What Gonzalo Mendez had that many similarly situated parents did not was economic stability. The farm operation he was running for the Munemitsus was generating income, and Felicitas was managing the farm directly during this period, which freed Gonzalo to do the work of organizing — meeting with community leaders, traveling to speak with other affected families, building the network that a lawsuit would require.
Felicitas’s role in this period is sometimes underemphasized in popular accounts that focus on the legal proceedings, but it was structural. Without the farm income and without her taking on the management work, the organizing that Gonzalo did would not have been possible in the form it took.
Gonzalo reached out to other families in the surrounding communities who faced the same situation. Initially, his efforts to enlist local Latino organizations produced limited support. The institutional wariness was understandable: a legal challenge to school segregation in federal court was not a small risk, and the organizations had their own calculus about what battles to join and when.
He persisted. Eventually, he connected with four other fathers whose children had been assigned to Mexican schools in other Orange County districts: Thomas Estrada and William Guzman of Santa Ana, Frank Palomino of Garden Grove, and Lorenzo Ramirez of Orange. Together, the five men represented families from four school districts — Westminster, Santa Ana, Garden Grove, and El Modena — covering a geographic range that would make the case something more than a single-district dispute.
## David Marcus
To file a federal lawsuit, the families needed an attorney. They found David Marcus, a Los Angeles civil rights lawyer who had experience in public accommodations cases — he had previously won cases challenging segregation in public facilities in Riverside, California. Marcus’s practice gave him both the legal tools and the political orientation that the case required.