For families across Orange County whose children began attending formerly white schools after the ruling, the experience varied. Some found genuine acceptance and access to educational resources that had previously been denied to them. Others found that the formal permission to attend was accompanied by informal resistance that made daily attendance difficult. Some districts found ways to slow the implementation of integration without openly defying the court order.
The long-term educational impact is captured in research conducted by economists Francisca Antman and Brian Cortes, who studied the outcomes for Mexican American children whose educational experiences were affected by the Mendez ruling. Their analysis found that Mexican American students who entered school after the ruling attended approximately 0.9 more years of school and were approximately 19.4 percent more likely to graduate from high school. These are substantial effects, measured in aggregate across a population, that confirm what the plaintiffs’ families argued in 1945: that segregated schooling was inflicting lasting educational harm.
The numbers also, implicitly, tell the story of what the segregated schools had been doing to the children assigned to them. If integration increased graduation rates by nearly a fifth, the segregated schools had been suppressing those rates by something like the same magnitude. The harm was real, sustained, and measurable, even if the legal proceedings that addressed it could not undo the damage already done to the children who had been through the separate schools.
## Sylvia Mendez and the Work of Memory
Sylvia Mendez was twelve years old when the Ninth Circuit affirmed her family’s victory. She was a teenager when the formal processes of integration were working themselves out in Orange County schools. She grew up, became a nurse, practiced for approximately three decades, raised two adopted daughters, and lived in Fullerton, California.