Adelfa Botello was born in 1923, on June 10, and in a small community halfway between San Antonio and Laredo. The place, called Millett, was just a dot on the Texas map. It still is. Adelfa’s dad, Félix Botello, was from Mexico; her mom, Guadalupe Guerra, who was mostly known as Lupita, was a tejana. Félix picked cotton for a couple of months out of the year and worked in the sulfur mines at other times. Lupita labored as a laundress. Both those parents, according to recorded information, instilled in Adelfa early on the need to fight injustice. There were four other siblings in that family besides her. She was the oldest.
The era that welcomed Adelfa to the world was eventually called the “Roaring Twenties,” for different reasons, but mainly because of the economic prosperity and the widespread consumerism that flourished then. That decade, however, was also a time of great contradictions. Not everyone benefited from that supposed prosperity, especially not the Mexican Americans that made their home in South Texas. They were the “Have nots” then, and part of a segment of the population that was greatly affected by wealth inequality and segregation. There were plenty racial tensions then, during that time of rapid economic growth that mainly benefited white America.
Near the end of that decade, though, in 1929 to be exact, the economy got sacked. That era of plenty for some did a sudden one-eighty. The market crashed, the economy shrank, and as other ills battered the land, the Great Depression began to unfold. Adelfa had just turned six when the market went south. The future didn’t look good for her and for the rest of her family. But the Botellos stuck around Millet, Texas, anyway, until 1939, and until Adelfa graduated from high school. They moved to Dallas to look for better opportunities. The Great Depression was mostly over by then.
There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that those years, living in South Texas, “built character” in Adelfa. Meaning, that she got to figure out early on how to survive. There’s a good chance, too, that learning to overcome the calamities slung by those difficult economic times made her tougher.
But there was something else that happened then, while living in Millett and in La Salle County, that probably helped shape Adelfa’s character. That “something” was institutionalized racism. And it was probably that alienation from mainstream America, which she and her family experienced in that part of Texas, that instilled in Adelfa the need to fight for her own rights and for the rights of others.
That early on exposure to de facto segregation, it seems, built a latent force in Adelfa’s young soul, a dormant quality that would later help her fight for what is right. That untapped inner power, it also seems, would later help Adelfa in her effective civil rights activism.
Much has been written about her now, about the late Adelfa Botello Callejo, her married name. And about her determined spirit to help others, the downtrodden, the undocumented, the people with no voice in the halls of government. Or about being the first Mexican American woman to graduate from SMU’s Dedman School of Law, as well as about the accolades that she’s received over the years and the awards she’s been given. Or the money that she and her husband Bill Callejo donated to SMU. Or the elementary school that is named after her, or the likeness of Adelfa in bronze that sits on a pedestal in a downtown Dallas park.
There’s a good probability that much more will be written about Adelfa and her legacy. About a Mexican American woman who with deep-rooted doggedness never gave up on herself and eventually graduated from law school at an age when most men or women are already done with getting an education. To accomplish that difficult task, incidentally, she worked during the day as a secretary and went to school at night. Based on what is known, Adelfa was probably driven by a wide range of reasons for seeking such a lofty goal, but most likely, she did it because of her desire to be able to provide legal counsel to Mexican Americans and other people of Hispanic heritage, to people that had few options then.
Ms. Callejo was thirty-eight years old when she graduated from law school in 1961. Though she tried, she was unable to find employment as an attorney in any of the law firms in Dallas where she applied for that line of work. The only positions offered, we are told, were for secretarial work. After a while, she decided to open her own law office instead, becoming the first Mexican American woman to practice law in the city of Dallas. Once her husband obtained his own law degree, in 1966, they both established the Callejo and Callejo law firm.
Adelfa Botello Callejo, a trailblazer and a role model for many, died on January 25, 2014, at age 90. But the work she did to fight for the voiceless, for the undocumented immigrant, and for others in the DFW Metroplex, is a legacy that will live forever.
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