• Listen to part one

| the entire program

GUEST: Sylvia Mendez, daughter of Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez, integrated a former “White School” in Orange County as a young girl

In the fall of 1944, Gonzalo Mendez and his sister Sally Vidaurri attempted to enroll their Latino children in Westminster Elementary School in Orange County. Gonzalo Mendez, who himself had attended Westminster as a young child, was told by school officials that since his children were Mexican, they had to attend the Hoover elementary “Mexican School.” The Mendez family, alongside four other families, filed a lawsuit the following year on behalf of 5,000 Latino children against segregation policies in practice in four Orange County school districts. Sixty years ago on April 14th 1947, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco unanimously upheld a Ninth District Court decision in the case of Mendez versus the Westminster School District. The landmark ruling held that segregated schools in the four districts violated the 14th amendment of the constitution as California became the first state in the nation to end school segregation. Following the ninth district ruling, Sylvia Mendez, daughter of Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez, integrated a former “White School” after being denied enrollment as an eight year old in 1944. The court of appeals decision made sure that Sylvia Mendez would never be a legally segregated student again. The reverberations of the court ruling were felt throughout California as legally sanctioned segregationist policies against other minority communities were dismantled statewide. Seven years after the decision in Mendez vs. Westminster was upheld, Brown vs Board of Education followed suit nationally. In commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of Mendez vs. Westminster, the United States Postal Service has decided to issue a stamp in it’s honor. The stamp will be released on Friday, September 14th at a special commemorative event at the Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez Fundamental Intermediate School in Santa Ana beginning at 10 a.m. Slyvia Mendez continues to reside in Orange County and speaks at schools and universities across the United States about the legacy of Mendez vs. Westminster.

• Listen to part two

GUEST: Sandra Robbie, Emmy award winning documentary producer of “Mendez vs. Westminster: For all the Children/Para Todos los Niños”

The history of Mendez vs. Westminster, though well documented, is obscured in the classrooms of Orange County and throughout the nation. In 2002, Sandra Robbie helped highlight the story of the critical but lesser know chapter in the Civil Rights movement through her first documentary, “Mendez vs. Westminster: Para Todos Los Ninos/For All the Children.” The film, which was Robbie’s first and was awarded an Emmy, examines the important fight for the desegregation of schools for Latino families in Orange County. Producer Sandra Robbie was inspired to create the documentary after growing up in Orange County and learning the history, not in a classroom, but by a newspaper article. Since first learning of Mendez vs. Westminster, Robbie has not only produced a documentary on the subject, but has also traveled across the United States speaking about the case. This past summer, Robbie traveled cross country as part of a history tour promoting awareness about Mendez vs. Westminster.

To learn more about the history of Mendez vs. Westminster, visit http://www.mendezvwestminster.com/ and http://sylviamendezinthemendezvswestminster.com/

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT

Gabriel San Roman: I’m here at the home of Sylvia Mendez, daughter of Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez in the 60th year of the Mendez vs. Westminster case. I’m very honored and humbled to be here. Welcome to Uprising, Sylvia Mendez.

Sylvia Mendez: Thank you.

Gabriel: Sylvia, first at the scene, let’s begin with your parents, Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez. Tell us about them and how they came to raise your family in Orange County and what Orange County was like at the time, just to set the scene for our listeners.

Sylvia: My father, Gonzalo Mendez, came from Chihuahua, Mexico, and my mother came from Puerto Rico and they both were living there in the barrio there in Westminster and that’s where they met and got married. And, at that time, it was all orchards and fields and orange trees here in Orange County. It was in 1935 when they met.

Gabriel: And, as a young girl in 1944, your parents tried to enroll you in Westminster school but you were refused and told to go to Hoover Elementary, which was designated as a Mexican school and your aunt, Sally Vidare, had the opportunity to enroll her children based on her French-sounding last name? I mean, what does that tell us about the policy of segregation at the Westminster school?

