Unveiling Justice: The Mendez Family's Fight for Education Equality and Lasting Legacy

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This article is part of Entangled Inequalities: Japanese Incarceration and Mendez, et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County, et al.

In 1944, a public school in California denied entry to Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr, and Jerome Mendez based on their surname and skin color. To fight this injustice, their parents Gonzalo and Felicitas (née Gomez Martinez) Mendez worked with four other families to bring a lawsuit against the local school district. Their case, Mendez, et al. v. Westminster, et al., brought an end to school segregation in California and later across the nation. The roots of this legal legacy start with two migration stories: the Mendez family and the Gomez family.

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Hoover School on Olive Street, Westminster 1944. The Hoover School was the designated school for children of Hispanic descent in Westminster CA. The Mendez children and others were forced to attend school there while the Mendez v. Westminster case was being decided.

Courtesy of Westminster Historical Society, no known copyright restrictions.

Mendez

The first story begins in 1919 when Gonzalo Mendez and his family immigrated to Westminster, California from Chihuahua, Mexico. His family bought land with money they had saved in Mexico and began farming for a living. By that time, Gonzalo was seven years old. Gonzalo attended Hoover School, the “Mexican” school, but was transferred to the “white” Seventeenth Street School after showing excellent academic skills.

During this time, children of immigrant farm laborers mostly attended Hoover School. Hoover School did not teach subjects like math and science and it did not have the same resources as other educational facilities. This was due to the presumption that children of immigrant farm laborers did not speak English and would end up working in jobs that did not require the same educational resources as white children. Children learned embroidery, cooking, or farm hand work instead of math and science.

Despite Gonzalo’s academic achievements and love for school, he had to drop out from Seventeenth Street School when his family’s financial situation plummeted. He worked in the fields to help support his family. While working, he cultivated a dream of one day owning his own farm instead of working as a farm hand. His older brother finished school, attended Bible college in Azusa, CA and landed a job. His sister, Soledad, continued to live in Westminster, married Frank Vidaurri, a Mexican-French man, and had two daughters, Alice and Virginia Vidaurri.

Company housing for Mexican cotton pickers on a large ranch in Corcoran, California, 1940.

Photo by Dorothea Lange. Collection of the National Archives and Records Administration (NAID: 521720).

Gomez

The second story continues in 1926 when Felicitas Gomez Martinez and her family migrated from Puerto Rico to Arizona to pick cotton. That year, the Arizona Cotton Growers’ Association and US Bureau of Insular Affairs arranged for 1,500 Puerto Ricans, including Felicitas’s family, to move to Arizona to replace farm labor from Mexico. The Cotton Growers’ Association faced difficulties in hiring workers due to restricted immigration policies for Europeans as well as a growing competition from urban industries for Mexican labor.

Felicitas was ten years old at the time. Her parents were Felipe Gomez Arroyo, of Juncos, and Teresa Martinez, of Naguabo. Felicitas had four siblings: Juana, Admiro, Cristina, and Blas. Juana did not relocate with the rest of the family and passed away in Puerto Rico.

In Arizona, Felicitas and her family faced discrimination due to their brown skin color. This discrimination, in addition to harsh working conditions, made them reconsider life in Arizona. Because other Puerto Rican farm laborers were subject to similar conditions as the Gomez family, they staged protests in front of the Arizona Cotton Growers Association offices to assert their rights as US citizens and laborers. The Cotton Growers’ Association failed to comply with the contracts they made with the families in Puerto Rico. Workers were denied housing, sanitary conditions, drinking water, and received a lower pay from $2.00 to $1.57 a day. Felicitas remembers:

“When everybody that volunteered to come from over there got here, and saw the conditions of living, everybody got mad, and they started rioting and throwing everything, and saying take us back, take us back, so everybody just asked to be taken back, to Puerto Rico, but my father he had a goal of coming to the United States and staying, so we stayed, we stayed with different farmers in Arizona.”[1]

Six months after the move to Arizona, the Gomez family relocated to California to find work. Although they were considered Black in Arizona, the family was seen as Mexican in California. The Gomez family joined the larger Mexican community – living and working alongside Mexicans. Felicitas even recalls her father, Felipe, having more of a Mexican accent than Puerto Rican. Felipe met Gonzalo Mendez while working the fields of Orange Country and introduced him to Felicitas. In 1935, Gonzalo and Felicitas married. He was twenty-three and she was twenty.

