SYMHC Classics: Mendez v Westminster

This 2013 episode covers the Mendez v. Westminster case that fought the segregation of Mexican-American students in the state of California in the 1940s. It went on pave the way for the much more famous Brown v. Topeka Board of Education.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. We talked very briefly about segregated schools in
South Texas in our episode on Hobi to Edar, and
we have a previous episode that gets into more detail
on that. It is on Mendes versus Westminster. This court
case took place in California, not Texas, and also a
little later than hob Ta Addar's lifetime, but these same

(00:25):
patterns of segregation and racism were in place all throughout
a lot of the Southwestern United States, including in South
Texas when hob T Edar was living. In this episode,
we mentioned that one day there might be an episode
on Brown versus Board, and now there are two. The
Road to Brown Versus Board came out initially on February

(00:46):
twenty third, twenty fifteen, and The Aftermath of Brown Versus
Board was released on February twenty fifth, twenty fifteen. There
is also a reference to the possibility of a future
episode on the mass incarceration of Japanese people and Japanese
in Bad Americans during World War Two, and there are
also two episodes on that. Those came out on February

(01:06):
thirteenth and February fifteenth, twenty seventeen. So enjoy Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Now

(01:28):
I'm Holly Frye. So if you've listened to the podcast
for very long, you know I've lived in the South
my whole life. Yep, right, And even though the Supreme
Court struck down segregation in America in nineteen fifty two
with the decision on Brown versus the Tapeak A Board
of Education, most of my K through twelve education was
actually heavily influenced by the legacy of segregation and racism.

(01:51):
Mine too. Yeah. I went to public schools in a
system that had to bust children to different places to
try to maintain the racial balance and schools. I think
until I was in tenth grade, we had one family
that was not white attending our school. Yeah. Yeah, there

(02:11):
was nowhere there's no one to bus in. Yeah, it
was kind of a pretty homogenized community. Yeah, our school
system really, Like, I lived in a part of the
county that had some predominantly African American neighborhoods and some
predominantly white neighborhoods, and depending on how the other parts

(02:32):
of the school districts were were trending. That's where boundary
lines would move a lot. So sometimes I would be
on a bus that was like driving past to predominant
neighborhoods of one race or another, or on a bus
that was picking up all of those kids. It sort
of depended. So that was really heavily in my consciousness,

(02:53):
and the idea of segregation as a subject that related
to Caucasian children and African American children like that is
how my experience of race and segregation has been. Yeah,
and that's one of the reasons that I've really thought before,
and it's on the list somewhere about doing an episode
about Brown versus the tepeak a Board of Education. I

(03:15):
kind of I'm really interested in who those people were
and how that all played out. We may really still
do that, but that also does get a lot of
airtime in most history classes. That's, you know, yeah, more
than other racial relations issues that get a little more
pushed to the sign most people have heard of. I

(03:35):
know some things about Brown versus Board. Yeah, I think
I did not know about the case we're going to
talk about at all today. I didn't either. I certainly
never heard about it growing up. Yeah, and where I
grew up now has a much broader spectrum of people
who live in the area, but it was really primarily

(03:56):
about white children and African American children. This was really
not the case in for example, the American Southwest, where
Mexican children were segregated away from white children, and the
case that changed that in the state of California was
Mendes versus Westminster, which really went on to pave the
way for the much more well known Brown versus Board.

