SYMHC Classics: Mendez v Westminster

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. We talked very briefly about segregated schools in South Texas in our episode on Hobi to Edar, and we have a previous episode that gets into more detail on that. It is on Mendes versus Westminster. This court case took place in California, not Texas, and also a little later than hob Ta Addar's lifetime, but these same patterns of segregation and racism were in place all throughout a lot of the Southwestern United States, including in South Texas when hob T Edar was living. In this episode, we mentioned that one day there might be an episode on Brown versus Board, and now there are two. The Road to Brown Versus Board came out initially on February twenty third, twenty fifteen, and The Aftermath of Brown Versus Board was released on February twenty fifth, twenty fifteen. There is also a reference to the possibility of a future episode on the mass incarceration of Japanese people and Japanese in Bad Americans during World War Two, and there are also two episodes on that. Those came out on February thirteenth and February fifteenth, twenty seventeen. So enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Now I'm Holly Frye. So if you've listened to the podcast for very long, you know I've lived in the South my whole life. Yep, right, And even though the Supreme Court struck down segregation in America in nineteen fifty two with the decision on Brown versus the Tapeak A Board of Education, most of my K through twelve education was actually heavily influenced by the legacy of segregation and racism. Mine too. Yeah. I went to public schools in a system that had to bust children to different places to try to maintain the racial balance and schools. I think until I was in tenth grade, we had one family that was not white attending our school. Yeah. Yeah, there was nowhere there's no one to bus in. Yeah, it was kind of a pretty homogenized community. Yeah, our school system really, Like, I lived in a part of the county that had some predominantly African American neighborhoods and some predominantly white neighborhoods, and depending on how the other parts of the school districts were were trending. That's where boundary lines would move a lot. So sometimes I would be on a bus that was like driving past to predominant neighborhoods of one race or another, or on a bus that was picking up all of those kids. It sort of depended. So that was really heavily in my consciousness, and the idea of segregation as a subject that related to Caucasian children and African American children like that is how my experience of race and segregation has been. Yeah, and that's one of the reasons that I've really thought before, and it's on the list somewhere about doing an episode about Brown versus the tepeak a Board of Education. I kind of I'm really interested in who those people were and how that all played out. We may really still do that, but that also does get a lot of airtime in most history classes. That's, you know, yeah, more than other racial relations issues that get a little more pushed to the sign most people have heard of. I know some things about Brown versus Board. Yeah, I think I did not know about the case we're going to talk about at all today. I didn't either. I certainly never heard about it growing up. Yeah, and where I grew up now has a much broader spectrum of people who live in the area, but it was really primarily about white children and African American children. This was really not the case in for example, the American Southwest, where Mexican children were segregated away from white children, and the case that changed that in the state of California was Mendes versus Westminster, which really went on to pave the way for the much more well known Brown versus Board. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Yeah, and a note on language. At the time, everybody was pretty much using the word Mexican to apply to people, whether they were actually from Mexico or had Mexican heritage. So today we have much more nuanced classifications for people, but a lot of the language at the time just used Mexican as this blanket term for everyone. So we were going to talk about Mexican and Mexican American, We're going to use lots of different words, but that doesn't quite reflect what people were using at the time in terms of language. Yeah, So for fully the groundwork, Yeah, when the Mexican American War ended in eighteen forty eight, the US gained territory from Mexico, where Mexicans were already living, and the people that were affected by this had a choice. They could relocate to the territory Mexico had retained, or they could stay in the United States. And Mexicans still in the United States a year after this all went down would then be considered American citizens. Right. What was supposed to happen was that Mexicans who stayed in United States territory would gain all the rights of citizenship upon being there for a year. What really happened was that discriminatory laws and social norms went into effect pretty much immediately or built on laws that were already there. But even so, people moved from Mexico to the United States for a range of political and economic reasons. There were a lot of things going on in Mexico that caused that, including many of them were fleeing the Mexican Revolution which started in nineteen ten, and until nineteen twenty four, there weren't any laws limiting Mexicans from entering the United States, so a different climate in terms of immigration than