SANTA ANA, CALIF.
In the 1940s, Gonzalo and Felícita Mendez wanted their three children to attend the school nearest their farm, which was the 17th Street Elementary School in Westminster. After all, the school was cleaner and had better facilities than the dilapidated schools that Mexican children had to attend.
California, at the end of World War II, experienced a surge of Mexican immigrants — as many as 120,000. But in the Westminster, Orange County, El Medina, Santa Ana, and Garden Grove districts, children of Mexican ancestry, even if they were U.S. citizens, were not allowed to attend the “White” schools.
Dr. César Ayala, associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of the article “Felícita La Prieta Mendez and the End of Latino School Segregation in California,” recently published in the Centro Journal, notes that a quarantine initiated at the U.S.-Mexican border “reflected the belief that Mexicans were diseased and dirty.”
Public school district trustees in Southern California internalized this belief, as the Mendez family would soon find out. On the first day of school in September of 1944, when Soledad Vidaurri, the Mendez children’s aunt, brought her three children and the Mendez children to the 17th Street Elementary School, half of them were denied entry.
Gonzalo Mendez Jr. remembers what the school officials said to his aunt. “They told her, ‘We’ll take those three, but we won’t take those three,’” he says, and the reason being, “We were too dark.”
Vidaurri’s husband was Mexican with French ancestry, thereby passing on his light complexion and French surname to his children, who were viewed as White. The Mendez children — with their brown skin and Hispanic last name — were classified as “Mexican,” even though they were actually half Puerto Rican and half Mexican. They were turned away from the all-White school.
