Felicitas lived to see significant recognition of what the family had done, but not all of it. She died of heart failure on April 12, 1998, at her daughter Sylvia’s home in Fullerton, California. She was eighty-two years old. Gonzalo Mendez had died in 1964 at the age of fifty-one, before most of the public recognition of the case’s significance developed.
## What the Social Scientists Said
The use of social scientific testimony in Mendez v. Westminster was not accidental. David Marcus made a deliberate choice to go beyond the physical comparison of school facilities and introduce evidence about what segregation did to children’s sense of themselves.
Social scientists who testified at the trial argued that placing children in separate schools based on ancestry communicated a message of inferiority — that the children being separated were not worthy of the same educational environment as white children. This psychological harm was not incidental to the practice; it was structural. The communication of inferiority happened through the act of separation, not only through the differential resources that separation produced.
This argument was important because it moved the legal question off the terrain where the school districts were most comfortable defending themselves. The districts could argue that their Mexican schools had adequate facilities, that the curriculum met state requirements, that the teachers held appropriate credentials. They could not so easily argue that sending children to separate schools because of their ancestry did not communicate anything damaging about those children’s social standing.
The social scientific framing would be refined and extended in subsequent NAACP cases, reaching its most famous expression in the “doll studies” conducted by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, which were cited in Brown v. Board of Education. The Clarks’ research — showing that Black children who were shown white and Black dolls tended to identify the white doll as the “nice” one and attribute positive qualities to it — was evidence of the psychological damage that racially segregated environments produced.