(04:19):
So that's what we're going to talk about today. Yeah,
and a note on language. At the time, everybody was
pretty much using the word Mexican to apply to people,
whether they were actually from Mexico or had Mexican heritage.
So today we have much more nuanced classifications for people,
but a lot of the language at the time just

(04:41):
used Mexican as this blanket term for everyone. So we
were going to talk about Mexican and Mexican American, We're
going to use lots of different words, but that doesn't
quite reflect what people were using at the time in
terms of language. Yeah, So for fully the groundwork, Yeah,
when the Mexican American War ended in eighteen forty eight,
the US gained territory from Mexico, where Mexicans were already living,

(05:05):
and the people that were affected by this had a choice.
They could relocate to the territory Mexico had retained, or
they could stay in the United States. And Mexicans still
in the United States a year after this all went
down would then be considered American citizens. Right. What was
supposed to happen was that Mexicans who stayed in United

(05:25):
States territory would gain all the rights of citizenship upon
being there for a year. What really happened was that
discriminatory laws and social norms went into effect pretty much
immediately or built on laws that were already there. But
even so, people moved from Mexico to the United States
for a range of political and economic reasons. There were

(05:48):
a lot of things going on in Mexico that caused that,
including many of them were fleeing the Mexican Revolution which
started in nineteen ten, and until nineteen twenty four, there
weren't any laws limiting Mexicans from entering the United States,
so a different climate in terms of immigration than there
is now. Right. There were also some big incentives for

(06:10):
moving to the American side of the border. The United
States started restricting immigration from several Asian countries starting in
the late eighteen eighties, and then during and after World
War One, the United States also started restricting immigration from
parts of Europe, and without an immigrant population coming into

(06:31):
the country, this led to a labor shortage in some
parts of the United States, so in response, employers started
to try to recruit more labor from Mexico and Puerto Rico.
This was especially true in California as the agriculture industry
really started to boom, and of course, after years of
legal back and forth, residents of Puerto Rico became American

(06:55):
citizens in nineteen seventeen. Though, because they physically resembled Mexicans
and the spoke Spanish, Puerto Ricans were often lumped in
with Mexicans in the eyes of many Americans. Yeah, people
would use the word Mexican to apply to both Mexicans
and Puerto Ricans, which is not accurate at all in
the least, but because of you know, some similarities that

(07:15):
people would sort of apply the same standard to two
completely different gifts of people. Because of these and other factors,
the Mexican and Mexican American population in California tripled between
nineteen twenty and nineteen thirty, and that trend actually shifted
a bit with the coming of the Great Depression. So
when the Hoover administration launched an effort to depoor illegal aliens,

(07:38):
that changed things. It led to both the deportation of
Mexicans who were in the United States illegally and American
citizens of Mexican descent. This effort increased tensions, of course,
between Mexican American and Anglo American communities right so there
were people with Mexican heritage who were citizens of the
United States who chose to go back to Mexico during

(08:00):
this time and people who were deported back to Mexico
during this time. Although many people came to the United
States from Mexico because of the promise of work, a
lot of times this did not actually work out well.
It was really exhausting work under very poor conditions for
very low pay, and so unemployment quickly became a big
problem in Mexican American communities along with us the spread

(08:24):
of illnesses because of living conditions and overcrowding, so predominantly
Mexican neighborhoods tended to be very poor in this part
of the United States, but they were also very close
knit with very strong support networks within the community. So
even though people did not have a lot of money
or a lot of food or a lot of health care,
they really were trying to support each other within their community.

(08:46):
So at the same time, looking at it in the
context of schools, school funding in California was tied to
race as early as eighteen fifty five, and that's when
school budgets were based on the number of white students
and only white students in the county. In short order, however,
students who were not white were restricted from attending white

(09:07):
schools entirely. Right, only the white students counted, is the
bottom line is, That's the bottom line. And so since
only white students counted, only white students were allowed to
go to the better schools that were getting most of
the money. In eighteen ninety six, the United States Supreme
Court ruled that having separate facilities for people of different
races was constitutional as long as those facilities were equal,

(09:29):
and that was the famous Plus versus Ferguson decision. So
segregated classrooms were really that it became the norm for
many races and ethnicities in many part of the parts
of the United States, and apart from the financial considerations
that were involved in school budgets, school boards were genuinely
worried about the health and language skills of Mexican American students.

