On Tuesday, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, will hold its annual awards gala and fundraiser in downtown Los Angeles. The awardees include such indisputable worthies as Linda Ronstadt and former MALDEF leader Antonia Hernandez. The real awardee, though, should be MALDEF itself, whose decades of civil rights litigation have yielded significant gains for Latinos. I haven't always agreed with all of its actions, but I generally find myself cheering it on (as I do its current campaign to create a second Latino-majority district on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors).
In September, 2009 Atlantic Monthly named 
