Earlier this year, 90-year-old Sylvia Mendez told students at a Santa Ana, California, school named after her family why she had spent her retirement making sure her parents’ story wasn’t forgotten.
“I wanted the students to know that someone had fought for them, and that [they] had the right to go to any school they wanted to,” she said.
That spring day this year marked the 79th anniversary of the landmark decision in Mendez v. Westminster School District, a lawsuit that Sylvia’s parents filed after their children were sent to a segregated school for Latino students instead of being allowed to enroll in a nearby majority-white school. The ruling in their favor paved the way for the milestone Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954, when the Supreme Court rejected the long-held “separate but equal” doctrine and ruled that state-sanctioned segregation in schools was unconstitutional.
Sylvia has devoted decades of her life to educating the public about her family’s case and continues to advocate for a quality education for all students. In addition to Santa Ana’s Mendez Fundamental Intermediate School, there’s the Sylvia Mendez Elementary School in Berkeley and Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez High School in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights. A bill to mark Sylvia Mendez Day as a California holiday is currently under consideration in the state legislature.
“California’s Latino community has helped build this state, with work, with sacrifice, and with an unshakable commitment to education,” Assemblymember Tri Ta, who introduced the bill, said at the April 14 news conference. “That legacy … is foundational to who we are. And that is exactly why recognizing Sylvia Mendez matters. Because one family’s courage can change everything.”
Background
In 1944, Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez moved to Orange County, California, with their children Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr. and Jerome to become farmers. One of the reasons they were able to move, Robert Chang, the inaugural holder of the Sylvia Mendez Presidential Chair for Civil Rights at the UC Irvine School of Law, noted in an interview with The LA Local, is connected to another landmark case concerning exclusion and belonging in America. In Korematsu v. United States, a Japanese American man challenged his conviction for refusing to relocate to an incarceration camp during World War II.
Despite their different experiences, Fred Korematsu and Gonzalo Mendez also had a lot in common, Chang said.
“[Korematsu] described himself as an ordinary person. He was a welder. It just wasn’t right, and he said no. I think Mendez is similar to that — just somebody who said no, and the power that that can have, and the ripple effects when they are able to advance their case in the courts.”
The Mendezes were able to lease a 40-acre farm and house from the Munemitsus, a Japanese American family who had been forced to abandon their Westminster property when they were imprisoned in an Arizona camp during the war. The Mendezes were dutiful tenants, regularly driving to Arizona to pay their rent directly to the Munemitsus, their daughter Janice Munemitsu wrote in “The Kindness of Color,” a book about the families’ unique relationship.
Gonzalo and Felicitas were eager for their children to attend the nearby school. But when their aunt, Soledad Vidaurri, tried to register them there along with her two daughters, she was told that the Mendez siblings would have to attend a farther-away segregated school for Latino students. Their lighter-skinned cousins, however, were allowed to attend the “white school,” the registrant told them, according to a National Park Service article.
At first, Gonzalo thought there had been a mistake.
“We live right next to the school,” he said, as Sylvia recounted at a public meeting of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 2016. “Why would they say we don’t belong there?”
He protested to school officials, who told him that school was reserved for white students. Not only was the so-called Mexican school farther, Gonzalo complained, but its campus, educational materials and curriculum were significantly inferior in comparison.
In numerous speeches and interviews, Sylvia has called the disparities between the schools a “terrible injustice.” The Latino school lacked a playground, and an electric fence separated its grounds from an adjacent cow pasture. Its textbooks and furniture were “handed down” from the white school, she said.
Moreover, the Latino school did not focus on core subjects like its white counterpart. Instead, vocational training was emphasized for the boys while the girls were taught how to crochet, embroider and quilt, Sylvia said.
“They wanted us to become maids when we finished the grammar school,” she told the USCCR.
That was unacceptable to Sylvia’s parents, who considered a high-quality education for their children to be paramount. They decided to take their case to court.
“My parents fought for me when I was very young,” Sylvia Mendez said after receiving the Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2011. “They wanted me to know that I was an individual . . . that we’re all individuals, that we’re all human beings and that we’re all connected together and that we all have the same rights; the same freedom.”
Arguments and decision
With financial assistance from friends, family and even the formerly incarcerated Munemitsus, the Mendezes raised enough money to hire civil rights attorney David Marcus. Four other Mexican American families — the Guzmans, Palominos, Estradas and Ramirezes — from different school districts joined the Mendezes in a class-action lawsuit.
Marcus argued that segregating children based on ancestry and English language proficiency was a violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. The separation created a sense of inferiority among Latino children, he argued, and fostered antagonistic attitudes toward them.
U.S. District Court Judge Paul McCormick ruled in favor of the Mendez plaintiffs in 1946. He said they suffered “great and irreparable damage” as a result of the school segregation policy, which he called “discriminatory and illegal.”
When the school districts appealed the decision, civil rights organizations including the NAACP, the Japanese American Citizens League and the ACLU supported the Mendez families in briefs to the courts. Thurgood Marshall wrote the brief for the NAACP, later using some of the same arguments when he successfully argued Brown before the Supreme Court.
On April 14, 1947, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s ruling.
Impact
In June 1947, Gov. Earl Warren signed a law ending school segregation in California — the first state to do so. Less than a decade later, the Mendez case’s impact would be felt across the nation when the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment prohibited states from segregating public school students on the basis of race.
By then, California’s former governor had become the chief justice of the Supreme Court and wrote the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka declaring that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
“In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” Warren famously wrote.
Chang said that Mendez is often described as a “trial run” for some of the arguments advanced in Brown — and that Warren’s political savvy as the former California governor likely played a role in swaying his judicial associates.
“Unlike some of the other justices, [Warren] was a very adept politician, and that I think had a big influence in him being able to get the unanimous decision in Brown,” Chang told The LA Local.
As Sylvia traveled the country to share her family’s historic achievements with audiences unfamiliar with the case, she noticed that although racial segregation in public schools had been deemed unconstitutional, “de facto” segregation continues to be widespread in practice.
“Imagine my surprise when I started going around speaking and find out we were more segregated now than we were in 1947,” she told the USCCR.
A report published in September 2025 by researchers at the Civil Rights Project found that California has the “highest proportion of intensely segregated schools in the continental U.S.”
“Double segregation by race and class remains entrenched at high levels, reinforcing severe opportunity gaps and underscoring the urgent need for strategic intervention to drive meaningful change,” the CRP’s analysis found.
Sylvia recognizes the challenges resulting from poverty, economic downturns, overcrowding and unemployment, but believes that cases like Mendez v. Westminster — where ordinary people like her parents successfully stood up against injustice — prove that change is possible.
“I am so proud to be a Latina, born in the United States, where I continue living my American dream without giving up my language or any part of my culture,” Sylvia told the USCCR.
“The important thing is to make sure our students in those de facto segregated schools get equal and quality education.”
Published as part of a national effort by local newsrooms to reflect on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. You can see coverage from other newsrooms by clicking here .