(09:53):
Since so many Mexicans were living in poverty and in
generally poor living conditions. Some children were you know, arriving
at school in the morning hungry or without having bathed,
and illnesses, including serious ones like tuberculosis, would spread rapidly
because of the overcrowding and a lack of access to
medical care. Unfortunately, at least some administrators and board members

(10:17):
associated these traits not with poverty but with being Mexicans,
so they attributed it to a racial issue instead of
just the fact that they were living, in some cases,
really really rough conditions. Right. There were also a couple
of real factors that did work against many Mexican American
students when it came to keeping up with the rest
of the class. Because a lot of Mexican workers were

(10:40):
holding seasonal migrant jobs, Mexican American children were often pulled
out of school for months at a time as their
parents moved to follow work this would cause students to
fall behind and have to repeat grades, and some Mexican
American families primarily spoke Spanish, which school board members thought
would make it hard for the children to keep up

(11:00):
in an English language classroom. This today seems very silly,
considering how many people will put their children on waiting
lists for second language immersion schools. Yes. Uh, But at
the time, the solution, and we put that in air
quotes to all of these problems was to educate Mexican
students separately. And although these facil facilities were supposed to

(11:24):
be equal, in reality, they really did tend to be
inferior in pretty much every respect, from the way the
spaces that they were learning and were constructed, to how
much the teachers and administrators involved in their education were paid. Yeah,
that was basically the case in separate but supposedly equal
facilities across the board, regarding pretty much every race and ethnicity.

(11:48):
If there was a separate facility for a minority population
in general, that facility was inferior. So this was not
just related to California or or Mexican American students. On
top of this inferiority in the buildings and the teacher pay,
and all of those sorts of things. The curriculum in

(12:10):
classrooms for Mexican American children was often geared to do
two things, to assimilate Mexican children into American culture and
to prepare them for a life of labor. In some schools,
boys learned trade skills and gardening, while girls learned sewing
and homemaking instead of having any academic part of their
subject work. That kind of makes my blood boil. I know,

(12:35):
as with many episodes, this is one where just the
layers of offensiveness pile on the deeper we get into something. Yeah,
it's hard to stay sort of neutral with the information
at hand because it just it makes my blood boil. Right.
By nineteen thirteen, Mexican children were being taught in different
classrooms in the first segregated school in Orange County, California,

(12:58):
which is where the Mendes family live of started in
nineteen nineteen. Occasionally, gifted Mexican children could potentially go to
a white school if they agreed to be inspected and
visited by white school administrators. Yeah, so, if a Mexican
American child was particularly stellar in academic ability, that child

(13:21):
might be able to go to a white school if
their family agreed to like home visits from school administrators.
And I wonder how they would identify students that could
academically really kind of succeeding in gardening, Yeah, when there's
no academic parts of their curriculum. Yeah, that's a great question.

(13:42):
By nineteen thirty, there were fifteen Mexican only schools in
Orange County, and between eighty and ninety percent of schools
in the South and the Southwest segregated Mexican children. And
there were also other court cases along these lines that
were happening before the case that we're discussing today, including
Alvarez versus Lemon Grove School District and Salvadiera versus Del

(14:03):
Rio Independent School District. But these cases, which found in
favor of Mexican American families, either didn't have an effect
outside the school system in question for legal reasons, or
they got overturned during an appeals process. Right, And as
sort of a side note, schools were not the only
places where Mexicans are being segregated. They were also served

(14:24):
last in restaurants after white families had been served. There
were racially restricted covenants that allowed Mexicans only to buy
property in certain neighborhoods. In some public pools, Mexicans could
only swim one day a week, and the next day
the pool would be drained and cleaned. Gonzalo and Philicitas

(14:52):
Mendes were the parents in Mendes Versus Westminster. Gonzalo was
originally from Chihuahua, Mexico. In a long way, his mother
and four siblings, he emigrated to Westminster, California in nineteen nineteen.
He actually attended Westminster, Maine School, the same school his
children were eventually barred from attending when he was a child,

