The districts also argued, more implicitly, that the separate school arrangement was a California tradition that the federal government had no standing to disrupt. This argument appealed to local control and to the constitutional allocation of educational authority to the states. But it ran into a problem: local tradition was not a constitutional defense when the tradition violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection requirements. The Fourteenth Amendment was designed precisely to allow federal courts to review state and local governmental actions that violated its guarantees.
## The Other Four Families
The case is named for the Mendez family, and Gonzalo Mendez’s role as the organizing force and lead plaintiff has given the family’s story the most public attention. But the four other plaintiff families deserve specific recognition.
Lorenzo Ramirez was from the city of Orange, the school district that would eventually bear his children’s enrollment dispute. His decision to join the suit connected the case to a different community from Westminster, extending the geographic reach of the litigation and strengthening the class action’s claim that this was a pattern rather than an isolated instance.
Frank Palomino’s family was from Garden Grove, another Orange County community with its own Mexican school and its own history of segregated enrollment. Garden Grove was among the most actively segregating districts in the county during this period, and Palomino’s involvement brought evidence from that district into the case.
Thomas Estrada and William Guzman were both from Santa Ana, the larger city where Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez had previously operated their restaurant and where the family had lived before moving to Westminster. Santa Ana had its own segregated elementary schools, and both Estrada and Guzman had children being denied access to the schools that should have served their neighborhoods.