The school administrator looked at the group of children that day and made a determination. Soledad Vidaurri’s own children had lighter complexions and bore a name — partly French in origin — that did not trigger the immediate association with Mexican ancestry that a Spanish surname produced. They were admitted. Sylvia and her brothers, darker-skinned and bearing the Mendez name, were directed elsewhere.
The destination was Hoover Elementary, the school designated for children of Mexican heritage in Westminster. It was a small frame building at the edge of a muddy cow pasture, set in the colonia — the segregated Mexican neighborhood — about ten blocks from 17th Street. The contrast between the two buildings was not subtle. The curriculum at Mexican schools in Orange County in this period focused heavily on vocational training rather than academic subjects: industrial skills for boys, domestic tasks for girls. Academic subjects like geometry and biology were taught at Anglo schools. Mexican schools employed less experienced teachers. Textbooks, when they came, were the discarded materials of white schools.
Soledad Vidaurri declined to enroll her own children at 17th Street after her niece and nephews were turned away. She was not going to separate them from Sylvia and her brothers. The enrollment attempt was over for the day.
## The First Steps
Gonzalo Mendez did not accept the outcome at the school door. He was a man who, by the accounts of those who knew him and the record of what he did, understood himself as a full citizen of the country he had joined, with the rights that citizenship was supposed to carry. He went to the principal, who referred him elsewhere. He went to the Orange County School Board. The answer was consistent: his children belonged at the Mexican school.