By the time of the Mendez filing in 1945, the practice was so established in Orange County that more than 80 percent of Mexican American children in the county were attending segregated schools. The normalcy of the practice was part of what made it so resistant to challenge: it did not look like an act of discrimination to those administering it, because it had always been done this way and there was no formal rule that anyone could be accused of violating.
## Integration’s Incomplete Reality
The court order that resulted from Mendez v. Westminster required the four Orange County school districts to stop assigning children to separate schools based on Mexican ancestry. What it could not do was require that the integration, once formally achieved, produce anything like the educational equality that the ruling’s language pointed toward.
Sylvia Mendez and her brothers entered 17th Street Elementary School in Westminster on January 19, 1948. They entered a school where they were unwanted by at least some of the students and families. Sylvia has spoken in interviews about the mistreatment she faced from white classmates — the specific form of hostility that children direct at those they have been told, explicitly or implicitly, do not belong in their space.
This experience of being formally included and socially rejected is one of the persistent features of school desegregation throughout American history. Court orders establish legal requirements; they do not change attitudes, reorganize communities, or require that newly integrated schools welcome the students they have been required to admit. The children who enter integrated schools first often pay a personal cost that the legal proceedings were not designed to address.