Schoolchildren eating hot school lunches made up primarily of food from the surplus commodities program. Taken at a school in Penasco, New Mexico, United States, December 1941.

Photo by the United States Department of Agriculture, public domain.

From Working in the Fields to Managing a Farm

After saving up money from years of farm labor, Felicitas and Gonzalo moved to Santa Ana, California. They opened and ran a successful restaurant. The Arizona Cantina, and had three children: Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr, and Jerome. It was during this time that Gonzalo became a US citizen. Two other children, Phillip and Sandra, would be born after the Mendez case.

The Mendez family enjoyed living in Santa Ana. Felicitas and Gonzalo valued living in a nice home and sending their children to school. After all, it was the life they always wanted for themselves. Among the Santa Ana community, Gonzalo was well known for being a welcoming host and having fruitful business relationships. One of those relationships was with Frank Monroe, his banker and trusted friend who knew of Gonzalo’s dream to one day own a farm.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, one of Monroe’s other clients, the Munemitsu family, was forced into an incarceration camp because they were of Japanese descent. The Munemitsus wished to maintain their 40-acre farm and worried they would lose it or have to sell it undervalue while they were incarcerated at Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona. To help them keep their land, Monroe asked Gonzalo if he wanted to lease the Munetmitsu family’s farm. By leasing and moving into the farm in Westminster, California, Gonzalo could fulfill his dream of being “the boss of a farm” and maintain the Munemitsus’ property until they returned. Although life in Westminster differed from life in the city of Santa Ana, the Mendez family embraced the rural setting and created some of the family’s most treasured memories there.

Statue honoring the 5,000 children represented in Mendez v. Westminster at the Mendez Historic Freedom Trail and Monument in Westminster, CA.

Photo by BreiAunna, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Mendez et al. v. Westminster, et al.

While settling into the farm, the Mendez family sent their three children Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr., and Jerome to public school. Their aunt, Soledad, took them, as well as her own two daughters, to be enrolled at the Seventeenth Street School. Soledad's daughters, who had lighter skin and a “less Mexican” surname, Vidaurri, were accepted. However, the Mendez children, who had darker skin and a “more Mexican” last name, were denied entry and told to attend the "Mexican” school.

Soledad remembers telling the woman at the office counter who denied her niece and nephews entry:

“My kids, they will not go to your school, if those of my brother cannot go, mine will not go!”[2]

Gonzalo and Felicitas attempted several times to resolve this issue and bring it to light, but were turned away by the school, the school district, the Orange County school board, and at first, many members of the community. While Gonzalo worked on the case, Felicitas ran the Munemitsu farm, earning most of the money to subsidize the lawsuit. She also organized many committees, such as the Asociación de Padres de Niños México-Americanos, to support the case all while managing the farm. It was the farm, however, that connected them to a man named Henry Rivera. Rivera was a truck driver who delivered produce for a living and stopped by the farm frequently to pick up asparagus. He told them about an attorney named David Marcus who had previously worked on a similar segregation case.

Marcus and Gonzalo gathered four families from different districts whose children were also discriminated against to become additional plaintiffs on the case. The four families included: William Guzman and his son Billy; Frank Palomino and his children Arthur and Sally; Thomas Estrada and his children Clara, Roberto, Francisco, Sylvia, Daniel, and Evelina; and Lorenzo Ramirez and his sons Ignacio, Sulverio, and Jose. Marcus filed a federal class action lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles against four Orange County school districts – Westminster, Santa Ana, Garden Grove, and El Modena (what is now eastern Orange) on behalf of roughly 5,000 children.

