By Kathie Ragsdale
Cristina Rousseau’s journey to the law crosses boundaries of geography, culture, and social strata.
A partner in the Lebanon-based firm Rousseau & Ross, she came to the United States from Ecuador as an exchange student at the age of 16, was struck by a legal system based on “juries and due process” instead of corruption, and now aids migrants and asylum-seekers in addition to her personal injury clients. But the woman who often champions the poor and struggling came from quite a different background herself.
Born to a wealthy and politically connected family in Ecuador’s capital, Quito, she grew up in a sheltered enclave open only to the affluent.
“The only poor people I knew were the maid or the chauffeur or the gardener,” she recalls. “I literally did not even know how to do laundry.”
Her world view expanded her junior year of high school, when a student exchange program sent her to the small town of Canaan, New Hampshire – population 3,794 – and she stayed with host family Audie and Harry Armstrong, not realizing how central they would become to her life.
She also befriended a classmate, now Renee Beebe, who introduced Rousseau to her older brother, John. The two fell in love.
Rousseau returned to Ecuador and graduated, came back to Canaan for a Christmas break, then went back to her home country, only to discover she was pregnant with John’s child.
“I couldn’t tell anyone,” she says. “I thought, ‘I’ll just go live in the United States with my boyfriend.’”
She lied to her parents about her intentions, returned to Canaan, and married John as soon as she turned 18. They have been together for 35 years.
“We grew up together, really,” she says.
Rousseau waitressed and John worked as an assistant manager at a grocery store. They had another child and later, a third, as Rousseau’s fascination with an American legal system that relied on justice rather than “a good bottle of whiskey handed to the judge” continued to grow.
Rousseau earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and pre-law from Franklin Pierce University and, when her youngest son was less than a year old, enrolled at Vermont Law School, continuing to waitress up until the day she took the bar exam.
The Armstrongs helped with her children and their daughter, Michele, would sometimes keep the kids overnight. With Rousseau’s husband in the service and away for extended periods, she occasionally stayed with her former host family.
“Without them, my ability to go to law school would have been impossible,” says Rousseau, whose family refers to the Armstrongs as “Grammy, Grandpa, and Auntie Michele.”
Rousseau first considered going into international law, as her time in law school included stints in Italy, Russia, and France as part of various exchange programs.
“When I graduated law school, I was fluent in four languages,” she says.
She worked briefly as in-house counsel for Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Vermont but quit when she decided to seek international law opportunities in a big city. Then, her husband was deployed to the Middle East for 18 months.
“Now I’m unemployed and we’re about to lose 50 percent of my husband’s income because of his deployment. And I have three kids, 13, 11, and four,” she remembers telling herself. “I’m thinking this is not the best time for me to start looking for jobs in New York or Washington.”
Instead, she accepted a nearby position at a personal injury law firm called Van Dorn & Curtiss, having never really studied litigation or set foot inside a courtroom. She planned to stay 18 months. Instead, “by the time the 18 months rolled around, I had fallen in love with litigation,” Rousseau says.
She became the first female partner at the firm, which evolved into the present-day Rousseau & Ross office.
Early in her career, “I realized the Spanish-speaking community was not being served here in New Hampshire,” Rousseau says, citing cases where an interpreter would have to be provided for a client appearing before the Department of Labor, for example. So, she started volunteering her services.
Then the border crisis struck, and Rousseau spent 10 days volunteering at the infamous Dilley Detention Center in Texas, where women and children fleeing Central America were housed.
She would interview women – many of whom had little or no education – about their reasons for seeking asylum and help them sort through which reasons were considered legitimate and which were not. Poverty, for example, was not a basis for seeking asylum. Nor was the threat of violence from gangs. Religious persecution, however, was.
Rousseau recalls one case where a woman had fled her Central American home with her severely underweight child after being abused for years by her husband, the brother of the police chief in their town. One of his abusive tactics was to use her Jewish heritage against her by forcing her to eat pork or refusing to let her go to synagogue.
“The beatings, rape, none of that was going to cut it,” Rousseau says. “With religious persecution, we’d have a shot.”
As with all the attorneys who volunteered their time at Dilley, she never found out what happened to the people she counseled, including that woman.
“You just have that faith that you’ve done the best you could and trust that our laws will work,” she says.
When regulations changed so that asylum seekers had to make their requests before entering the country, Rousseau won approval from both the United States and Mexico to work with asylum seekers inside Mexico. She was prepared to go to Tijuana in May 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world.
“I never did go,” she says. “Then I joined CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children). If I can’t help children at the border, I can help them here.”
She has also served on the New Hampshire Association for Justice board and is a member of the New Hampshire Bar Association’s Special Committee on Attorney Wellness.
Among cases related to her law practice, one that stands out is that of Fernando Flores Diaz, a Mexican immigrant who was living in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and was called to a job in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he was injured on the job and left with high medical bills.
Neither the employer nor the subcontractor carried workers’ compensation insurance. Rousseau moved the case from New Hampshire to Vermont, won her client benefits under Vermont’s workers’ compensation statute, and chased after the involved parties and their insurance companies until she won a settlement of nearly $500,000.
The process took nearly 10 years.
“I was like a dog with a bone on this case,” Rousseau says. “It was a life-changing settlement for him. By the time it was said and done, I think I made 50 cents an hour, but I feel good about it.”
That sort of dedication won her the NHBA’s Vickie M. Bunnell Award for Community Service earlier this year.
It has also won her the admiration of colleagues like her partner, Kristin Ross, who says Rousseau has been her “mentor, colleague, and a true friend for over 15 years… She is a tireless advocate whose passion, compassion, dedication, perseverance, and creativity in the practice of law produce outstanding results for her clients.”
Beebe, whom Rousseau met back when she was an exchange student, is also a fan, calling Rousseau a “strong, truthful, and kind person” and an inspiring role model who “demonstrates unwavering passion in all aspects of her life.”
She adds that Rousseau’s husband is her big brother.
“I won the lottery because my best friend became my sister,” she says.
Rousseau and her husband, now Director of Radiology for Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, enjoy deep-sea diving with their children and plan their holidays around diving opportunities.
“What I’m probably proudest of is, despite what many would consider insurmountable odds – teenage pregnancy, three kids, working as a waitress, English not my first language – I put my heart and soul into law and became a lawyer, the first female partner, and I’m proud of that,” Rousseau says. “I missed a lot. I was not the mom going to PTA or sports games. My entire family sacrificed a lot. But I did it.”
People should know, she adds, “there is a way.”