Sylvia: There were two things about it: first of all, my aunt was Mexican. My uncle was born in Mexico, only he had a French last name. That’s one thing. The other thing that they were looking at aside from the last name, Mendez and Vidare, was that I was very dark and Gonzalo and Geronimo were dark and my cousins were very light-skinned. They were Mexicans but they were very light-skinned. So, two reasons why we were not accepted.

Gabriel: As your father tried to enroll you and your siblings in Westminster, they tried to send you to Hoover Elementary. What were the conditions of Hoover Elementary as compared to Westminster?

Sylvia: The school that my aunt had tried to enroll us in, the white school, had manicured lawns, I remember this, and the palm trees in front of it and the playground was just beautiful. I was young, 8 years old, and I was so excited about going to that school at that time that I was denied. I had to go to the Mexican school which had on the outside, it was dirt where we played, and right next to a dairy with cows and when we ate lunch the flies would come over, around us. And, I think it was just two buildings. The school was a two buildings structure.

Gabriel: Now, those were your impressions as a kid. But, do you remember hearing anything about why your aunt or your father had wanted you to go to Westminster or was it just the closest school to your house?

Sylvia: Well, my parents wanted, when they found out about the difference, the two schools, well, my father always thought that I was going to go to the white school because he had gone to the white school. At one time, there was not segregated schools and when they did desegregate in Westminster, he was allowed to go the white school because he was so intelligent, so he just figured that his children would go to the white school. We were off on the side of that school, not living in the barrio at that time.

Gabriel: And then, one thing that’s interesting that I’d like to know is, how did your parents, you know, come to finally decide to pursue an injunction against, you know, segregation against Mexican students in Orange County because a lot of people will experience discrimination, experience, you know, back in those times, segregation on the books in terms of law, but there are a lot of people who will get angry and recognize that it’s an injustice but they won’t actively struggle against the injustice. What was it about your parents that made them pursue this Mendez vs. Westminster case, do you think?

Sylvia: I think it was two things: one, my mother was Puerto Rican and she always knew she was a citizen of the United States and had equal rights. And my father, who had come from Chihuahua, Mexico, had assimilated into the American culture and he always felt that he was equal to anyone, especially since he had been sent to that white school because he was so intelligent, and then he became a businessman in Santa Ana and had his own café and so he always knew that Latinos were equal to anybody else.

Gabriel: And, was part of it just, you know, the anger that a parent might feel that both the mother and the father want to provide, especially in terms of education, the best opportunities possible and here they were, being unfairly denied?

Sylvia: That, it was two things. One, yes, that they wanted us to have a good education. The other one, if you read on the court transcripts, he states, my father wanted us to feel equal and not feel inferior. By separating us into another school, he felt that we would be feeling inferior and he wanted us to grow up knowing that we were just as good as anybody else and all the children of Latinos were just as good as anybody else.

Gabriel: Now, before your parents tried to enroll you in Westminster school, your father had leased farmland from the Minimitsu family, and it was around the time of Japanese internment and the Minimitsu family was forced into the camps. In terms, for me, in researching this history, that part of the story really didn’t come up as often as some of the other parts for me, in terms of like some of the articles that I read and researched. But, you know, I think it is interesting and part of the history. So, I was wondering if you could tell our listeners how this partnership between the Mendez and Minimitsu families mutually benefited two communities facing discrimination and talk about how it ultimately helped Mendez vs. Westminster.

