With the family incarcerated, Tad leased the Westminster farm to Gonzalo Mendez through two one-year lease agreements signed in 1944 and 1945. This arrangement allowed the Munemitsu family to retain ownership of the land during their incarceration — one of the mechanisms by which some Japanese American families managed to hold their property through the war. Gonzalo and his family moved to the farm and harvested asparagus. When the Munemitsus returned after the war, a provision of the lease gave them the right to use the farm buildings as dwellings, and for a period the two families shared the land.
Sylvia Mendez, in later interviews, has noted that this history connects the family’s story to the broader wartime displacement of Japanese Americans — that the farm on which her family lived and worked, and from which the events that led to the lawsuit originated, existed in its available state because another family had been forced from it.
## The Enrollment
In the fall of 1943, Gonzalo’s sister-in-law Soledad Vidaurri — the children’s aunt — took Sylvia and her brothers Gonzalo Jr. and Jerome, along with Soledad’s own three children, to 17th Street Elementary School in Westminster to enroll for the upcoming school year.
17th Street Elementary was the school that served the white families of the area. It had the attributes that community investment could produce: maintained lawns, a proper playground with the equipment that children notice and remember. Years later, Sylvia Mendez recalled looking at the school with its green grounds, the swings and the teeter-totter, and wanting to attend it — wanting what it represented as an educational environment and as a social place.