In the Aftermath of Mendez: The Failure to Desegregate
Mexican-American Students in California Public Schools

Viola Burlew

Viola Burlew is finishing her third and final year as an undergraduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She studies contemporary English literature and twentieth century American history and looks forward to continuing research in both fields at the graduate level. Currently, Viola is pursuing research regarding depictions of race in twentieth century propaganda as it relates to the vilification of minority groups.

Ending racial segregation in public schools was not as simple as banning legal segregation in racially divided school districts. And, in areas where court cases failed to adequately end informal segregation, racial-minority students were left to suffer in the same conditions that existed prior to the ban. In 1946, Judge Paul McCormick declared segregation on the basis of race to be illegal in Orange County, California. The decision came out of the landmark case Mendez vs. Westminster, nearly ten years before the case commonly touted as the most crucial court case regarding segregated schools, Brown vs. Board of Education. California newspapers touted the Mendez case as a fierce blow against racism, a resounding victory for Mexican Americans who were the target of such racism, and a nail in the coffin of segregation across the nation. However, despite the acclaim Mendez vs. Westminster received, its legacy does not carry the weight that Judge McCormick’s ruling may suggest. While de jure segregation was banned in Orange County, de facto segregation continued through the region well after the end of the case; Mexican American students were disproportionately disadvantaged by the public school systems on the basis of language, socioeconomic status, and racial stereotypes.[1] Minority students remained in de facto segregated school environments after Mendez left the courts, and as a result, suffered in school environments that struggled with dropout rates, unequal funding, and overall, a second-rate education. This failure to provide minority students with an equal education negatively affected “standardized test scores and college attendance and completion,” which in turn resulted in “weak job prospects….unstable employment” and “low wages” stretched out over the rest of these students’ lives.[2] While the Orange County, CA case, Mendez vs. Westminster, banned segregation on the basis of race for Mexican American children in California public schools, the practice of segregation continued after the court ruling and put Mexican American students at a disadvantage in their public education.

The Mendez case came about in the immediate aftermath of World War II, where the return of soldiers brought about a rise in civil rights activism across the nation. In 1945, America was entering the post-war era, with veterans of varying races and ethnicities returning to the states after achieving victory overseas. The return of these veterans marked a shift in the budding civil rights movements; soldiers sought equal protection under the laws they had fought to defend, and began to demand equal treatment en masse after having risked their lives to defeat the Axis powers.  As a result, civil rights activism within communities of color, including the Mexican American community, blossomed in the years following the end of the war.

The civil rights of students of color were then quickly called into question when, in 1945, eight-year-old Sylvia Mendez was denied entry to a school of her choice on what her father claimed was the basis of race. When Sylvia, a Mexican American student, was denied admittance to a school within the Westminster district in Orange County, California, her father, Gonzalo Mendez, compiled evidence with the help of David Marcus in order to file a claim against a total of four school districts in Orange County.[3] The case, stating that Mexican American students had routinely been denied entrance to schools within the four districts on the basis of race, was dubbed Mendez et al. vs. Westminster et al..[4] Over the course of several months, the case was battled out in both state and federal courts, with Mendez and other families claiming that students of Mexican and Latin descent were denied entry to the schools of their choice, and instead were sent to schools with inadequate facilities and resources; Sylvia Mendez described having to “eat lunch sitting on the ground outside, because the school had no cafeteria,” sitting near “electrified wire fences” with “flies that, attracted by the food, settled on the children and their lunches.”[5] The school districts on the defense (Westminster, Garden Grove, El Moderno districts, and Santa Ana City Schools), “[denied]  that  [they discriminated]  in  any  way against the students” within their districts; the only reason that students were segregated, the districts claimed, was “for  the  benefit” of students “[speaking] the Spanish  language” who were “unfamiliar with the English language to the same extent that the so-called Anglo-Saxon students [were.]”[6]

However, at the end of the court proceedings, presiding Judge McCormick ruled in favor of Mendez.[7] The case against segregation gained support from Mexican American families around the district, as well as groups like the NAACP, the American Jewish Congress, and the Japanese American Citizens League who claimed that a victory for Mexican American students would pave the way towards ending segregation among students of other ethnicities as well.[8] In the end, Judge McCormick ruled that the “segregating [of] persons and pupils of Latin and Mexican descent in separate schools” was “discriminatory and in violation of [students’] constitutional rights.”[9] Newspaper articles reporting on Judge McCormick’s remarks write that in addition to deeming segregation illegal, he likened the actions of the school districts to the racism of Hitler, and disparaged the school superintendents for their behavior.[10]

Public response to the trial varied throughout California, though a variety of newspaper articles heralded the ruling as a success. The Los Angeles Sentinel published an article titled “Another Blow at Racism” following the end of the trial, as well as an article framing the act of segregation as “illegal” and “vicious,” while The New York Times reported on the rampant inequality of the schools named in the Mendez case.[11] Overall, the case was considered a landmark achievement in the battle for equal rights, and from a historical perspective, Mendez paved the way for Brown vs. Board of Education.