Sylvia: The Mendez story is about all nationalities coming together. My father was owner of a café, a Latino café there in Santa Ana, and his banker was white. He’s the one that told my dad about the Minimitsus and the Minimitsus, a Japanese family, were about to be sent to camp and his banker was the same man, Mr. Monroe, that my dad had. So, he’s the one that negotiated for my father and the Japanese family, the Minimitsus, to come in to sign a lease where my father could take over the ranch. And, the only reason my father went over there was because when they came to Mexico, they wanted to, he went to school, he was young. But my grandmother ran out of money when he was in the fifth grade and he had to leave school and here he was in the white school doing so good, but he had to leave school and go and work in the fields to make money to support my grandmother and what happened was that he grew up. As he got older, he always wanted to be the boss and not the peon, not the person picking the chiles. He wanted to be the boss. So, when Mr. Monroe, who had always heard my father say, “I want to be a rancher”, he said, Mr. Mendez, here’s your opportunity – you can help the Japanese family, the Minimitsus, and at the same time you can be that rancher and the boss of a farm at the same time. You’ll be doing two things: you’ll be helping the family and you’ll be able to have your dream come true.

Gabriel: And then, how, you know, how did that agreement, with the Minimitsu family, in leasing the farmland, how did that actually end up helping your father in the pursuit of justice in Mendez vs. Westminster?

Sylvia: What happened was that when we arrived at the Minimitsu farm, my aunt took us and that’s when we found out we couldn’t go to that school. When my father pursued the law case, if it hadn’t been for the Minimitsu farm – they were making so much money at that time they wouldn’t have been able to hire a lawyer or hire and pay people – my father ended up paying people to go to court because they didn’t want to leave their job, they didn’t have enough money to miss a day of work, so he ended up paying some of them so they could go to court and he also ended up going around and taking the lawyer all over the four cities that ended up in the court case.

Gabriel: Now, in terms of the court case, I want to turn to the court case and before I do that, I just want to remind our listeners that I am at the home of Sylvia Mendez. And Ms. Mendez, for our listeners, worked 33 years as a nurse at the Los Angeles University of Southern California Medical Center and her final five years of service she held the position of Assistant Nursing Director of the Pediatric Pavilion. And again, we’re talking about Mendez vs. Westminster, in its 60th anniversary year, and this is a case that preceded Brown vs. Board of Education and actually desegregated schools in Orange County and led to desegregation statewide here in California. But, let’s talk about that case now I want to turn to. We all know, you know, in terms of history, what the final outcome was, but for me, I’m somewhat interested in what kind of resistance that Mendez vs. Westminster faced, like who was opposed to it and, you know, what kind of resistance was there to your father’s efforts and the other families that were plaintiffs in the case?

Sylvia: At first, it’s ironic that the resistance was from their own community, the Latinos. And, so they had to form an organization, a little committee that met weekly and then started to bring in all the community and started to talk to them because they had to prove to them, show them how terrible it was for their children to be segregated because they thought it was ok that the school was close to their home and they could just go a couple of blocks and go to that Mexican school. But, they had to form that committee and had to show them the injustice between the two. The Mexican school was more vocational training and the other one was more reading, writing and arithmetic. So, that was the first hurdle. The second one was when they started the case – nothing like the South. Of course, they had a lot of verbal abuse. We still don’t know about what some of the other families faced. But, I just know from my father, that he was called a Communist because he was trying to help the Latinos and trying to fight this case.

Gabriel: And then also, like in terms of my research of the case, in terms of who was opposed to it, now, I mean, it is a court case, and there were forces against integration and, you know, one of the things is, during the trials, you know, educators, school officials had to justify the reasons to continue segregating Mexicans into the so-called “Mexican schools”. And, I wonder if you could talk about that and some of the rationales that they put forth, you know. One can only imagine how they tried to justify segregating the Mexican school kids into different schools and having the white kids into so-called white schools.

Sylvia: Well, one of the reasons that they gave in court was that they wanted us to assimilate into the American culture first. And, we didn’t know how to speak English and, of course, we did know how to speak English but that’s what they were saying, that they could not put us together since we didn’t even not know how to speak English. That was one of the rationales. But then, during the court trial, it was discovered that one of the superintendents had written a thesis where he had mentioned that the Mexicans were socially immoral, diseased and unable to learn and that, I think, was brought up during the court case, that that’s what they thought of Latinos at that time.

