About Alan Diamante

Alan Rodolfo Diamante was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. His mother was a union activist, and his father was a blue-collar worker from Argentina. Mr. Diamante attended and graduated with honors from U.C. Berkeley where he found solidarity with other Latino students who learned to transform their acute awareness of social inequality and injustice into activism. This activism led to a passion for civil rights defense. His empathy for immigrants grew in college when he gained first-hand experience of a foreigner’s plight in a strange land while studying abroad in Guildford, England. After discovering his financial aid had been cancelled, he was given a choice to give up his dream of studying abroad or stay and find work as his parents could not financially assist him. He chose to stay and finish his classes when a Colombian expat, one of the few Latinos in town, reassured him it would be easy to find employment in England. Among many jobs, he washed dishes in the only Chinese restaurant in Guildford. He would ride his bike home in the midnight drizzle after each shift.

After graduating, he attended Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. The 1994 passage of Proposition 187, the California state initiative to prohibit undocumented immigrants from using public healthcare and education, sparked outrage on campus. He and other fellow La Raza students took to the streets and participated in demonstrations against what seemed to be a racist and unconstitutional referendum. This experience crystalized his desire to further represent voiceless and vulnerable immigrants.