But despite the resounding support from both the legal system, the press, and the minority students defended in the case, Mendez vs. Westminster did little to change the practice of segregation in California. De jure segregation may have come to an end, but de facto segregation continued on in the years to follow. Mexican American students continued to suffer under the injustices of the public school system, with little intervention on behalf of the districts that had been ordered to desegregate. The question then becomes how? How did schools continue to segregate students in practice despite the court rulings that segregation of Mexican American children on the basis of race was illegal?

The answer lies within practices not outright banned by laws against segregation: the practices of segregation based on socioeconomic status, based on language skills, and based on racial stereotypes within the classroom. These de facto segregation practices continue into the present day, with Mexican American students still facing these same forms of discrimination in their educational environments. Mendez’s failure to truly address the issues of segregation in California resulted in decades of unequal education and unfair treatment for Mexican American students that persists today. All three practices of socioeconomic, linguistic, and stereotypical segregation kept Mexican American students in isolated and wholly inadequate learning environments within Californian schools, and it is in these environments that students received unequal educations that negatively impacted their experiences within the public school system.

The segregation of Mexican American children in California public schools was directly linked with the overall social and economic status of Mexican American families. One of the original claims made in Mendez vs. Westminster was that district lines had been redrawn in order to keep Mexican American children out of “white” schools; districts were created to encompass communities of Mexican Americans, and direct them to a Mexican American specific school.[12] While Mendez combatted these forced segregation lines, neighborhoods divided by socioeconomic status remained much the same. Mexican Americans in California inhabited lower social classes than their white counterparts due to occupation and education status. Only “36.5% of Hispanics over the age of twenty-five were high school graduates” by 1974, meaning that “professional jobs—doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.” that required extensive education were given to “Anglos” in the twenty eight years between Mendez and the 1974 study.[13] With many Mexican American adults then forced into low wage jobs, such as “laborers, farm laborers, gardeners, and cooks,” the average “Mexican American” households made between “twelve to twenty per cent” less than “European-American” households.[14] Mexican American families were therefore “[separated] from taxable wealth” that could be used to fund “broad curriculums” like those available to more middle class students.[15] “Parents with more education, income, higher status jobs” tended to “produce children who generally [performed] well in school,” but if parents did not meet these qualifications and instead occupied a lower socioeconomic class, their children were expected to have lower school performance.[16] Therefore, students of a lower social and economic class were segregated into separate schools in low income areas, not by means of the law, but by way of practice. It is the “‘Mexican school’” that “serves the lower social class; the mixed (usually predominantly Anglo) school serves the middle class.”[17] This trend continues today, as the National Research Council indicates that “Hispanic students remain concentrated in large urban school systems” that primarily serve “low income families.”[18] Mendez failed to address the de facto segregation propped up by the socioeconomic disparities between Mexican Americans and white students, and consequently failed to truly desegregate school districts that relied on this segregation to keep Mexican American students at an educational disadvantage. Socioeconomic differences continue to isolate Mexican American students from their white peers and force them into unequal facilities that have a detrimental effect on their education as a whole.

