The content of what students learn about the case varies, as it does with any historical subject. At minimum, the curricular requirement means that students will learn that before Brown v. Board of Education, five families in Orange County organized and funded a federal lawsuit that challenged the segregation of Mexican American children in California’s public schools — and won. Many students will learn more than this minimum.
The inclusion of the Mendez case in curricula alongside Brown v. Board of Education also does something important for how students understand the history of American civil rights: it complicates the narrative. The story of school desegregation is not simply a story about Black and white, about the South, about the Supreme Court. It is a story about Mexican American families in California, about Japanese American incarceration and its effects on land ownership, about a Puerto Rican woman who ran a farm while her husband organized a lawsuit, about a coalition of parents from four different communities, about a lawyer who had previously desegregated swimming pools. The story is richer, more complicated, more American than any single-thread narrative can capture.
Sylvia Mendez has spent decades contributing to this educational project through her direct school visits and public appearances. The curricular mandate means that the project continues through the formal educational system, independent of her personal presence. The story will be taught after she is no longer available to tell it in person — which is, presumably, one of the things she means when she says, ‘This is my legacy.’