In every California community with a sizable Mexican American population, schools were segregated; sometimes it was just a "Mexican" room, but most commonly each district had an identified "Mexican" school. The Orange County superintendent of schools even denoted each designated school with the word "Mexican" in parenthesis in his annual reports. In Orange County, Gonzalo Mendez, a farmer in Westminster, and his wife, a native of Puerto Rico, along with a group of Mexican American World War II veterans asked a fundamental question about their communities: If we are good enough to fight and die alongside Anglos, then why are my children not good enough to attend the same schools as their children? Early in 1945, They filed a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles against four Orange County school districts seeking an injunction that would order their schools' integration.
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