In addition to socioeconomic segregation, Mexican American students faced segregation due to their language skills. In the original Mendez vs. Westminster hearings, representatives of the school districts claimed that students of Latin descent were separated from their peers in order to better their English language skills. In response, Judge McCormick reasoned “that the ‘only tenable ground’ for defending segregation lay in the English language deficiency of some Mexican American students,” but such deficiency “did not justify ‘general and continued segregation in separate schools.’”[19] Despite Judge McCormick’s remarks, segregation on the basis of language persisted in California public schools. The common perception was that “bilingualism [was] detrimental to intellectual functioning” and impeded students’ ability to succeed in school, therefore Spanish speaking students needed to be separated from their classmates in order to develop proper language skills.[20] This belief was documented in a 1975 study conducted by the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA), a non-profit organization designed to protect students’ rights to equal education.[21] If non-English speakers were allowed to remain in the classroom, instructions were not given in Spanish. Spanish-speaking students were not able to understand instructions or follow through with them, creating a “handicap for non-English speakers and [denying] them equality of educational opportunity.”[22] But in several cases, Spanish speaking students were removed from the classroom and incorrectly placed in “‘slow’ and mentally retarded classes.”[23] The 1975 IDRA study conducted by the organization’s founder, Jose A. Cardenas, also found that Spanish-speaking students in California schools were two-and-a-half times more likely to be placed in such a class than their white peers.[24] Not only was language itself used as a means of segregation, but language as it connected to last names was also used to segregate students; students with the last name “Gonzales, or Mendoso, or Palomini” were separated from classmates merely on the basis of their last name, with the assumption that their heritage would mean they were Spanish-speaking.[25] Such linguistic discrimination continues today, over seventy years after the Mendez ruling. A 2002 study found that “[English Learners]” in California were “1.5 times more likely to be diagnosed as Speech Impaired and Learning Disabled than their English speaking peers during the elementary school years,” and were “twice as likely to be diagnosed as Mentally Retarded, Speech Impaired, and Learning Disabled” in their high school years.[26] Had Mendez truly succeeded in preventing further segregation in California public schools, linguistic segregation would not continue to detrimentally and disproportionately affect Mexican American students. These various forms of linguistic-based separation continue to serve as a means of segregating Mexican American children from their classmates, isolating them and creating an environment in which they receive an unequal education to their white peers.

Coupled with both socioeconomic status and language barriers were harmful racial stereotype also used to keep Mexican American children segregated in schools. In Mendez vs. Westminster, representatives of the school district insisted that Mexican American children “had hygiene deficiencies, like lice, impetigo, tuberculosis, and generally dirty hands, neck, face and ears,” and for those reasons they needed to remain separate from white children in schools.[27] These images called upon by school representatives were part of a highly critical stereotype of Mexican American children, depicting them as generally poor and dirty. After segregation based on these stereotypes was ended by the Mendez ruling, there was no legal precedent for separating students based on such preconceived notions, yet the practice of doing so still remained. “Teachers walked into the schools with the same stereotypes” from before the Mendez ruling throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and well into the 1960s, demonstrating the failure of Mendez to change the actual practice of social segregation.[28]  In addition to the perception that Mexican American students were dirty, teachers “possessed low expectations for the kids” of Mexican descent.[29] The belief was that Mexican American students were incapable of learning more than “vocational” skills as they were destined “to enter the low-skilled labor market as replacements for their working-class parents.”[30] Overall, teachers viewed the Mexican American community as “traditionally apathetic” when it came to the education of young students.[31] This degradation, stereotyping, and insulting of Mexican American students created a style of social segregation; while students are not physically removed from the classroom, they were socially isolated from students that may have otherwise been their peers and made to believe they were inferior.[32] The social integration process was disrupted by instructors who believed Mexican American students were dirty, faculty members who believed they were diseased, and school districts that believed them incapable of learning more than low-level vocational skills. Even within schools that were not segregated outright, students of Mexican descent were still subject to unequal treatment and unequal educational opportunities.

Despite the decision rendered in Mendez vs. Westminster, segregation on the basis of social status, language skills, and stereotypical perceptions persisted, altering the ways in which Mexican American students were allowed to learn. Mendez failed to address the cultural and socioeconomic issues that disenfranchised Mexican American students, and as a result of this disparity between legal and practical applications of segregation, the case failed to properly desegregate California public schools. Once it is clear that segregation continued even after the Mendez ruling, the question then becomes what impact did said segregation have on Mexican American students?

Evidence suggests that students who remained segregated were given unequal educations due to lack of funding, resources, and opportunities; schools and classrooms that remained majority white and English speaking were not deprived of such resources.[33] Those in favor of de facto segregated schools claimed that keeping Mexican American students separated from white students benefited both groups as it allowed for culturally coherent groups to remain together and educate their children according to their own standards.[34] But studies conducted in 1967, twenty years after the Mendez ruling, showed that schools with an overwhelming Mexican American population received significantly less funding than majority-white schools in the area; students were not only segregated in various schools, but schools for minority students were not receiving nearly the same level of funding as their majority counterparts.[35] This lack of funding led directly to a further strain on resources, such as well qualified teachers, access to materials such as textbooks, and improvement to school facilities.