The case went to trial in July 1945. Seven months later on February 18, 1946, Judge Paul J. McCormick ruled in favor of the five families. Although three of the school districts appealed, a year later, on April 14th, 1947, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court's ruling in favor of the five families. Together, the five families won the legal battle Mendez et al. v. Westminster, et al. to ensure their children, and other children in California, could get equal access to education. Shortly after the ruling was upheld on appeal, the state assembly, senate, and Governor Earl Warren moved to desegregate all public schools and school districts in California.

The Mendez family along with the Guzman, Palomino, Estrada, and Ramirez families proved that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Mendez et al. v. Westminster, et al. changed the course of history with a resounding impact. The case left a legacy that led to the end of school segregation across the US in the 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown et al. v. Board of Education, et al.

Sylvia Mendez celebrates the release of the US Postal Service’s Mendez v. Westminster commemorative stamp at Chapman University, 2007.

Courtesy of Chapman University, Frank Mt. Pleasant Library of Special Collections and Archives.

Legacy

Gonzalo passed away in 1964 at the age of 51, ten years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. He is buried at the Westminster Memorial Park Cemetery in Westminster, California. Felicitas passed away in 1998 of heart failure at Sylvia’s home in Fullerton, California. She is buried at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, California. All their five children, twenty-one grandchildren, and thirteen great grandchildren continue their legacy. Sylvia became a strong advocate and public figure who travels around the country and continues the story of her and the other four families’ contributions to society. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on February 15, 2011, and an honorary degree from Brooklyn College in 2012.

Sylvia wants us to know that:

“The awards and honors, they are really for my parents and the families that brought the case and pursued justice… I am just the storyteller. The main character happens to be my family, and I am so proud of them. But I just consider myself a storyteller of this part of history that is not well known.”[3]

Many institutions and researchers created and dedicated exhibits, documentaries, celebrations, a research center, a stamp, and books to the impact of Mendez, et al. v. Westminster, et al. In December 2022, the city of Westminster dedicated, “The Mendez Tribute Park.” The park is an outdoor museum telling the story of the Mendez, et al. v. Westminster, et al. case and includes educational panels created by the Orange County Dept. of Education. It also includes augmented reality and interactive displays for visitors.

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This article was researched and written by Melissa Hurtado, Heritage Education Fellow, Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education.

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Notes

[1] Felícita Mendez Interview, 1975.

[2] Jennifer McCormick and César J. Ayala, “Felícita ‘La Prieta’ Méndez (1916–1998) and the End of Latino School Segregation in California,” CENTRO Journal 19, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 13-15, https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/377/37719202.pdf.  

[3] Raul A. Reyes, “A Latino Family Paved the Way for School Desegregation. It’s Still ‘Unknown’ History,” NBC News, last updated September 20, 2021, 11:07 AM CDT, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latino-family-sylvia-mendez-pivotal-desegregation-fight-rcna2068.  

Bibliography

City of Westminster. “Mendez Historic Freedom Trail and Monument.” Projects. https://www.westminster-ca.gov/our-city/project-w/projects/mendez-historic-freedom-trail-and-monument.  

McCormick, Jennifer and César J. Ayala. “Felícita ‘La Prieta’ Méndez (1916–1998) and the End of Latino School Segregation in California.” CENTRO Journal 19, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 13-15. https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/377/37719202.pdf.  

Munemitsu, Janice. The Kindness of Color: The Story of Two Families and Mendez, et al. v. Westminster, the 1947 Desegregation of California Public Schools. Foreword by Sylvia Mendez. Self-published, Janice Munemitsu, 2021. 

Reyes, Raul A. “A Latino Family Paved the Way for School Desegregation. It’s Still ‘Unknown’ History.” NBC News. Last updated September 20, 2021, 11:07 AM CDT. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latino-family-sylvia-mendez-pivotal-desegregation-fight-rcna2068.  

Tang, Annie. “The Munemitsu Legacy: The Japanese American Family Behind Mendez v. Westminster: California’s First Successful Desegregation Case.” The Pacific Citizen. December 18, 2020. https://www.pacificcitizen.org/the-munemitsu-legacy/.