Gabriel: Now, 60 years ago, in 1947, after the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the decision that had been come to by a lower court in the previous year in favor of your father and the other plaintiffs, you and other children, you know, began integrating schools in Orange County. Tell me about that personal experience of integrating into the schools and what you experienced, both in terms of like, your fellow classmates and then also educators, teachers, etc.

Sylvia: Well, the teachers were, well, one thing that they did do is they punished us if we spoke Spanish in school. I remember some of the kids being put in the corner and they had to look into the wall but there’s other stories some of the kids had, but this is what I remember, just being placed there. And, I remember that they would choose one of us to be the leader that day and we would have a little red band around our arm and that person was chosen, and she would go around and she was the monitor for that day and then if anybody spoke Spanish, she would go and tell the teacher and then they would be abused. But, they would choose one of us to be that person. And that was supposed to be like a prize for us to be that person chosen to tell on the other children that were speaking Spanish.

Gabriel: Now, how about the kids? Because, I know one thing that you have said is that, you know, children aren’t inherently bigoted, that they learn racism. They learn to discriminate on all these grounds from adults, actually. So, I’m guessing that, you know, some kids were just kids and they weren’t bigoted and I’m guessing that there were some kids who were already carrying the prejudice that were passed down and bestowed upon them by their parents.

Sylvia: And, that I found out singlehandedly, because the integration in Westminster went very smoothly. They went ahead and integrated in 1945 when they had the first court hearing – the Federal District Court in Los Angeles – and Judge McCormick said that he affirmed the judgment for the Mendez. So, that integration went really good in Westminster, where they segregated the classes and put one group of classes in the Mexican school and one group in the white school. Eventually, of course, the Anglo parents got very upset that their children were in the Mexican school so they closed down that school. But, personally, we had to move back to Santa Ana when the Japanese came home from the internment camps and the war was over and I personally encountered prejudice when I was taken across town by my parents to a white school and I recall distinctly that the teacher was very nice and she knew that we were coming and it was not until we went out to recess that I was approached by one of the little white boys and told that I was a dirty Mexican and didn’t belong in that school and I’ll never forget that and that’s the kind of prejudice that they had at that time towards Latinos but, I always say, like you did mention, that children are not born that way and so it wasn’t long before everybody became friends.

Gabriel: Now, we’ve kind of talked about the forces that worked against the case who were in favor of continuing the status quo of segregation and, you know, you had mentioned that it took a while to convince the Latino community of the righteousness of desegregation itself, but did it turn around and who were the forces supporting your father and the other plaintiffs bid to desegregate schools in Orange County?

Sylvia: Okay, this is what we always say, that the Mendez case is not just about Latinos, why it’s everybody coming together because the other forces that came in to join us were the Japanese Americans – they had just come back from being in internment camps – and they formed an organization and they sent in a brief to the Ninth Circuit Court. And, the Jewish Congress, they came in and sent in a brief and the civil liberty. And, the Lawyers Guild, which at that time was mostly white men. And, the NAACP, the African Americans, they all joined in to help with the Mendez case. Even Governor Warren sent his Attorney General to help in the Mendez case when we went to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal.

Gabriel: And, I just want to remind our listeners that I am talking here at the home of Sylvia Mendez, daughter of Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez in this 60th year anniversary of the Mendez vs. Westminster case, that effectively ended segregation in schools in Orange County. And, I mentioned, and I’ve had a heavy emphasis on schools in terms of this, but the decision, the upheld decision 60 years ago, had reverberations beyond schools as there was discrimination beyond schools, I mean in terms of housing and even the public swimming pools?

Sylvia: Yes, we were not allowed to go swimming in the public swimming pools until the day before the water was changed and the white children were allowed to swim all week long and then the day that it was going to be changed the Latinos were allowed to swim. And the other thing was the theaters. We weren’t allowed to sit on the main floor of the theaters. We had to go up in the balconies to sit. Latinos could not buy homes anywhere they wanted to – they could only buy in Latino districts, barrios. So, it did change all that. We had a wonderful governor at the time that made a lot of changes. Because the Indians were segregated, and so were the Chinese, especially up in San Francisco where they had Chinese schools and that all was changed after the case.