Students within California schools were not blind to these issues of inequality and turned to student-led activism to draw attention to the educational disparities between students of color and white students. De facto segregation fueled the 1968 East L.A. walkouts, where students and teachers of Mexican American descent joined together in order to protest the conditions under which they were educated. The movement’s leader, teacher Sal Castro, recounted students wanting to “make the schools better.”[36] Students drafted a set of demands to present to local school boards in order to better the conditions and curriculums under which they were educated. Students demanded that they “must not be grouped into slow, average, and rapid ability groups and classes based on the poor tests currently in use that often mistake a language problem with lack of intelligence,” that teachers who “[showed] any form of prejudice toward students, including failure to recognize cultural traditions, [would] be transferred,” and “textbooks and curriculum should be revised to show Mexican American contribution to society [and] to show the injustices they suffered.”[37] These demands highlighted the specific inequalities and mistreatment Mexican American students faced at the hands of the public school system and its faculty. Students demonstrated that they were painfully aware of the socioeconomic, linguistic, and stereotypical segregation they were facing, and sought to better their educational conditions.  “In all, about 20,000 students” walked out during the weeks of the East L.A. walkouts, expressing their dissatisfaction with the unequal education they were forced to receive.[38] Teachers in Los Angeles responded by lowering the grades of Mexican American students as punishment, and when student protests were violently disbanded by police, witness accounts claim that school staff “did nothing.”[39] Teachers were not invested in the education of their Mexican American students, nor did they wish to help them succeed, providing further evidence of the racism embedded in a public school system still marred by the effects of segregation.[40]  If Mendez v. Westminster truly ended segregation and its effects, students twenty years later would not have needed to protest for their right to equal funding, resources, and treatment in the public school system.

However, as unequal as the education of Mexican American students was during the period of de facto segregation, the most unequal education students received was no education at all. Kept at a distance linguistically, culturally, and socially, Mexican American students saw high dropout rates in California throughout the period following the Mendez ruling. In 1965, the dropout rate of Mexican American students was 40%, with the average amount of schooling years completed by students with Spanish surnames standing at 8.6.[41] Other estimates, such as those made by Mexican-American scholar Tony Rivas in 1974, suggested the average was closer to 7.1 years of completed schooling.[42] This was in comparison to students considered to be “all white,” a term used by author Julian Samora to describe Anglo students from generationally white families with non-Spanish last names, who on average completed 12.1 years of schooling in both estimates.[43] What these numbers suggest is that ending de jure segregation did not keep Mexican American students in school, but rather continued to disenfranchise students by allowing for loopholes that bolstered segregation practices. These practices contributed directly to the dropout rates found during the time period; if schools were deliberately designed to punish Mexican American students for their economic status, their language skills, and their perceived cultural and social norms, then why should those students continue with school at all? Unequal public education did not benefit Mexican American students, ergo there was no reason for them to remain in the public school system.

While Mendez vs Westminster may have symbolically marked the end of racial segregation in California public schools, separation and isolation remained a reality for Mexican American students within the education system. California schools believed students of Latin descent were destined to fail based on stereotypical and preconceived cultural assumptions; as a result, students were separated from their peers, forced into spheres of lower education, and ultimately disenfranchised to the point of failure. If Mendez had truly succeeded, these disparities would have been rectified, and Mexican American students would have been allowed, or better yet, invited to learn alongside their white peers. Equal treatment in California classrooms may have bettered Mexican American students’ prospects, in both the late twentieth century and in the present day, but segregation persisted in the aftermath of Mendez; ultimately, the case failed to make the changes necessary to end segregation in the California public school system. Further study into de facto segregation as it relates to California, other border states, or communities of racial and ethnic minorities may expand upon the legacy of Mendez and the case’s failure to properly desegregate public schools. Though the Mendez case intended to address such issues of discrimination, the evidence shows that students, long after Sylvia Mendez, struggled to earn a quality education, and, as a result, were forced to either leave the public school system or continue to fight for the equal rights that they should have been granted years before. 

 Endnotes

[1] The term de jure segregation refers to legal segregation enforced by the state. De facto segregation refers to segregation in practice, regardless of the law.

[2] Barbara Schhneider, Sylvia Martinez, and Ann Ownes. “Barriers to Educational Opportunities for Hispanics in the United States,” in National Research Council (US) Panel on Hispanics in the United States, edited by M. Tienda and F. Mitchell. (Washington (DC): National Academies Press, 2006.6), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19909/#.

