Sylvia Mendez well remembers being sent to a 'Mexican school' in Orange County. Her parents landmark lawsuit challenged segregated schools in California.
A once-segregated Mexican American school in Texas may become a historic site.
“I’m so proud of you,” she repeated again and again to the students that spring morning. Then, gently, she reminded them: “Sometimes it’s a struggle to get what you want. But you just don’t give up.” Covering the issues, politics, culture and lifestyle of the Latino community in L.A., California and beyond.
At trial, school officials tried to argue that the separation of students was based on language ability. But those arguments floundered, with one superintendentthat Mexican children were inferior in “their economic outlook, in their clothing, [and] their ability to take part in the activities in school.”
After the plaintiffs won the case, Mendez was allowed to attend previously all-white schools. There, some children treated her cruelly, telling her that she did not belong. DecadesColumn OneAttending those schools gave her the type of education she could not have gotten at the Mexican school. It also led her to lose the ability to fluently speak Spanish, a loss she still mourns.
for her work by President Obama with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.If they know about the desegregation of schools, it’s typically in the context of Brown vs. Board of Education. Sometimes, they have learned about segregation only as something that happened in a faraway place, mostly to Black students,“I was surprised at how it was very recent,” said eighth-grader Desiree Arevalo-Gil.
Sylvia Mendez, right, stops to chat with student Jennifer Torres, 14, at Mendez Fundamental Intermediate School. Mendez visits classrooms across the country to fulfill a promise to her mother not to let the landmark legal case Mendez, et al. vs. Westminster be forgotten. Santa Ana Unified, for example, is 96% Latino and 85% of its students come from low-income families. AboutFifteen miles away in Laguna Beach Unified, 12% of students are Latino, 11% are from low-income families and nearly 80% of graduates met the requirements to attend a public university in California.
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