“We Always Tell Our Children They Are Americans”: Mendez v. Westminster and the Beginning of the End of School Segregation

Abstract

“We Always Tell Our Children They Are Americans”: Mendez v. Westminster end the Beginning of the End of School Segregation PHILIPPA STRUM Soledad Vidaurri walked up to the schoolhouse door, five little children in her wake. It was a warm September 1943 day in Westminster, California, thirty-five miles south of Los Angeles in the heart of citrus­ growing country, home to some 2,500 residents. American soldiers were still fight­ ing overseas—there were almost two more years of battles ahead before World War II would end—but Orange County was peace­ ful, and bustling economically because ofthe wartime demand for agricultural products and war factory materiel. Mrs. Vidaurri had gone to the Westminster Main School to enroll her two daughters, Alice and Virginia Vidaurri, and her niece and two nephews—Sylvia Mendez, Gonzalo Mendez, Jr., and Geronimo (Jerome) Mendez—in the neighborhood pub­ lic school. Mrs. Vidaurri was welcomed to the school and told that her daughters could be registered. Their father had a French ancestor and their last name sounded acceptably French or Belgian to the teacher in charge of admissions. Besides, the Vidaurri girls were light-skinned. The Mendez children, however, were visibly darker and, to the teacher, their last name was all too 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.”1 “No way,” an outraged Mrs. Vidaurri replied, and marched all the children home. Her equally outraged brother, Gonzalo Mendez, simply refused to send his children to the “Mexican” school. Two years later the Mendezes would lead a group of Mexican-American parents into federal court, 308 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY challenging the segregation of their children, and legal history would be made. Their case became the first in which a federal court declared “separate but equal” schooling to be unequal. Mendez v. Westminster was the 1946 predecessor to Brown v. Board ofEducation, and can in fact be seen as the Latino/a version of that better-known decision.2 There had been Mexican-Americans in California since the United States annexed California in 1848, although their numbers were relatively few. The combination of political turmoil in Mexico in the first decades ofthe twentieth century andjob opportunities in the United States, however, led to largescale immigration. Official census figures indicated that 661,538 Mexicans entered the United States between 1910 and 1930. Scholars of Latino history put the number as closer to one million, suggesting that 1/8 to 1/10 of the entire Mexican population moved north.3 Many ofthem found work in agricultural fields. In the decades after the end of the American Civil War, railroads had expanded into the West. Simultaneously, advances in irrigation enabled Western growers to pro­ duce large quantities of fruits and vegetables, which could be transported in the newly invented refrigerator cars on the railroads that now crisscrossed the United States. That became the pull for Mexican immigrants, as the need ofboth growers and the railroads for cheap farm workers increased exponentially.4 In 1930, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce stated that Mexicans picked more than eighty percent of the Southwest’s crops. By 1940 Mexican immigrants and their American descendants were almost 100 percent of the picking force in southern California.5 Many ofthem lived in what amounted to ghetto neighborhoods—colonias—next to citrus groves or vegetable fields, on the outskirts of cities such as Santa Ana, California. Santa Ana is the county seat of Orange County, where the Mendez story takes place. The Mexican farm laborers in Orange County in the 1930s found themselves in neighborhoods that for the most part lacked sewers, gas for cooking and heating, paved streets, or sidewalks. Many families built their own two-room wooden houses and could afford very little furniture. There were no refrigerators; heat came from wood-burning kitchen stoves. Clothes were made on pedalpowered sewing machines and cleaned in washtubs. The families might have small food gardens and raise chickens, goats or ducks...