“Mendez vs. Westminster” is the case of the Mendez family, whose children faced school isolation in Westminster during the forties. The family had just stimulated from Santa Ana to lean a farm they were rent from a Japanese family that had been fling to a captivity camp throughout World War II.
As the country marks the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, we must as well keep in mind Mendez v. Westminster. The majority people do not comprehend that it was universal practice to isolate Mexican Americans in the schools and in civilization at large all through California and the Southwest. Almost sixty years ago, a milestone court decision had broken this act of violence. (Arroyo, Luis L., 1975, pg 87).
On the whole, the discrimination of prejudice developed together with the gradually worsening status of Mexican Americans subsequent to the agreement of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, while Mexico given up California to the United States, and as of the basic injustice of numerous American institutions that until then had been seen simply in the South and the conurbations of the Northeast. These institutes were transferred to California subsequent to the Gold Rush of 1849. Although the actual troubles surface around 1910 while Anglo communities in Southern and Central California instigated to meet larger numbers of Mexicans. The new immigrants were concerned by the thriving citrus industry or determined north by civil unrest in Mexico, and the intensely entrenched Californian Mexican American population developed to three times its size by the 1920s. California now was dealt with what was termed "the Mexican problem" (Carl Allsup, 1982, pg 90).
General retort to the "problem" concerned some type of isolation in practice, if not in law: housing on the Mexican side of town; Mexican seats in movie theaters and Mexican.....
