Felicitas Mendez was born Felicita Gomez Martinez on February 5, 1916, in Juncos, Puerto Rico. Her family moved to the United States mainland and, eventually, to Southern California, where she grew up experiencing the particular racial instability that characterized life for many nonwhite families in the American Southwest: she was classified as “Black” in Arizona and as “Mexican” in California, despite being neither, in a social order that sorted people by perceived proximity to whiteness and then treated that proximity as destiny.
When she was about twenty, she married Gonzalo Mendez. Together they raised a family in Santa Ana and then, during the war years, relocated to Westminster to take over the management of a farm.
The farm’s ownership history is part of the larger story of what the war meant for communities of color in California. The Munemitsu family — Seima and Masako Munemitsu, along with their children Seiko (known as Tad), Saylo, and twin daughters Kazuko and Akiko — had worked and farmed in Orange County since the early 1930s, establishing themselves as strawberry growers with roots in the Japanese American community. Because California’s 1913 Alien Land Law barred first-generation Japanese immigrants from holding land titles, legal ownership was held in the name of Tad, the American-born son.
In 1942, the federal government began the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Seima Munemitsu was arrested and held in Department of Justice camps in New Mexico and then Colorado — facilities that were used specifically for community leaders and others the government deemed security concerns. The rest of the family was sent to the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona. Tad, working under an Indefinite Leave Clearance that required signing a loyalty questionnaire, was able to leave the camps for outside work in Colorado, which he did to support the family financially.