there is now. Right. There were also some big incentives for moving to the American side of the border. The United States started restricting immigration from several Asian countries starting in the late eighteen eighties, and then during and after World War One, the United States also started restricting immigration from parts of Europe, and without an immigrant population coming into the country, this led to a labor shortage in some parts of the United States, so in response, employers started to try to recruit more labor from Mexico and Puerto Rico. This was especially true in California as the agriculture industry really started to boom, and of course, after years of legal back and forth, residents of Puerto Rico became American citizens in nineteen seventeen. Though, because they physically resembled Mexicans and the spoke Spanish, Puerto Ricans were often lumped in with Mexicans in the eyes of many Americans. Yeah, people would use the word Mexican to apply to both Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, which is not accurate at all in the least, but because of you know, some similarities that people would sort of apply the same standard to two completely different gifts of people. Because of these and other factors, the Mexican and Mexican American population in California tripled between nineteen twenty and nineteen thirty, and that trend actually shifted a bit with the coming of the Great Depression. So when the Hoover administration launched an effort to depoor illegal aliens, that changed things. It led to both the deportation of Mexicans who were in the United States illegally and American citizens of Mexican descent. This effort increased tensions, of course, between Mexican American and Anglo American communities right so there were people with Mexican heritage who were citizens of the United States who chose to go back to Mexico during this time and people who were deported back to Mexico during this time. Although many people came to the United States from Mexico because of the promise of work, a lot of times this did not actually work out well. It was really exhausting work under very poor conditions for very low pay, and so unemployment quickly became a big problem in Mexican American communities along with us the spread of illnesses because of living conditions and overcrowding, so predominantly Mexican neighborhoods tended to be very poor in this part of the United States, but they were also very close knit with very strong support networks within the community. So even though people did not have a lot of money or a lot of food or a lot of health care, they really were trying to support each other within their community. So at the same time, looking at it in the context of schools, school funding in California was tied to race as early as eighteen fifty five, and that's when school budgets were based on the number of white students and only white students in the county. In short order, however, students who were not white were restricted from attending white schools entirely. Right, only the white students counted, is the bottom line is, That's the bottom line. And so since only white students counted, only white students were allowed to go to the better schools that were getting most of the money. In eighteen ninety six, the United States Supreme Court ruled that having separate facilities for people of different races was constitutional as long as those facilities were equal, and that was the famous Plus versus Ferguson decision. So segregated classrooms were really that it became the norm for many races and ethnicities in many part of the parts of the United States, and apart from the financial considerations that were involved in school budgets, school boards were genuinely worried about the health and language skills of Mexican American students. Since so many Mexicans were living in poverty and in generally poor living conditions. Some children were you know, arriving at school in the morning hungry or without having bathed, and illnesses, including serious ones like tuberculosis, would spread rapidly because of the overcrowding and a lack of access to medical care. Unfortunately, at least some administrators and board members associated these traits not with poverty but with being Mexicans, so they attributed it to a racial issue instead of just the fact that they were living, in some cases, really really rough conditions. Right. There were also a couple of real factors that did work against many Mexican American students when it came to keeping up with the rest of the class. Because a lot of Mexican workers were holding seasonal migrant jobs, Mexican American children were often pulled out of school for months at a time as their parents moved to follow work this would cause students to fall behind and have to repeat grades, and some Mexican American families primarily spoke Spanish, which school board members thought would make it hard for the children to keep up in an English language classroom. This today seems very silly, considering how many people will put their children on waiting lists for second language immersion schools. Yes. Uh, But at the time, the solution, and we put that in air quotes to all of these problems was to educate Mexican students separately. And although these facil facilities were supposed to be equal, in reality, they really did tend to be inferior in pretty much every respect, from the way the spaces that they were learning and were constructed, to how much the teachers and administrators involved in their