The recognition was both deserved and late. It came sixty-four years after the Ninth Circuit’s ruling. It came forty-seven years after Gonzalo Mendez died. It came thirteen years after Felicitas Mendez died. The people most responsible for the case were not in the East Room that day.
Sylvia Mendez has said that she accepted the medal for her parents. This is exactly right. The honor belongs to Gonzalo Mendez, who organized five families into a federal lawsuit and spent his resources making sure they had legal representation. It belongs to Felicitas Mendez, who ran the farm and articulated the moral foundation of the fight in twelve words. It belongs to Lorenzo Ramirez and Frank Palomino and Thomas Estrada and William Guzman, whose children were equally harmed and who made the equally courageous decision to join.
Sylvia Mendez has been the living repository of this history for decades. She has carried it to schools across the country and told it to students who had never heard it. She has accepted the honors and the renamings and the monuments as the surviving human embodiment of what her parents built.
She was eight years old when the school turned her away. She has spent the rest of her life making sure that act, and the response to it, is not forgotten. Her parents helped win a desegregation case before Brown v. Board of Education. She has made sure we know.
## The Asparagus Fields and the Schoolroom
There is a particular quality to the histories that take place in agricultural communities — a groundedness, a relationship between the work of growing things and the institutions that sustain life in the communities that work those fields. The Mendez family’s story is inseparable from the asparagus fields they worked in Westminster, from the land they managed for a Japanese American family forced away from it by the wartime policies of the federal government, from the economic life of a farming region in wartime Southern California.