In 1997, the Santa Ana Unified School District named a school after Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez. The name acknowledged the two parents most responsible for the organizing and funding that made the case possible. A school in the Los Angeles Unified School District was later named for them as well.
In 2007, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp marking the sixtieth anniversary of the case. The stamp brought Mendez v. Westminster to a national audience that might not have encountered it otherwise.
Sandra Robbie’s documentary film, Mendez v. Westminster: For All the Children, told the story of the case for a general audience and won an Emmy Award and a Golden Mike Award. The film reached audiences in schools and at screenings across California and beyond, becoming an educational resource for teachers who wanted to incorporate the case into curricula.
On February 15, 2011, President Barack Obama awarded Sylvia Mendez the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The award was formal national recognition that what her family had done belonged to the central narrative of American civil rights history, not to a marginal footnote. In presenting it, the Obama administration placed her achievement in the company of the country’s most honored civil rights contributions.
In 2018, the Westminster City Council approved plans for a park and monument honoring the Mendez family. By 2022, the Mendez Historic Freedom Trail and Monument had opened in Westminster, creating a physical site of commemoration in the community where the events had occurred. Janice Munemitsu, the daughter of Tad Munemitsu, has been involved in the monument project alongside Sylvia Mendez — a reunion, of a kind, between the families whose stories had intersected in the wartime asparagus fields of Orange County.