## Gonzalo Mendez as Organizer
The record of what Gonzalo Mendez actually did in the years between the enrollment rejection and the filing of the lawsuit is worth examining as an example of how civil rights organizing actually works, distinct from the courtroom proceedings that tend to attract historical attention.
He met with the principal of 17th Street Elementary and with county school officials, and received consistent refusals. He then began reaching out to other parents in the affected communities — families in Santa Ana, Garden Grove, Orange, and El Modena whose children faced the same situation. This organizing required time, travel, and persistence, and it required convincing other families that the risk of joining a federal lawsuit was worth taking.
The economic risk was real. Families who challenged the practices of institutions they depended on — school districts that held authority over their children’s education, communities where they worked and owned businesses — faced the possibility of retaliation that could take many forms, not all of them overt. The decision to put one’s name on a federal lawsuit against the school districts was not taken lightly by any of the five families.
Gonzalo Mendez’s financial ability to contribute to the legal costs — described in some accounts as draining much of the family’s resources — was important both practically and symbolically. The practical dimension is straightforward: litigation costs money. The symbolic dimension is that it demonstrated a level of commitment that could encourage others to join. When the lead plaintiff is visibly putting his own resources on the line, the invitation to others to take the same risk has a different character than it might otherwise.