Gabriel: Now, as we’re winding down with this interview, I know we’ve talked a lot about the history of what, you know, Mendez vs. Westminster has been. But, I want to bring it to a little bit more recent past. In 1998, the Santa Ana School Board named their newest middle school at the time the Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez Fundamental School. But, ironically enough, at that time, you know, the school name for your parents had a student body that was overwhelmingly Latino and what that brings us to in this current day is that Westminster ended de jure segregation but in many ways de facto segregation still exists, unfortunately. What are your thoughts on that and what do you think can be done to address the issue of continued segregation in schools, which some people remark that it’s even more concentrated than back in the times of Mendez vs. Westminster and Brown vs. the Board of Education?

Sylvia: I always state that we have come full circle around and we’re more segregated now than we were in 1945, that we are more segregated with de facto. At that time, it was by law and now it’s by de facto, which means it has so many reasons for it, it’s demographics, politics, poverty and what I always state is that, yes, we have de facto segregation, but that doesn’t mean that the children cannot continue to have a good education. We have good schools and that they have to continue to work hard in school and not drop out and that’s my main reason for going out to speak to high schools because the Latinos are dropping out of high school before they even graduate. And, as you all know, high school might even get you to McDonald’s, but you cannot get a good job if you don’t finish high school. So, I want to speak to all the children and let them know that they have to finish high school and go to college because only by getting a college education will they have a good job and that is my whole emphasis now as I go around the country speaking to the students that it’s so important to get a college education. And, yes, we do have de facto segregation but we have come a long ways. I remember when I was young, we didn’t have scholarships, we didn’t have student loans. And, they can go to any school they want if they persevere and they set their goals that they want to get an education and that’s why I call myself an educational advocate because that is all that I live for now.

Gabriel: Sylvia, this is my last question to you. You keep on going and speaking to schools and universities. I heard a presentation you gave at a conference for the LAUSD. What keeps you going? What drives you in terms of continuing your parents’ legacy to continue, you know, acting, speaking on behalf of education and its virtues?

Sylvia: When I first started, I recall, it was 11 years ago and my mother was living at that time, and she used to tell me that nobody thanked them for what they did and I promised my mother the legacy that I would make sure that everybody knew about the Mendez case, that I’d start talking about it. But, as I went around learning, talking to students and I found out how bad it was for the Latinos in education, how they were dropping out 50%, how only 12% of Latinos have a B.S. and only 1% out of the millions of Latinos here in the United States have a phD. Then, I decided I would just change my emphasis from just telling the story because now it’s become well-known, and then an angel sent me Sandra Roby, who has helped me and gone around and then she did that wonderful documentary that made the Mendez case more famous. So, now the reason I continue with this legacy is because I want to up those percentages of Latinos dropping out of high school, out of college, and I want them to live the same dream that I have been dreaming, living this American dream and I would never have done it if my parents hadn’t fought for me and encouraged me to go to college and I want to encourage them so they can have this wonderful life that I am living right now.

Gabriel: Well, Sylvia Mendez, I’d like to thank you very much for your time and for your hospitality and like, as you mentioned, you know, your parents felt that at one time they hadn’t been thanked for what they had done in terms of changing history. But, I’d just like to take this opportunity to give thanks for those efforts, as a young Chicano who had the opportunities to be educated in integrated public schools in Orange County. Thanks again, Sylvia Mendez.

Sylvia: Oh, you’re so welcome. And, I always tell the students it wasn’t just my father, Gonzalo Mendez, there were four other families – the Guzmans, the Palominos, the Estradas, and Ramirezes – that also fought. And, it wasn’t just that family, but everybody coming together, all the nationalities coming together, to fight this.

Special thanks to Julie Svendsen for transcribing this interview