For Mexican American families more broadly in Orange County and across California, the period after the ruling brought formal equality without always delivering substantive change. Some districts resisted in practice. Some families found that the formal permission to attend white schools did not translate into actual welcome. The mechanisms of exclusion that did not depend on written policy could prove more durable than the ones that did.
## The Five Families
It is worth pausing on the people behind the case caption, because the legal history tends to emphasize the Mendez family as protagonists while the other plaintiff families recede into the formal record.
Thomas Estrada and William Guzman were from Santa Ana, where the segregation at Fremont Elementary and other schools had been a source of community grievance. Lorenzo Ramirez was from Orange. Frank Palomino was from Garden Grove. Each of these men had children in Mexican schools; each had made the decision — with its attendant risks of social and economic retaliation from the white-dominated institutions they depended on — to join the lawsuit.
Attorney Timothy Prince, in historical accounts of the case, has noted that Gonzalo Mendez’s role as lead plaintiff was partly a function of his having made the first contact with David Marcus and having contributed the most to legal fees. The designation carried no special legal significance in terms of the ruling — the outcome applied to all the plaintiffs equally. But it did mean that the case was named for the Mendez family, and that the family’s story became the face of a case that was, from the beginning, a coalition effort.