education were paid. Yeah, that was basically the case in separate but supposedly equal facilities across the board, regarding pretty much every race and ethnicity. If there was a separate facility for a minority population in general, that facility was inferior. So this was not just related to California or or Mexican American students. On top of this inferiority in the buildings and the teacher pay, and all of those sorts of things. The curriculum in classrooms for Mexican American children was often geared to do two things, to assimilate Mexican children into American culture and to prepare them for a life of labor. In some schools, boys learned trade skills and gardening, while girls learned sewing and homemaking instead of having any academic part of their subject work. That kind of makes my blood boil. I know, as with many episodes, this is one where just the layers of offensiveness pile on the deeper we get into something. Yeah, it's hard to stay sort of neutral with the information at hand because it just it makes my blood boil. Right. By nineteen thirteen, Mexican children were being taught in different classrooms in the first segregated school in Orange County, California, which is where the Mendes family live of started in nineteen nineteen. Occasionally, gifted Mexican children could potentially go to a white school if they agreed to be inspected and visited by white school administrators. Yeah, so, if a Mexican American child was particularly stellar in academic ability, that child might be able to go to a white school if their family agreed to like home visits from school administrators. And I wonder how they would identify students that could academically really kind of succeeding in gardening, Yeah, when there's no academic parts of their curriculum. Yeah, that's a great question. By nineteen thirty, there were fifteen Mexican only schools in Orange County, and between eighty and ninety percent of schools in the South and the Southwest segregated Mexican children. And there were also other court cases along these lines that were happening before the case that we're discussing today, including Alvarez versus Lemon Grove School District and Salvadiera versus Del Rio Independent School District. But these cases, which found in favor of Mexican American families, either didn't have an effect outside the school system in question for legal reasons, or they got overturned during an appeals process. Right, And as sort of a side note, schools were not the only places where Mexicans are being segregated. They were also served last in restaurants after white families had been served. There were racially restricted covenants that allowed Mexicans only to buy property in certain neighborhoods. In some public pools, Mexicans could only swim one day a week, and the next day the pool would be drained and cleaned. Gonzalo and Philicitas Mendes were the parents in Mendes Versus Westminster. Gonzalo was originally from Chihuahua, Mexico. In a long way, his mother and four siblings, he emigrated to Westminster, California in nineteen nineteen. He actually attended Westminster, Maine School, the same school his children were eventually barred from attending when he was a child, although in his late elementary years he was briefly sent to a segregated school. He and his classmates, who were fluent in English, were eventually transferred back to Westminster, Maine, although he had to drop out to work as an orange picker because his family needed the money. He was naturalized as an American citizen when he was thirty years old. Philicitas was from Puerto Rico. She and her family had moved to Arizona from Puerto Rico in nineteen twenty six and they stayed there for about six months. The working condition for Puerto Ricans there where they were living were terrible, and Philicito's family had participated in protests against these terrible working conditions and the fact that their pay was dramatically less from what they had been promised before they emigrated. Philicitos's family then moved to cal California, to a predominantly Mexican neighborhood, where she later met Gonzalo and the pair were married in nineteen thirty five. They opened a cantina in the Mexican barrio of Santa Anna, and their business was successful, and eventually they saved enough money to buy a house. They had three children who are extremely important to this story, Silvia, Gonzalo Junior, and Jerome. In nineteen forty three, when the children were all still under the age of ten, their banker got in touch with them about an asparagus farm in Westminster. It was owned by the Minimtsu family, a Japanese family who was being relocated to an internment camp, which a whole other topic we could discuss. I know that great length the mini Metsus knew that they were likely to lose the farm if they couldn't find a tenant, and they offered to lease it to the Mendes family to protect it under the until their internment was over. Yeah. Their hope was that if they had people who were living there and working it for them, that eventually their internment would be over and they would be able to return to their property. Unfortunately, I do not have knowledge of how that ultimately turned out. Topics for a future Topics for Yeah, I think we do need a future podcast. I need to first look in the archive and see if there already is one. A future podcast on internment of Japanese people during World War Two. So the Mendes family agreed to lease the farm. They closed their cafe, rented out their home, and moved to live on the asparagus