The Latino Brown v. Board of Education
As Hispanic Heritage Month draws to a close, Senior Scholar Philippa Strum tells the tale of Mendez v. Westminster, the Latino equivalent of Brown v. Board that was decided eight years earlier.
We all know about Brown v. Board of Education, the famous school desegregation case, but few of us have heard of Mendez v. Westminster, the Latino equivalent that was decided eight years earlier.
Mendez began in 1943, when Soledad Vidaurri arrived at her neighborhood school in Westminster, Calif. to enroll her two daughters, Alice and Virginia, and her niece and two nephews—Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr., and Jerome Méndez.
Mrs. Vidaurri was told that her daughters could be registered. Their father had a French ancestor and their last name sounded acceptably European to the teacher in charge of admissions. Besides, the Vidaurri girls were light-skinned. The Méndez children, however, were darker and, to the teacher, their last name was clearly Mexican. They would have to be taken to the "Mexican" school a few blocks away. Little Gonzalo Jr. would remember the teacher telling his aunt, while indicating the two Vidaurri girls, "‘We'll take those...but we won't take those three,'" because "We were too dark."
"No way," an outraged Mrs. Vidaurri replied, and marched all the children home. Her brother and sister-in-law, Gonzalo and Felícitas Méndez, who were running a farm in Westminster, were equally angry.
Some 1,000,000 Mexicans had migrated to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, many of them seeking work in California's agricultural industry. School districts responded to pressure from Anglo parents, along with the popular belief that Mexicans were inferior, by creating second-rate "Mexican" schools. Authorities claimed that the schools were for the benefit of the children, who needed more help because their English was so poor. No language tests were given to the children, however, and the fact that most of them were born in the United States and were fluent in English was ignored. Many of the schools were firetraps. Teachers in them were paid less than their counterparts in "Anglo" schools. Academics were downplayed in favor of vocational training for low-paying jobs.
The Méndezes hired attorney David Marcus and while Felícitas ran the farm, Gonzalo and Marcus drove around California's Orange County identifying plaintiffs in other school districts whose children had been treated the same way. Méndez and four other Mexican-American fathers from Orange County school districts eventually brought suit in federal court, charging that their children were being denied the equal protection of the laws in violation of the U.S. constitution.
Back in the mid-1940s, the Supreme Court was still handing down decisions based on the assumption that "separate but equal" was constitutional. Nonetheless, Marcus called upon education experts to testify at trial that segregating children impeded their ability to progress in English and to become part of American society. Separate but equal was therefore not equal, he argued. Federal district court judge Paul McCormick agreed, and in 1946 he ordered the school districts to end segregation. It was the first time a federal court declared that separate but equal was not at all equal: Brown v. Board was decided by the Supreme Court only eight years later.
The school districts appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. At that point, the ACLU, the NAACP, the Japanese American Citizens League, and the American Jewish Congress got into the case. The brief submitted by the NAACP was written by Robert Carter, later a federal judge himself. Carter has described the brief, which tackled segregated schools head on, as the NAACP's trial run for the argument it would make in Brown v. Board.
The appeals court ruled in favor of Méndez, on the basis of a California law that permitted segregation of Asian-American and Native American school children but did not mention Mexican-American students. Once Judge McCormick's ruling was handed down, the California legislature and Governor Earl Warren looked closely at the segregation law and began the process of repealing it. Governor Warren signed the repeal on June 14, 1947, and the school districts dropped the case.
Warren, of course, went on to become the Chief Justice of the United States who wrote the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board. The rulings in Mendez encouraged Mexican-American activism and led to a spate of organizing. Parents throughout the southwest not only began challenging the unequal treatment of their children; they created new citizens' organizations and nominated candidates for local office. The Méndez children and thousands of other Mexican-American students went to desegregated schools and became doctors, nurses, lawyers, judges, legislators, and teachers.
In 2000, Orange County celebrated the opening of the Gonzalo and Felícitas Mendez Fundamental Intermediate School. It was an appropriate acknowledgment of an important chapter in Latino history—and in the history of the United States.