(15:13):
although in his late elementary years he was briefly sent
to a segregated school. He and his classmates, who were
fluent in English, were eventually transferred back to Westminster, Maine,
although he had to drop out to work as an
orange picker because his family needed the money. He was
naturalized as an American citizen when he was thirty years old.
Philicitas was from Puerto Rico. She and her family had

(15:35):
moved to Arizona from Puerto Rico in nineteen twenty six
and they stayed there for about six months. The working
condition for Puerto Ricans there where they were living were terrible,
and Philicito's family had participated in protests against these terrible
working conditions and the fact that their pay was dramatically
less from what they had been promised before they emigrated.

(15:57):
Philicitos's family then moved to cal California, to a predominantly
Mexican neighborhood, where she later met Gonzalo and the pair
were married in nineteen thirty five. They opened a cantina
in the Mexican barrio of Santa Anna, and their business
was successful, and eventually they saved enough money to buy
a house. They had three children who are extremely important

(16:18):
to this story, Silvia, Gonzalo Junior, and Jerome. In nineteen
forty three, when the children were all still under the
age of ten, their banker got in touch with them
about an asparagus farm in Westminster. It was owned by
the Minimtsu family, a Japanese family who was being relocated
to an internment camp, which a whole other topic we

(16:40):
could discuss. I know that great length the mini Metsus
knew that they were likely to lose the farm if
they couldn't find a tenant, and they offered to lease
it to the Mendes family to protect it under the
until their internment was over. Yeah. Their hope was that
if they had people who were living there and working
it for them, that eventually their internment would be over
and they would be able to return to their property. Unfortunately,

(17:03):
I do not have knowledge of how that ultimately turned out.
Topics for a future Topics for Yeah, I think we
do need a future podcast. I need to first look
in the archive and see if there already is one.
A future podcast on internment of Japanese people during World
War Two. So the Mendes family agreed to lease the farm.

(17:23):
They closed their cafe, rented out their home, and moved
to live on the asparagus farm. Gonzalo's sister Sally died
and her husband, Frank Vadari, went with them. Frank had
experience running a farm, so he was a logical person
yes to be involved in this endeavor. And this was
just it was a really successful enterprise. It spanned forty acres,

(17:44):
it employed up to thirty people, and meanwhile Gonzalo also
managed another farm in the area, and the whole family
really continued to prosper when they moved to the farm.
They moved from the barrio to a neighborhood in the
Westminster School District where there was only one other Mexican
American family. In the fall of nineteen forty four, Solidad

(18:06):
took the children to enroll in Westminster Main School, also
known as the Seventeenth Street School. So Solidad was of
Mexican American heritage also, but she had lighter skin and
she had a last name that didn't sound Mexican. So
the teacher who was doing the enrollment told her that
her children could go to Westminster Main School, but that

(18:27):
the Mendez children would have to go to the Mexican school.
They had to go to Hoover Elementary instead of Westminster
Main School, which, as we discussed earlier, was generally inferior.
The building was in poor condition, there was no playground,
The textbooks were a varied assortment and a collection of
hand me downs from white schools in the area, so

(18:48):
probably out of date. Lunch was eaten outside on picnic tables,
and since part of the school property was adjacent to
a cow pasture, there were flies everywhere and the manure
smell permeated the school area right So Solidad said that
if the Mendez children could not attend Westminster Maine, her
children would not be going there either, and she left.