[3] Philippa Strum, “Our Children Are Americans: Mendez v. Westminster and Mexican American Rights,” in The Pursuit of Racial and Ethnic Equality in American Public Schools, ed. Kristi L. Bowman (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2015), 12.

[4] Ibid., 13.

[5] Ibid.

[6] “Pre Trial Transcript,” Court Documents, Mendez et al v Westminster, accessed October 25, 2018,  http://mendezetalvwestminster.com/court-documents/.

[7] Strum, “Our Children Are Americans,” 21.

[8] Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (Philadelphia: The Balch Institute Press, 1990), 28; Strum, “Our Children Are Americans,” 18.

[9] “Judgement and Injunction,” Court Documents, Mendez et al v Westminster, accessed October 25, 2018, http://mendezetalvwestminster.com/court-documents/.

[10] “Another Blow at Racism,” Los Angeles Sentinel, April 24, 1947, https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/562100057/F65026EE22A7474FPQ/7?accountid=14503.

[11] “Another Blow at Racism”; “Court Brands Segregated Schools as Illegal, Vicious: Upholds Rights of Mexicans,” Los Angeles Sentinel, April 17, 1947. https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/562096638/B12390C520F24B34PQ/4?accountid=14503; Lawrence E. Davies, “Pupil Segregation On Coast is Fought,” The New York Times, December 10, 1946. https://search.proquest.com/docview/107692648/F65026EE22A7474FPQ/11?accountid=14503.

[12] Strum, “Our Children Are Americans,” 9.

[13] Kenneth J. Meier and Joseph Stewart, Politics of Hispanic Education: Un paso pa’lante y do pa’tras (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 82; Ibid., 3.

[14] George J. Borjas and Lawrence F. Katz. The Evolution of the Mexican-Born Workforce in the United States (The National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005), 11, https://www.nber.org/papers/w11281.pdf; Philip M. Blair, Job Discrimination and Education: An Investment Analysis. A Case Study of Mexican-Americans in Santa Clara County, California (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 72.

[15] Dick Turpin, “Two Great Crises Faced in California Education,” Los Angeles Times, September 20, 1964, https://search.proquest.com/docview/155012852/9861E6FA519745E8PQ/16?accountid=14503.

[16] Thomas P. Carter, Mexican Americans in School: A History of Educational Neglect (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1970), 20. Carter conducted various studies concerning the education of Mexican American children in the Southwest United States and worked as the Professor of Education and Sociology at the University of Texas at El Paso. This text is a compilation of his work and was published by the College Entrance Examination Board as a way to combat the lack of literature surrounding the topic of Mexican American education.

[17] Ibid.,72.

[18] Schhneider, Martinez, Ownes, “Barriers to Educational Opportunities for Hispanics in the United States.”

[19] Davies, “Pupil Segregation.”

[20] Carter, Mexican Americans in School, 49.

[21] Intercultural Development Research Association, “Who We Are,” accessed December 14, 2018, https://www.idra.org/who-we-are/.

[22] Jose A. Cardenas, Intercultural Development Research Association, “Bilingual Education vs. Segregation,” October 1975: 2, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED125155.pdf. 

[23] Carter, Mexican Americans in School, 49.

[24] Cardenas, “Bilingual Education.”

[25] Davies, “Pupil Segregation.”

[26] Patricia Gandara and Russell Rumberger, “The Inequitable Treatment of English Learners in California’s Public Schools,” Williams Watch Series: Investigating the Claims of Williams v. State of California (October 1 2002): 56, https://escholarship.org/content/qt03b7k2km/qt03b7k2km.pdf?t=krnr0k&v=lg.

[27] Vicki L. Ruiz, “Tapestries of Resistance: Episodes of School Segregation and Desegregation in the Western United States,” in From The Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy, ed. Peter F. Lau (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 61. Impetigo is also known as “school sores”, a rash that appears around the nose and mouth region that is highly contagious through skin-to-skin contact.

[28] Mario T. Garcia and Sal Castro, Blowout!: Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 116.

[29] Garcia and Castro, Blowout!, 110.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Kuben Salazar, “Mexican-American School Walkout Focused on Problem,” Los Angeles Times, June 26, 1970, https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/156500046/11A6575C185E4248PQ/6?accountid=14503.

[32] “Better Education Urged for Mexican-Americans,” Los Angeles Times, August 18, 1974, https://search.proquest.com/docview/157521366/333DDA2179284BF5PQ/7?accountid=14503.

[33] Davies, “Pupil Segregation.”