farm. Gonzalo's sister Sally died and her husband, Frank Vadari, went with them. Frank had experience running a farm, so he was a logical person yes to be involved in this endeavor. And this was just it was a really successful enterprise. It spanned forty acres, it employed up to thirty people, and meanwhile Gonzalo also managed another farm in the area, and the whole family really continued to prosper when they moved to the farm. They moved from the barrio to a neighborhood in the Westminster School District where there was only one other Mexican American family. In the fall of nineteen forty four, Solidad took the children to enroll in Westminster Main School, also known as the Seventeenth Street School. So Solidad was of Mexican American heritage also, but she had lighter skin and she had a last name that didn't sound Mexican. So the teacher who was doing the enrollment told her that her children could go to Westminster Main School, but that the Mendez children would have to go to the Mexican school. They had to go to Hoover Elementary instead of Westminster Main School, which, as we discussed earlier, was generally inferior. The building was in poor condition, there was no playground, The textbooks were a varied assortment and a collection of hand me downs from white schools in the area, so probably out of date. Lunch was eaten outside on picnic tables, and since part of the school property was adjacent to a cow pasture, there were flies everywhere and the manure smell permeated the school area right So Solidad said that if the Mendez children could not attend Westminster Maine, her children would not be going there either, and she left. When Gonzalo and Felicitas heard about this, they were both understandably outraged. They were both citizens of the United States and they saw no reason why their children should not attend the school in the district where they lived. So they went to talk to the principal and they were told that no, the children had to attend the Mexican school. Then they went to both the Westminster and Orange County school boards and they just kept getting the same answer from everyone. Yeah, everyone was telling them they have to go to the Mexican school. Gonzalo contacted lawyer David C. Marcus, who had recently successfully argued another California civil rights case involving whether Mexicans could be banned from public swimming pools. That answer was no, they could not. They discovered that Mexican and Mexican American children were routinely being segregated in Orange County. This wasn't actually required or allowed by law, though the Education Code actually read quote, the governing board of any school district may establish separate schools for Indian children, accepting children of Indians who are wards. The United States Government and children of all other Indians who are descendants of the original American Indians of the United States, and for children of Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian parentage. Yes, so there were actual segregation laws on the books, but some of them mention Mexican American children, right. So this puts them into kind of an interesting position as far as wanting to fight what was going on, because there wasn't actually a law to try to repeal. Yeah, so first they tried to get the support of other Mexican families in the district to file a class action suit, but many of the families they talked to actually didn't want the school board to change its policy. The Mexican school that their children attended was right in the middle of the barrio where they were living. It was extremely convenient, so the parents liked that they had their children close by, that they could walk their children to school in the morning, that children could come home at lunchtime. There were real practical reasons that people liked having their children in a school that was in their neighborhood, and so that made it a little tricky for them to start to build a case and believing that they'd have better success if they could prove that it wasn't just the Westminster school district in question. Gonzalo and his attorney actually toured the area and they interviewed families and looked for other people that would be willing to join the suit. So outside of their area, they expanded to try to find some support and other people that would rally along with their cause right and eventually four other families did join them, the families of Lorenzo Ramirez, Frank Palomino, William Guzman, and Tomasa Strada. Some of these families included veterans from World War Two. These are people who had just returned from fighting for their country, specifically fighting Nazis for their country, and they were really unwilling to accept treatment as second class citizens once they got back. And with their involvement, the defendants included four school districts, so Westminster, which the Mendes family had started this ground swell, in Santa Anna, Garden Grove, and Elmadena which is Orange Yes. Meanwhile, Philisitas and other mothers continued to pressure their school boards to try to change their decisions. Pilicitas also helped organize the Associacion de Padres de Ninos Mexican americanos. I'm just gonna apologize for my pronunciation. I am not fluent in Spanish to show support during the trial. All of this was extremely brave on a number of levels. The Mendes family and the other families faced the possibility of racist retribution from the Anglo community and anger from people in the Mexican American community who didn't want this suit