Mendez v. Westminster (1946)

Local Schools Versus “Mexican” Schools

Like many Latinos who were attracted to Orange County, California, in the 1920s and 1930s, Gonzalo Méndez and his wife, Felicitas, came to work in the booming citrus belt. They saved enough money to buy a restaurant in Santa Ana and then, during World War II, moved to nearby Westminster to lease a 60-acre farm owned by an interned Japanese American family.

It was the fall of 1943 when Gonzalo Men-dez's sister, Soledad Vidaurri, took the three Méndez children and her two daughters to enroll in the closest school: 17th Street Elementary. An administrator determined that the [Page 1437]Vidaurri children, who were half-Mexican but light-skinned and with a French surname, could attend; however, the darker-skinned Méndez children would have to go to the “Mexican” school, Hoover Elementary.

Not only was Hoover 10 blocks farther away, but it also shared features common for Mexican schools of the era: run-down facilities, outdated materials, and a curriculum that focused on labor and domestic skills rather than scholastic achievement. The Méndezes went to the superintendent to protest the policy and wrote a letter to the Westminster School Board demanding that it integrate the schools. An eventual offer for the Méndez children to attend the white school was rejected because the school board's integration policy would not be changed for the rest of the Hoover students.

Together with four other Mexican American families (Estrada, Guzman, Palomino, and Ramirez) who were fighting the same battle in nearby towns, the Méndezes filed suit against the Westminster, Santa Ana, Garden Grove, and El Modena School Districts on behalf of over 5,000 children. David Marcus, a Los Angeles attorney who had recently won a desegregation case against a neighboring city, was contracted to represent the plaintiffs. Marcus needed to carefully craft his arguments because other cases had unsuccessfully tried to strike down the “separate but equal” clause.

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