|
Only have a minute? Listen instead
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Ruben Herrera, Brownsville attorney and Texas Southmost College trustee who died unexpectedly March 3 in Madrid, Spain, had a vagabond streak that took him throughout Latin America and to places around the world.
“He was educated in so many things, whether it was motorcycles, bull fights, traveling, geography and just significant history, you name it, the reason of why things worked the way things worked, just because he read so much,” fellow attorney and friend Heriberto Ramos said from Houston earlier this week.
Herrera and Ramos graduated in 2000 from the Thurgood Marshal school of law at Southern University in Houston, traveled together and were close friends.
Herrera died of a heart attack in the early morning this past Sunday while he and his brother-in-law Octavio Olivarez were at their hotel in Madrid’s historic district.
A memorial service is scheduled at 2 p.m. Saturday, March 16, in the Jacob Brown Auditorium at Texas Southmost College. Herrera was a TSC graduate, having entered without a GED at age 28 and going on to earn bachelor’s and juris doctor’s degrees and to head his own successful Brownsville criminal defense law firm.
He was elected to the TSC Board of Trustees in 2016 and was the board’s immediate past chairman, having been elected chairman in 2020.
Herrera always credited TSC with nurturing his path to higher education.
Board chairwoman Adela Garza said Herrera ran for the board “for all the right reasons” and that it was amazing to watch him fight for clients from behind the scenes as the two worked together on TSC business. He fought like a bulldog for clients, just as he did for TSC students, she said.
“He was an amazing attorney and never had any arrogance about it. He was a humble, humble guy,” Garza said.
“He lived the life of many, many men. He’s done things that nobody will ever do. He’s traveled and seen and read books more than anyone. In law school, Sundays he would read the Sunday news and spend most of the day reading the Sunday newspaper,” Ramos, an attorney who represented international clients who were victims of airline disasters, said.
“I had many cases in Brazil, Central America, all Latin America basically, and Ruben would catch wind of me traveling to Brazil or Peru or Argentina and he would hitch along and accompany me, and it was always my best trips even though they involved my work, when my best friend was with me,” Ramos said.
“You know, everybody you talk to, they’re going to say ‘he was my best friend.’ Ramos added, saying Herrera had a way of making anyone he was with feel that their friendship was unique.
“He went with me to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he ate at the finest restaurant in all of Sao Paulo, called La Figata. It’s a huge wild fig tree. It’s enormous, the trunk is larger than any live oak you’ve seen and the branches extend over the restaurant and the tables like a huge canopy. And there he had the finest foie gras a man could ever eat, you know goose liver,” he said.
“And from there we spent some time in Rio de Janeiro, where he stayed at the classic, the most classic hotel you can imagine where all the old famous people stayed, the Coca Cabana Palace. Yeah, he stayed with me at the Coca Cabana Palace,” Ramos said.
From there, Herrera and Ramos traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Herrera found a Uruguayan taxi driver and made him their personal taxi driver for the week.
Herrera left behind two grown daughters Edna Herrera Dinsdale and Ada Herrera Flores, in addition to his mother Socorro Alvarado, father Ruben Herrera Ramos, and three grandchildren, Alexis, Patrick and Natalia, among other family members.
Dinsdale, an attorney in Conroe, Texas, said fine dining around the world was a constant with her father.
“He was always the first to take you for a good meal or recommend some restaurant somewhere around the world. Above all, he made you laugh, with witty banter and his loud personality,” she said in a statement to The Herald.
“I was blessed enough to have the chance to practice law with my dad. I felt so privileged, not only to be his daughter, but being his co-counsel and an attorney in the same community as him,” she wrote.
“He always brought so much joy to the courthouse, constantly making everyone laugh even in difficult situations. He really cared about the legal community and those he worked with every day,” she wrote.
Ramos said Herrera traveled widely and was “ingeniously frugal.”
“There’s a common characteristic you’re gonna hear. He was frugal, but frugal was an understatement. Ruben was ingeniously frugal because he would find a way to get high quality and fine items at a good price. Not frugal in the way that somebody robs themselves of a pleasure. He wasn’t the guy that says ‘I’m not gonna spend $5 on a hamburger, I just won’t eat. He was the guy that would figure out how to get that $5 hamburger for $2.
“He was ingeniously frugal and I would often call him a bon vivant, but he was quick, always quick to correct me and say, I’m no bon vivant, I am a vagabond. There’s a difference.”
Bon vivant is a French phrase meaning one fond of good living. Vagabond means a person who wanders from place to place without a job or home, according to the Oxford dictionary.
Brownsville attorney Hector Garza met Herrera in 1985 or 1986, while he was covering Matamoros for The Brownsville Herald and Herrera was working for a newspaper his father owned in Matamoros.
The two became close friends in the early 2000s while working for 404th state District Judge Elia Cornejo-Lopez as public defense lawyers, Garza said
They became fishing buddies and went into motorcycling together, both riding BMWs. A group of those same motorcyclists would stay with Ramos in Houston while attending motorcycle rallies there, Ramos said.
“He went all over the place. He went to India. He went to the Orient. He went to many places. Europe, South America … all the way to the Patagonia of Tierra del Fuego,” Garza said.
“He wanted to make it all the way to the end but unfortunately he spent too much time in Central America eating cheap lobsters and he only made it to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Two years later he went back. He flew to Chile and then used a service. They rent motorcycles and have a guide, and then he made it all the way to, I think they call it Ushuaia,” the capital of Tierra del Fuego, Antártida, nicknamed the end of the world, according to Wikipedia.
Garza said he and Herrera made motorcycle trips of 5,000 and 6,000 miles in Mexico and the U.S. They were planning another after Herrera had an apparently successful heart operation last October.
“I have wonderful memories of travelling with my father, along with family. From the hot chocolate in Oaxaca to the clam chowder in San Francisco, each destination was an adventure,” Edna Dinsdale wrote.
“In the immortal words of Ruben Herrera, ‘Panza llena, corazón contento,’” she wrote, meaning that when one’s stomach is full, their heart is contented.