[34] Carter, Mexican Americans in School, 73.

[35] Ibid., 72.

[36] Garcia and Castro, Blowout!, 124.

[37] Ibid., 186-187.

[38] Ibid., 177.

[39] Ibid., 169.

[40] Ibid., 186.

[41] Carter, Mexican Americans in School, 28; Julian Samora, “The Education of the Spanish-Speaking in the Southwest: An Analysis of the 1960 Census Materials,” in Educating the Mexican American, ed. Henry Sioux Johnson and William J. Hernandez (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1970), 84.

[42] “Better Education.”

[43] Samora, “The Education of the Spanish Speaking,” 84.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

“Another Blow at Racism.” Los Angeles Sentinel, April 24, 1947. https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/562100057/F65026EE22A7474FPQ/7?accountid=14503.

 “Better Education Urged for Mexican-Americans.” Los Angeles Times, August 18, 1972. https://search.proquest.com/docview/157521366/333DDA2179284BF5PQ/7?accountid=14503.

 “Court Brands Segregated Schools as Illegal, Vicious: Upholds Rights of Mexicans.” Los Angeles Sentinel, April 17, 1947. https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/562096638/B12390C520F24B34PQ/4?accountid=14503.

Davies, Lawrence E. “Pupil Segregation On Coast is Fought.” The New York Times, December 10, 1946. https://search.proquest.com/docview/107692648/F65026EE22A7474FPQ/11?accountid=14503.

Mendez et al v Westminster.. “Judgement and Injunction.” Court Documents. Accessed October 25, 2018. http://mendezetalvwestminster.com/court-documents/.

___________. “Pre Trial Transcript.” Court Documents. Accessed October 25, 2018. http://mendezetalvwestminster.com/court-documents/.

Salazar, Kuben. “Mexican-American School Walkout Focused on Problem.” Los Angeles Times, June 26, 1970. https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/156500046/11A6575C185E4248PQ/6?accountid=14503.

Turpin, Dick. “Two Great Crises Faced in California Education.” Los Angeles Times, September 20, 1964. https://search.proquest.com/docview/155012852/9861E6FA519745E8PQ/16?accountid=14503. 

Secondary Sources

 Blair, Philip M. Job Discrimination and Education: An Investment Analysis. A Case Study of Mexican-Americans in Santa Clara County, California. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972.

Borjas, George J. and Lawrence F. Katz. The Evolution of the Mexican-Born Workforce in the United States. The National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005. https://www.nber.org/papers/w11281.pdf.

 Cardenas, Jose A. “Bilingual Education vs. Segregation.” Intercultural Development Research Association. October, 1975. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED125155.pdf.

 Carter, Thomas P. Mexican Americans in School: A History of Educational Neglect. New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1970.

Gandara, Patricia and Russell Rumberger. “The Inequitable Treatment of English Learners in California’s Public Schools.” Williams Watch Series: Investigating the Claims of Williams v. State of California, October 1, 2002. https://escholarship.org/content/qt03b7k2km/qt03b7k2km.pdf?t=krnr0k&v=lg.

Garcia, Mario T. and Sal Castro. Blowout!: Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Gonzalez, Gilbert G. Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation. Philadelphia: The Balch Institute Press, 1990.

Intercultural Development Research Association. “Who We Are.” Accessed December 14, 2018. https://www.idra.org/who-we-are/.

 Meier, Kenneth J. and Joseph Stewart. Politics of Hispanic Education: Un paso pa’lante y do pa’tras. New York: State University of New York Press, 1991.  

Ruiz, Vicki L. “Tapestries of Resistance: Episodes of School Segregation and Desegregation in the Western United States.” In From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy, edited by Peter F. Lau, 44-67. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004.

Samora, Julian. “The Education of the Spanish-Speaking in the Southwest: An Analysis of the 1960 Census Materials.” In Education the Mexican American, edited by Henry Sioux Johnson and William J. Hernandez, 80-92. Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1970.

Schhneider Barbara, Sylvia Martinez, and Ann Ownes. “Barriers to Educational Opportunities for Hispanics in the United States.” In National Research Council (US) Panel on Hispanics in the United States. Edited by M. Tienda and Mitchell F. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US): 2006.6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19909/#

Strum, Philippa. “Our Children Are Americans: Mendez v. Westminster and Mexican American Rights.” In The Pursuit of Racial and Ethnic Equality in American Public Schools, edited by Kristi L. Bowman, 9-30. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2015.