to go forward. Also ran financial risks associated with the trial, and they would be missing work to testify. And for this last part, Gonzalo actually reimbursed people out of pocket. So it was a really important fight to them. They were willing to kind of literally put their money where their mouth was right. So they filed a class action lawsuit in the Federal District Court of Los Angeles in March of nineteen forty five. They chose to file this in federal court instead of state court because there was no state law being violated that they could try to repeal. So, as we had just discussed, there was no state law in California at the time requiring segregation that was based on race. It was related to Mexican Americans. So the lawsuit's argument was that in absence of a state law. Segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and California state law. The ACLU and the National Lawyer's Guild also filed amicus briefs. Yes, and if you remember our Loving Versus Virginia episode, there's the briefs that are from people not directly related to the case. You have sort of expert legal advice to include. The trial started on July fifth, nineteen forty five, and it lasted for two weeks. It was to be decided by Judge Paul J. McCormick. The school board was to be defended by Orange County Council Joel E. Ogle, but he wound up turning it mostly over to the deputy County Council, George F. Holden. The testimony for the plaintiffs included evidence of segregation in several school districts, evidence of how the schools for Mexican children were inferior, and testimony for Mexican American children about how the segregation had affected them. Parents and education experts also testified. Doctor Ralph Deals of UCLA's anthropology department was an expert witness. He argued that segregation set up white children as superior and Mexican children now inferior, and drew parallels to what was going on in Nazi Germany. The school board's defense was bizarrely offensive to today's or so kind of be ready for that, right. James L. Kent, the superintendent of the Garden Grove School District, said Mexicans were inferior and had poor hygiene, in a lower ability level and outlook than white children. He also said Mexican families had loose morals. Yes, it kind of was just making up some garbage. Yeah, does he I don't know, feared change, didn't like them. Yeah, Well, as we talked about earlier, he kind of conflated problems associated with poverty with problems that were innate to an ethnicity, correct, which I don't. Maybe it's because I am a little idealistic sometimes I kind of think the better option would have been to address the problems of socialiated with poverty, rather than segregating the poor children into their own school you hippie, HI know, it's crazy. I too tend to be idealistic in that regard, and it's important to remember that it was a different social climate, but it's hard not to kind of be a little judgmental of statements like that. I just like it. Statements that say those people are terrible for the following reasons. Yeah, we really need to keep them separate. Well, and the judge he would sort of call them on it. He was like, so, if a white child has problems with hygiene and is having trouble keeping up, what do you do? And they're like, well, we talked to the parents and we maybe hold them back a year. He's like, so you don't just segregate them into somewhere else. So Frank A. Henderson, who was the superintendent of the Santa Ana School District, also acknowledged that they were basically making school assignment decisions based on people's surnames and their skin color, which is ridiculous. Yeah. In terms of the legal aspects, the school boards tried to build their defense around the idea that this was not a matter for a federal court since it was a county and not a state or federal matter. Yeah, it was not a very strong defense. It's a little flaily at that point, I think. Yeah, And so unsurprisingly, Judge Paul McCormick of the U. S. District Court Southern District of California Central Division ruled that the segregation of Mexican American students did violate the law. He also described segregation itself as inherently unequal, writing quote, A paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality. It must be open to all children by unified school association, regardless of lineage. So then this takes a turn into the yet more offensive because the school boards appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. While the appeal was taking place, since they had been told that what they were doing was illegal, they all kind of handled their own integration efforts efforts separately by their own devices. In the case of the Westminster District, grades one through four wound up going to Westminster, Maine, and grades five through eight went to Hoover, with the Mexican American children and the Anglo children in the same school. But that meant that grades five through eight were in the inferior ski school with the cow pastor and no playground and no cafeteria. So nobody wins, right, it is not good. The ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, the Japanese American Citizens League, the American Jewish Congress, the NAACP, and the Attorney General of California all filed amicus briefs on behalf of Mendes in the appeal, And we're not going to rehash the testimony because it was basically the same testimony over again with the school boards again trying to build this defense that this was just a county thing and was not something that the