Sylvia Mendez is not a household name. No one recognized her as she walked through the UC Riverside campus Wednesday afternoon on her way to a speech at the student union.
However, Mendez’s name is on a landmark 1947 court decision that ended legalized segregation in California schools for Latinos and allowed her to transfer from her ramshackle “Mexican school” in Orange County to what had been a white-only campus.
Segregated schools were the norm before the decision, including in the Inland area. The buildings used for Latino schools were often older and decaying. Books were sometimes hand-me-down, outdated texts from white schools.
“They weren’t preparing us to be scientists or doctors,” Mendez said before her address Wednesday. “They were preparing us to be maids and preparing the boys to work in the fields.”
The Mendez vs. Westminster School District ruling by a federal appeals court was the first successful challenge to an 1896 U.S. Supreme Court doctrine that allowed “separate but equal” public facilities, said Gilbert Gonzalez, a professor emeritus of Chicano Latino studies at UC Irvine. It was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that desegregated schools nationwide.
The Brown case involved black students in Topeka, Kan. That’s what always came to UCR student Maritza Figueroa’s mind when she heard the term ‘school segregation.’
“I only thought it was about African-Americans,” Figueroa, 18, said as she waited for Mendez to speak.
Like Figueroa, student Anthony Ortiz, 21, first heard of the Mendez case two weeks ago, in a UCR email announcing the speech.
“I was in awe,” he said. “It’s ironic that that was happening in a place that was developing a foundation of freedom and equality. I was surprised and couldn’t really believe it.”
Sandra Robbie, whose 2002 documentary on the case was screened before Mendez’s address, said she grew up in Westminster and didn’t hear of the case until she was an adult. Robbie said she was outraged that she was never taught about the case in school.
About 85 percent of California schools were segregated by law before the Mendez decision, Gonzalez said. Many theaters only allowed Latinos to sit in balconies. Many pools allowed Latinos to swim only on the day before the water was drained for cleaning.
George Aguilar, 55, of Colton, attended integrated schools in Colton. But he recalled how his father told him of how he and other children were punished for speaking Spanish in the all-Latino schools he attended in San Bernardino.
“They’d get spanked or put in the corner with dunce caps,” Aguilar said.
Aguilar said that, as a light-skinned boy, his father was able to escape much of the anti-Latino discrimination in San Bernardino movie theaters and pools. He and his two light-skinned sisters “passed” for white and swam with white children at Perris Hill Park in San Bernardino, Aguilar said. But his father’s older sister was darker-skinned and banned from the pool, Aguilar said.
PRACTICAL EFFECT
The Mendez decision set a legal precedent, but its practical effect was limited because most cities in California were largely segregated, so schools remained as segregated as the surrounding neighborhoods, Gonzalez said. Real-estate contracts forbidding the sale of homes to non-whites were common and maintained segregation, he said.
Until Riverside Unified School District in 1965 became one of the first large districts in the country to desegregate schools through busing, Riverside schools were almost entirely segregated, said Vince Moses, who organized a mid-1990s exhibit on Riverside’s Mexican-American history for the Riverside Metropolitan Museum.
Cindy Collins, 51, attended Casa Blanca School in Riverside until about first grade, when she was bused five miles to Jackson Elementary.
She recalled how Jackson was better-maintained than Casa Blanca and had newer books, supplies and playground equipment.
“Their facilities were much better,” she said.
Collins, a Latina from Riverside, said she had no bad experiences in the integrated schools she attended — except for one, with a white teacher at Chemawa Middle School.
“He told me you are nothing but a stupid beaner and you won’t amount to anything,” she said.
PARENTS SHOCKED
Mendez, 75, said that her parents were shocked she couldn’t go to her neighborhood school.
“My father felt he was an American citizen and knew his rights,” Mendez said. “He said he did not want his children growing up to be unequal to other children.”
That’s why they and four other families sued Westminster and three other Orange County school districts, she said.
Last year, President Barack Obama awarded her a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Today, forced segregation is illegal, but Latino and black students in the 1990s and 2000s are more likely to attend segregated schools than in the early 1990s, according to a 2007 study by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center.
Even though a 1976 court ruling made California school funding more equal, black and Latino students are still more likely to attend less well-funded schools than white pupils, said Arun Ramanathan, executive director of The Education Trust — West, an Oakland-based research and advocacy group.
