John continues to maintain a private practice with his father, Cristóbal Bonifaz, which specializes in international human rights and environmental law cases. John and his father serve as co-counsel for thousands of indigenous people living in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon in an ongoing case against the Texaco oil company for the company's environmental destruction of their homeland. John was instrumental in launching a landmark case against the Unocal oil and gas company on behalf of Burmese villagers for human rights abuses connected with the company's construction of a major gas pipeline in Burma.
John has been active in social movements for change from a very young age. As a college student at Brown University, John worked to register thousands of voters, participated in the nuclear disarmament movement, and fought for the university's divestment from companies doing business in then-apartheid South Africa. After graduating from Brown, John served as the scheduler for United States Senator Edward M. Kennedy in his 1988 re-election campaign. While attending Harvard Law School, John served as a leader of La Alianza, the Latino law students association, and helped to lead the fight for faculty diversity at the school. In 1990, John was one of 11 Harvard Law students who, along with a coalition of student groups, sued the school for discrimination in the hiring of its faculty. Following his graduation from Harvard Law School in 1992, John moved to Washington, D.C., to serve as the staff attorney for the Center for Responsive Politics. He moved back to Massachusetts in 1994 to start the National Voting Rights Institute and to join his father's law practice.
John and his wife, Lissa Pierce Bonifaz, live in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Lissa holds a doctorate in bilingual education and works as a professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, where she teaches in the Language and Literacy Division of Lesley's School of Education.
John's parents, Deirdre and Cristóbal, live in Conway, Massachusetts, and his sister Margarita lives in Northampton. Deirdre grew up in nearby Whately, Massachusetts, and, during John's childhood, she founded and directed a national non-profit cooperative supporting low-income artisans across the country. Cristóbal emigrated to this country from Ecuador when he was sixteen and became a chemical engineer. He later became a lawyer while John was in high school. Margarita has worked tirelessly for the past fifteen years as a teacher in the Amherst public school system.
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