Albequerque, N.M.

A gathering here last month of organizations representing Latino law students agreed to form a national organization to support a pro-affirmative action march, scheduled for January in San Francisco, being organized by legal educators.

The conference, attended by representatives of nearly twenty law schools -- from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., to the University of Texas (UT) and the University of California (UC) -- was held in a near crisis atmosphere.

Margaret Montoya, a professor at the University of New Mexico (UNM) said that the movement against affirmative action is an effort to keep universities White and to maintain the status quo in the legal profession.

"Affirmative action is an effort to remedy a wrong -- an effort to dismantle White supremacy," she said.

However, citing the Nixon White House as the first administration to actually implement it on a large scale, Montoya added, "Affirmative action was never intended to bring about real change.... The power centers have not been meaningfully integrated."

Montoya is a member of the Society of American Legal Teachers (SALT). She said the organization has decided to counter the anti-affirmative action movement through various methods.

The CARE march in San Francisco, scheduled for January 8, is one of those methods. CARE stands for "Communities Affirming Real Equality." The march, in which participants will be asked to wear academic gowns, is intended to be a demonstration of disgust with perceived distortions being perpetrated by opponents of affirmative action.

Marching under a banner which will read, "We won't go back," Montoya said, "We as law professors will lead the march."

One of the biggest obstacles to remedying segregation, in Montoya's opinion, is standardized tests, which came into wide use in the 1970s. The tests, she said, simply function as a means of "allocating social goods" -- whether in employment, educational opportunities, housing, or public contracts.