His father was a musician who played in commercially-unsuccessful big bands before dealing in real estate, and his mother was a legal secretary.
This was the time of the East Los Angeles Blowouts, and Cruz became interested in the Chicano Movement, but decided could do more for the cause if he remained in law school.
A coalition of students, welfare mothers, Brown Berets, and Immaculate Heart nuns joined to become Católicos por la Raza.
On October 11, 1969, a group of Chicano students tried to see Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, but only Cruz and Joe Aragon were admitted.
On December 29, sympathizer Bishop Parilla from Puerto Rico celebrated mass in a dirt lot across the street from the church.
Exactly one month after the Christmas Eve protest, 3,000 people, many of them high school students, conducted a midnight march from the downtown chancery to St.
This condition was exacerbated in Los Angeles, whose Archdiocese was one of the wealthiest in the nation and served some of its poorest members, and where white domination of the Church's interior structures places Latinos at a disadvantage.
Having failed to obtain reform within the archdiocese through peaceful means, the Católicos targeted the recently constructed (to the tune of $4 million) St.
When they attempted to enter the church for mass, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's deputies, disguised as ushers, brutalized them.
At 5:00 am on January 20, 1970, LAPD officers arrested Cruz and twenty others, including Alicia Escalante, chair of the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization, in connection with the Christmas Eve demonstration.
Los Angeles Archbishop McIntyre, accused by the Católicos of paternalistic attitudes towards Mexicans and Chicanos in the administration of the bishopric, stepped down in 1970.
In 1971, despite passing his exam, the State Bar of California denied him certification due to his "moral turpitude for disrupting a religious service".
He was subjected to 23 hearings, during which the American Civil Liberties Union and new Los Angeles Archbishop Timothy Manning lobbied on his behalf, before finally being admitted to the bar in 1973.
The Abogados, along with La Raza Law Students, published Justicia O., a bilingual paper dealing with legal and criminal justice issues.
He was active with Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), and opened his own law practice in East Los Angeles in 1974.
In 1982, Cruz fought for and won the dismissal of a murder charges against a young Chicano prisoner, Gordon Castillo Hall.
No longer was I relating to heavens and hells, goods and evils and spooky stories and mortal and venial [sic] sins.
In order to help defray the cost of his treatment, he decided to take advantage of his reputation for throwing some of the best parties of the Chicano Movement to turn his 50th birthday celebration into a fundraiser.
Basil's were memorialized in Oscar Zeta Acosta's Revolt of the Cockroach People and recorded as a major event of the Chicano Movement in Rodolfo Acuña's Occupied America.