federal court should be messing with. The Ninth Circuit's decision, which came out in nineteen forty seven, was unanimous. It upheld the lower court ruling on the basis that it violated California law, not on passed Supreme Court precedent. Since California had no segregation law for Mexicans, earlier Supreme Court decisions didn't actually apply, so it didn't apply the ruling more broadly to the other races or ethnicities, right, They still kind of had a battle of their own to deal yes, So while this did, this ruling did achieve what people were hoping it would achieve as far as ending the segregation of Mexican American children. It was a pretty narrow ruling. It was based only on the fact that this didn't this wasn't within California law, like it didn't expand that out to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment at this point, doing possibly the only thing they had done right so far. The school boards elected not to appeal to the Supreme Court, and this may be one reason why this case has become much less well known than Brown versus the Tapeak a Board of Education. And after this ruling had finalized, and apart from overturning segregation of Mexican students in California, the Mendez versus Westminster case had other effects. Later on, It really put a spotlight on segregation in California. Governor Earl Warren, who later became Chief Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, proposed to the state legislature that California repeal all of its segregation laws in nineteen forty six. He signed this bill into law in nineteen forty seven. He went on to author the Supreme Court's opinion in Brown versus Board and in Loving versus Virginia, which we talked about in earlier episodes of this podcast, along with many many other civil rights legislations. Yeah, the war in court was in a lot of ways extremely progressive when it came to rights and liberties. Yeah, they really had an eye on achieving equality, I think. And while it was not cited as a direct precedent in Brown versus Board of Education, the NAACP did use Mendez versus Westminster as a test case when trying to see how they might get Brown versus Board overturned. Earl Warren's ruling on Brown versus Board has a lot in common with McCormick's ruling in the Mendez case. Yeah, it was clear that he had read and digested that written opinion thoroughly. The NAACP's amicus brief was also written by Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown versus Board before the Supreme Court. Many of the challenges to segregation before this point had focused on the fact that facilities were separate, but they were not equal. This was a case in which the entire concept of separate but equal was thrown out and it succeeded. This helped propel America towards actually desegregating schools. Yeah, while there were people who were working on integration before this point, there was still a lot of focus on trying to make the facilities be actually equal, and this really proved. It was sort of a proof of concept of hey, we can actually get these laws completely overturned instead of just focusing on getting the facilities to be on the same level as one another. Gonzala Mendez died in nineteen sixty four, and he was fifty one at the time. Felisa Tas Mendez died in nineteen ninety eight. There are actually two California schools named after them. A commemorative stamp came out in two thousand and seven for the seventieth anniversary of the ruling, and Celia became an activist. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in twenty eleven at the age of seventy four. Yeah, she went on to do just a lot of lecturing on the issues relating to Mexican American people in the United States and segregation, a lot of education of children on this case in particular, because it turns out that this even people who are living in that part of the country don't necessarily know that this ever existed because so much of the focus about the civil rights movement is on African American children rather than children of other races who were also put into segregated schools. Yeah, and the school integration thing is largely focused, as we've said on Brown view Board. Yeah, so this does kind of fall by the wayside. Yeah. And as a weird side note, I watched a lot of videos for this. There are just there are a lot of videos that have been recorded that are about the case, and a lot of them had this weird undertone that really bothered me. That was like, well, everybody thought that Mexican children couldn't speak English, but the Mendez children could totally speak English, and I was like, so, so that would have been okay if they didn't. It's very strange. Yeah, I mean we talked about this a little bit yesterday when you were commenting on this, and like I said, I think the idea is that they were trying to build a case of how ridiculous it looked to try to keep these kids out of any school, but it ends up making it look like they were the exception in the Mexican American community, right, which is and the others still should maybe be segregated. It set up weird, Yeah, a very odd tone. And while the a Mendez family was definitely more affluent than a lot of other Mexican American families in the area. But that doesn't mean that all the prejudices about all of the other Mexican American people were correct, because that is not true. No, So yes, I am really glad that I got to learn about this case. It was not one that I was familiar with before. Now yeah, I said neither. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.