things that she didn’t. I learned after that experience of running, running, running that there is beauty in the slowdown as well. I ended up being focused only on certain efforts. After she was born and as I started to build my career, I really started to build in various intentional times for myself, for her, for my family and for my career so that I paved a path forward that I can look back and be proud of and also feel rested throughout the experience. I was always supported by my loving partner, Victor Garcia. He’s a teacher at Huegel Elementary and has a passion for education and our Latino students here in Madison as well. We do this together and I definitely couldn’t do this without him.”

When Olivarez received her law degree, she headed back to Texas and the border to practice immigration law and be close to family.

“I had been in Wisconsin and separated from my family, having lived a long distance from them for three years,” Olivarez said. “I had a great support system here and a wonderful partner. But I decided that I was going to go back home and work and live on the border again. Right after law school, I went back and I worked with ProBAR, which stands for Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project. Basically what I did was I represented children who were at risk of deportation. There are 14 shelters down at the border that hold children who have come into the United States unaccompanied  without any familial adult. I would go into immigration court with them and represent them or at least observe the court to make sure that proceedings were happening fairly for these children.”

It was 2016, the time when Donald Trump ran for and won the U.S. presidency, largely appealing to anti-immigrant rhetoric. The work and the political times were emotionally overwhelming.

“It was going from being a first-grade teacher and teaching kiddos how to read and write to sitting across from a 7-8-year-old trying to explain what it is going to be like to go to court tomorrow and who you are going to see and drawing it out on paper,” Olivarez said. “I’m not there anymore. It wasn’t something that was sustainable for me. It was emotionally a very intense and physical experience. It’s an important job and I have colleagues who are still doing the amazing work. But it wasn’t something that I could do long-term. And a lot of it just has to do with how cruel our immigration system became, in particular, during that year. I started there in 2016. The rhetoric was especially difficult around the immigrants at the time and policy and the courts were especially difficult. I found myself in a place where I couldn’t do the advocacy that I wanted to do during the Trump administration.”

And then opportunity came a calling.

Next issue: Immigration law