Summary In 1951 in the town of Edna, Texas, a field hand named Pedro Hernandez murdered his employer after exchanging words at a gritty cantina. From this seemingly unremarkable small-town murder emerged a landmark civil rights case that would forever change the lives and legal standing of tens of millions of Americans. A team of unknown Mexican American lawyers took the case, Hernandez v. Texas, all the way to the Supreme Court, where they successfully challenged Jim Crow-style discrimination against Mexican Americans.

In his law office in San Antonio, a well-known attorney named Gus Garcia listened to the desperate pleas of Pedro Hernandezs mother, who traveled more than one-hundred-and-fifty miles to ask him to defend her son. Garcia quickly realized that there was more to this case than murder; the real concern was not Hernandezs guilt, but whether he could receive a fair trial with an all-Anglo jury deciding his fate. Garcia assembled a team of courageous attorneys who argued on behalf of Hernandez from his first trial at the Jackson County Courthouse in Texas all the way to Washington, DC. It would be the first time a Mexican American appeared before the Supreme Court. The Hernandez lawyers decided on a daring but risky legal strategy, arguing that Mexican Americans were a class apart and did not neatly fit into a legal structure that recognized only black and white Americans. As legal skirmishes unfolded, the lawyers emerged as brilliant, dedicated, humorous, and at times, terribly flawed men.

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