The Anderson Bill, by repealing the statutory provisions that had authorized segregation of Native American and Asian students, swept away the remaining explicit legal infrastructure for California school segregation. But it did this through legislation rather than constitutional interpretation, which meant that the constitutional questions McCormick’s district court opinion had raised were not fully resolved at the appellate level.
## Felicitas Mendez and the Work of Organizing
The accounts of Mendez v. Westminster that focus on Gonzalo Mendez as the organizing force are not wrong, but they are incomplete. Felicitas Mendez’s contribution was structural, operational, and without it the organizing Gonzalo did would not have been possible.
While Gonzalo was traveling to meet with affected families, speaking with community members, and eventually working with David Marcus on the legal strategy, Felicitas was running the farm. She managed the asparagus operation, coordinated the labor, handled the day-to-day work that kept the family’s economic base functioning. The farm’s income was the resource that made it possible to hire an attorney, a decision that Dr. Al Mijares, an Orange County school official who has spoken publicly about the case, characterized with the observation that the families “emptied their bank accounts” for this fight.
Felicitas’s own voice on the meaning of the struggle is preserved in the words that her daughter Sylvia has carried and repeated across decades of public speaking. Felicitas said: “We were fighting because under God we’re all equal.” The statement is simple and it is not simple. It is the distillation of a conviction that the legal system should reflect a moral reality, and that where it did not, the right response was to change the legal system.