Mexican American children occupied a peculiar legal position. They were classified as white for most legal purposes under California law, which meant that the statutes authorizing segregation of racial minorities technically did not apply to them. This legal whiteness was a product of treaty provisions dating from the end of the Mexican-American War and of political arrangements that served various interests at various times. It coexisted, in most California communities, with systematic social and economic discrimination against people of Mexican ancestry.
What developed in the absence of explicit statutory authorization was administrative practice. School districts created Mexican schools and maintained them through enrollment procedures that sorted children by ancestry without anyone formally acknowledging that racial sorting was occurring. The official justification was always pedagogical — the special language needs of children from Spanish-speaking homes. The actual mechanism, as the Mendez trial would demonstrate, was racial.
A 1931 statewide survey found that approximately 85 percent of California schools with significant Mexican American student populations had segregated those students into separate facilities. This was a near-universal practice achieved without a single statewide statute requiring it. It was maintained through local administrative decision, through tradition, through the willingness of school officials to treat ancestry as an enrollment criterion, and through the absence of any effective challenge to the practice.
The Lemon Grove case of 1931 had produced a local victory against one specific district’s attempt to build a separate school for Mexican American children, but it operated in state court, produced only a local ruling, and did not challenge the broader statewide pattern. It is a significant predecessor case, but it did not have the effect of disrupting the system of separate Mexican schools that persisted through the 1930s and into the 1940s.