On the primary day of Hispanic Heritage Month 2020 in the U.S., the present Doodle celebrates Puerto Rican civil rights pioneer and business owner Felicitas Mendez. Close by her significant other Gonzalo, Felicitas assisted with initiating and win the amazing claim Mendez v. Westminster, which in 1946 brought about the principal US government court administering against state funded school isolation—very nearly 10 years before Brown v. Leading group of Education.
Felicitas Mendez was conceived Felicita Gómez Martínez on February 5, 1916 in the town of Juncos, Puerto Rico. She moved with her folks to the American Southwest as a youngster, and the family in the long run joined the Latino people group of horticultural specialists in California’s Orange County. In 1935, she wedded Gonzalo Mendez, a Mexican migrant who worked with her dad in the fields. Together, the couple opened a local bistro and later dealt with a fruitful ranch in the humble community of Westminster.
In 1944, the Mendez’s three kids were rejected enlistment at a neighborhood state funded school dependent on their nationality and skin shading. Reluctant to acknowledge this shamefulness, the couple chose to retaliate. With the claim Mendez v. Westminster, Gonzalo Mendez and four different guardians sued the Westminster school locale and a few others to request a conclusion to the isolation of Hispanic understudies. Felicitas Mendez composed panels to help the case and capably dealt with the Mendez’s ranch all alone, getting record benefits that assisted with sponsoring the claim.
On February 18, 1946, the government region court reasoned that the school regions were infringing upon Mexican-American residents’ entitlement to approach assurance under the law and decided for the Mendez family and different guardians. Certified by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals the next year, this milestone choice legitimately made ready for a law that required the incorporation of all California government funded schools that very year, just as the Brown v. Leading body of Education Supreme Court choice that managed the isolation of state funded schools illegal seven years after the fact.
In 2011, Mendez’s girl Sylvia was granted the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the United States’ most noteworthy non military personnel honor—in acknowledgment of her and her folks’ part in the Westminster v. Mendez case and her long lasting devotion to social liberties and instruction that followed.
Thank you, Felicitas Mendez and family, for assisting with driving the route toward an all the more simply future.