(19:10):
When Gonzalo and Felicitas heard about this, they were both
understandably outraged. They were both citizens of the United States
and they saw no reason why their children should not
attend the school in the district where they lived. So
they went to talk to the principal and they were
told that no, the children had to attend the Mexican school.
Then they went to both the Westminster and Orange County

(19:31):
school boards and they just kept getting the same answer
from everyone. Yeah, everyone was telling them they have to
go to the Mexican school. Gonzalo contacted lawyer David C. Marcus,
who had recently successfully argued another California civil rights case
involving whether Mexicans could be banned from public swimming pools.
That answer was no, they could not. They discovered that

(19:53):
Mexican and Mexican American children were routinely being segregated in
Orange County. This wasn't actually required or allowed by law,
though the Education Code actually read quote, the governing board
of any school district may establish separate schools for Indian children,
accepting children of Indians who are wards. The United States

(20:14):
Government and children of all other Indians who are descendants
of the original American Indians of the United States, and
for children of Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian parentage. Yes, so
there were actual segregation laws on the books, but some
of them mention Mexican American children, right. So this puts

(20:34):
them into kind of an interesting position as far as
wanting to fight what was going on, because there wasn't
actually a law to try to repeal. Yeah, so first
they tried to get the support of other Mexican families
in the district to file a class action suit, but
many of the families they talked to actually didn't want

(20:54):
the school board to change its policy. The Mexican school
that their children attended was right in the middle of
the barrio where they were living. It was extremely convenient,
so the parents liked that they had their children close by,
that they could walk their children to school in the morning,
that children could come home at lunchtime. There were real
practical reasons that people liked having their children in a
school that was in their neighborhood, and so that made

(21:17):
it a little tricky for them to start to build
a case and believing that they'd have better success if
they could prove that it wasn't just the Westminster school
district in question. Gonzalo and his attorney actually toured the
area and they interviewed families and looked for other people
that would be willing to join the suit. So outside
of their area, they expanded to try to find some

(21:38):
support and other people that would rally along with their
cause right and eventually four other families did join them,
the families of Lorenzo Ramirez, Frank Palomino, William Guzman, and
Tomasa Strada. Some of these families included veterans from World
War Two. These are people who had just returned from
fighting for their country, specifically fighting Nazis for their country,

(22:02):
and they were really unwilling to accept treatment as second
class citizens once they got back. And with their involvement,
the defendants included four school districts, so Westminster, which the
Mendes family had started this ground swell, in Santa Anna,
Garden Grove, and Elmadena which is Orange Yes. Meanwhile, Philisitas

(22:25):
and other mothers continued to pressure their school boards to
try to change their decisions. Pilicitas also helped organize the
Associacion de Padres de Ninos Mexican americanos. I'm just gonna
apologize for my pronunciation. I am not fluent in Spanish
to show support during the trial. All of this was
extremely brave on a number of levels. The Mendes family

(22:48):
and the other families faced the possibility of racist retribution
from the Anglo community and anger from people in the
Mexican American community who didn't want this suit to go forward.
Also ran financial risks associated with the trial, and they
would be missing work to testify. And for this last part,
Gonzalo actually reimbursed people out of pocket. So it was

(23:10):
a really important fight to them. They were willing to
kind of literally put their money where their mouth was right.
So they filed a class action lawsuit in the Federal
District Court of Los Angeles in March of nineteen forty five.
They chose to file this in federal court instead of
state court because there was no state law being violated
that they could try to repeal. So, as we had

(23:39):
just discussed, there was no state law in California at
the time requiring segregation that was based on race. It
was related to Mexican Americans. So the lawsuit's argument was
that in absence of a state law. Segregation violated the
equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and California state law.
The ACLU and the National Lawyer's Guild also filed amicus briefs. Yes,

(24:03):
and if you remember our Loving Versus Virginia episode, there's
the briefs that are from people not directly related to
the case. You have sort of expert legal advice to include.
The trial started on July fifth, nineteen forty five, and
it lasted for two weeks. It was to be decided
by Judge Paul J. McCormick. The school board was to
be defended by Orange County Council Joel E. Ogle, but

(24:27):
he wound up turning it mostly over to the deputy
County Council, George F. Holden. The testimony for the plaintiffs
included evidence of segregation in several school districts, evidence of
how the schools for Mexican children were inferior, and testimony
for Mexican American children about how the segregation had affected them.
Parents and education experts also testified. Doctor Ralph Deals of

(24:51):
UCLA's anthropology department was an expert witness. He argued that
segregation set up white children as superior and Mexican children
now inferior, and drew parallels to what was going on
in Nazi Germany. The school board's defense was bizarrely offensive
to today's or so kind of be ready for that, right.

