Within six months, PRLDEF was at the forefront of litigation to get the Justice Department to block the election of the New York City Council until district lines were redrawn in a nondiscriminatory manner.
In 1981, Perales returneded to PRLDEF after another stint in government. The litigation had national impact in 1975 when Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to include the right to bilingual voting procedures. New York State Board of Elections on the statewide level, forced election officials in New York to provide bilingual assistance. Dinkins on the local level and culminating with Ortiz v. In the mid-1970s, a number of PRLDEF lawsuits, beginning with Lopez v. And, in several lawsuits against the New York Civil Service Commission, New York Police Department and New York Sanitation Commission, PRLDEF was able to get the courts to strike down numerous civil service requirements that kept Latinos from public employment and eliminated barriers to government benefits for non-English speaking applicants. New York City Board of Education became central to the United States’ establishment of bilingual education programs in schools across the country.
In 1974, the consent decree issued in PRLDEF's suit Aspira v. In its early days, the fund, known by the acronym PRLDEF (pronounced pearl-deaf), brought many important civil rights lawsuits on behalf of Latinos living in New York City and across the U.S. Perales served as the first executive director and Marrero was chairman of the board. In 1972, Perales, along with two other young Puerto Rican attorneys-Jorge Batista and Victor Marrero-raised enough seed money to open the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, a legal organization modeled on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Perales is a co-founder of LatinoJustice PRLDEF and established the first Brooklyn Legal Services Office.
Perales went on to earn a bachelor's degree from City College in 1962 and graduated from Fordham Law School in 1965. And my father once told me that if he had had good legal help this wouldn't have happened." It was a very terrible period for our family. I'm talking about losing furniture in the house, having it repossessed and things of that nature. He has said he first considered becoming a lawyer as a child, after his father's business went bankrupt. The son of a Puerto Rican father and a Dominican mother, Perales grew up in New York City.