In the fall of 1943, a girl went to register for school in Westminster, California, and was turned away because of her name and the color of her skin. She was eight years old, a daughter of a Mexican immigrant father and a Puerto Rican mother, a child who spoke English and had previously attended schools elsewhere without incident. The school she walked up to had green lawns and a real playground. The school she was sent to instead was a small wooden building near a cow pasture at the edge of a Mexican neighborhood. Her parents decided to fight.
What followed was not a spontaneous act of individual courage but something more complicated and more important: a organized legal campaign funded by a farming family, supported by a coalition of parents from four different Orange County communities, argued in federal court, and eventually affirmed by an appellate court in a ruling that reached questions about race, education, and equal protection that the American legal system had been avoiding for decades. Sylvia Mendez was eight when the fight began. She was twelve when her family and four others won.
## The City and the System
Westminster in the early 1940s was an agricultural community in Orange County, California, then dominated by strawberry and asparagus farming. Like much of Southern California at the time, it had a substantial Mexican American population — families who had been in California for generations alongside more recent immigrants, many of them engaged in agricultural work. And like many California communities, it had developed a system of separate schools for children of Mexican ancestry.