(25:13):
James L. Kent, the superintendent of the Garden Grove School District,
said Mexicans were inferior and had poor hygiene, in a
lower ability level and outlook than white children. He also
said Mexican families had loose morals. Yes, it kind of
was just making up some garbage. Yeah, does he I

(25:34):
don't know, feared change, didn't like them. Yeah, Well, as
we talked about earlier, he kind of conflated problems associated
with poverty with problems that were innate to an ethnicity, correct,
which I don't. Maybe it's because I am a little
idealistic sometimes I kind of think the better option would

(25:57):
have been to address the problems of socialiated with poverty,
rather than segregating the poor children into their own school
you hippie, HI know, it's crazy. I too tend to
be idealistic in that regard, and it's important to remember
that it was a different social climate, but it's hard
not to kind of be a little judgmental of statements

(26:21):
like that. I just like it. Statements that say those
people are terrible for the following reasons. Yeah, we really
need to keep them separate. Well, and the judge he
would sort of call them on it. He was like, so,
if a white child has problems with hygiene and is
having trouble keeping up, what do you do? And they're like, well,
we talked to the parents and we maybe hold them
back a year. He's like, so you don't just segregate

(26:41):
them into somewhere else. So Frank A. Henderson, who was
the superintendent of the Santa Ana School District, also acknowledged
that they were basically making school assignment decisions based on
people's surnames and their skin color, which is ridiculous. Yeah.
In terms of the legal aspects, the school boards tried
to build their defense around the idea that this was

(27:04):
not a matter for a federal court since it was
a county and not a state or federal matter. Yeah,
it was not a very strong defense. It's a little
flaily at that point, I think. Yeah, And so unsurprisingly,
Judge Paul McCormick of the U. S. District Court Southern
District of California Central Division ruled that the segregation of
Mexican American students did violate the law. He also described

(27:28):
segregation itself as inherently unequal, writing quote, A paramount requisite
in the American system of public education is social equality.
It must be open to all children by unified school association,
regardless of lineage. So then this takes a turn into
the yet more offensive because the school boards appealed to
the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in

(27:49):
San Francisco. While the appeal was taking place, since they
had been told that what they were doing was illegal,
they all kind of handled their own integration efforts efforts
separately by their own devices. In the case of the
Westminster District, grades one through four wound up going to Westminster, Maine,
and grades five through eight went to Hoover, with the

(28:10):
Mexican American children and the Anglo children in the same school.
But that meant that grades five through eight were in
the inferior ski school with the cow pastor and no
playground and no cafeteria. So nobody wins, right, it is
not good. The ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, the Japanese
American Citizens League, the American Jewish Congress, the NAACP, and

(28:32):
the Attorney General of California all filed amicus briefs on
behalf of Mendes in the appeal, And we're not going
to rehash the testimony because it was basically the same
testimony over again with the school boards again trying to
build this defense that this was just a county thing
and was not something that the federal court should be
messing with. The Ninth Circuit's decision, which came out in

(28:53):
nineteen forty seven, was unanimous. It upheld the lower court
ruling on the basis that it violated California law, not
on passed Supreme Court precedent. Since California had no segregation
law for Mexicans, earlier Supreme Court decisions didn't actually apply,
so it didn't apply the ruling more broadly to the
other races or ethnicities, right, They still kind of had

(29:15):
a battle of their own to deal yes, So while
this did, this ruling did achieve what people were hoping
it would achieve as far as ending the segregation of
Mexican American children. It was a pretty narrow ruling. It
was based only on the fact that this didn't this
wasn't within California law, like it didn't expand that out
to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment at

