The irony that schools are named after people who fought for the right to attend schools that were closed to them is not subtle. The children who attend Sylvia Mendez Elementary in Berkeley are studying in a building whose name carries, implicitly, the story of a child who was denied access to a school because of her name and her skin. The name is an invitation to learn that story.
The renaming of Berkeley’s LeConte Elementary in 2018 placed Sylvia Mendez’s name on a school in a community that had its own complex history with school segregation and integration. Berkeley was, in some ways, a city where the politics of school integration had been worked out publicly and contentiously over decades. The choice to name a school after Sylvia Mendez was a statement that Berkeley’s community understood her family’s contribution to belong to the national story of school desegregation — that it was not a California story or an Orange County story or a Mexican American story but an American story.
For Sylvia Mendez, the school renamings are among the forms of recognition she has accepted on behalf of her parents — as embodiments of what Gonzalo and Felicitas did, rather than as personal honors for herself. The distinction she draws, consistently, is between the recognition that comes to her as the surviving representative of her parents’ achievement and the recognition that would have been properly directed at her parents themselves, had it come when they were alive to receive it.
## Why the Case Was Forgotten