(29:37):
this point, doing possibly the only thing they had done
right so far. The school boards elected not to appeal
to the Supreme Court, and this may be one reason
why this case has become much less well known than
Brown versus the Tapeak a Board of Education. And after
this ruling had finalized, and apart from overturning segregation of

(30:00):
Mexican students in California, the Mendez versus Westminster case had
other effects. Later on, It really put a spotlight on
segregation in California. Governor Earl Warren, who later became Chief
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, proposed to the state
legislature that California repeal all of its segregation laws in
nineteen forty six. He signed this bill into law in

(30:23):
nineteen forty seven. He went on to author the Supreme
Court's opinion in Brown versus Board and in Loving versus Virginia,
which we talked about in earlier episodes of this podcast,
along with many many other civil rights legislations. Yeah, the
war in court was in a lot of ways extremely
progressive when it came to rights and liberties. Yeah, they

(30:46):
really had an eye on achieving equality, I think. And
while it was not cited as a direct precedent in
Brown versus Board of Education, the NAACP did use Mendez
versus Westminster as a test case when trying to see
how they might get Brown versus Board overturned. Earl Warren's
ruling on Brown versus Board has a lot in common

(31:07):
with McCormick's ruling in the Mendez case. Yeah, it was
clear that he had read and digested that written opinion thoroughly.
The NAACP's amicus brief was also written by Thurgood Marshall,
who argued Brown versus Board before the Supreme Court. Many
of the challenges to segregation before this point had focused

(31:27):
on the fact that facilities were separate, but they were
not equal. This was a case in which the entire
concept of separate but equal was thrown out and it succeeded.
This helped propel America towards actually desegregating schools. Yeah, while
there were people who were working on integration before this point,
there was still a lot of focus on trying to

(31:49):
make the facilities be actually equal, and this really proved.
It was sort of a proof of concept of hey,
we can actually get these laws completely overturned instead of
just focusing on getting the facilities to be on the
same level as one another. Gonzala Mendez died in nineteen
sixty four, and he was fifty one at the time.
Felisa Tas Mendez died in nineteen ninety eight. There are

(32:12):
actually two California schools named after them. A commemorative stamp
came out in two thousand and seven for the seventieth
anniversary of the ruling, and Celia became an activist. She
was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in twenty eleven
at the age of seventy four. Yeah, she went on
to do just a lot of lecturing on the issues

(32:33):
relating to Mexican American people in the United States and segregation,
a lot of education of children on this case in particular,
because it turns out that this even people who are
living in that part of the country don't necessarily know
that this ever existed because so much of the focus
about the civil rights movement is on African American children

(32:57):
rather than children of other races who were also put
into segregated schools. Yeah, and the school integration thing is
largely focused, as we've said on Brown view Board. Yeah,
so this does kind of fall by the wayside. Yeah.
And as a weird side note, I watched a lot
of videos for this. There are just there are a
lot of videos that have been recorded that are about
the case, and a lot of them had this weird

(33:20):
undertone that really bothered me. That was like, well, everybody
thought that Mexican children couldn't speak English, but the Mendez
children could totally speak English, and I was like, so,
so that would have been okay if they didn't. It's
very strange. Yeah, I mean we talked about this a
little bit yesterday when you were commenting on this, and

(33:42):
like I said, I think the idea is that they
were trying to build a case of how ridiculous it
looked to try to keep these kids out of any school,
but it ends up making it look like they were
the exception in the Mexican American community, right, which is
and the others still should maybe be segregated. It set
up weird, Yeah, a very odd tone. And while the

(34:03):
a Mendez family was definitely more affluent than a lot
of other Mexican American families in the area. But that
doesn't mean that all the prejudices about all of the
other Mexican American people were correct, because that is not true. No,
So yes, I am really glad that I got to

(34:23):
learn about this case. It was not one that I
was familiar with before. Now yeah, I said neither. Thanks
so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd
like to send us a note, our email addresses History
Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to

(34:44):
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