Méndez, along with four other parents, decided to hire David Marcus to represent them in their suit on behalf of “some 5,000 other persons of Mexican and Latin descent and extraction”against four Orange County school districts. In California, Section 8003 of the Education read, “the governing board of any school district may establish separate schools for Indian children…and for children of Chinese, Japanese, or Mongolian parentage.” Because Mexicans were not one of the groups that the law permitted to be segregated, the school district’s attorney argued that the segregation was not based on race.
Mexicans, after all, were legally Anglo. Instead, the segregation was a result of Mexican children’s lack of English-proficiency. David Marcus, attorney for the Méndezes, also argued, “race discrimination” was not the issue at hand “since persons of Latin and Mexican extraction are members of the ‘white’ race.” If Mexican children were white, it was illegal to segregate them from other white children. Marcus had to prove, then, that language proficiency was not being tested equally and that many of the Mexican students unfairly segregated were actually fluent English speakers. Judge McCormick agreed, and on February 18, 1946 he ruled in favor of the Méndezes because the school district had failed to prove they were testing for English proficiency in ways that did not specifically target Mexican students.
The school district appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Marcus again emphasized the whiteness of Mexicans so the court did not have to confront Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal doctrine.” Because, as Marcus argued, the case was not about racial segregation, the court could uphold that the segregation of Mexican children was unconstitutional because they were Anglo, while preserving the legality of racial segregation.
Cecilia Márquez, “The Strange Career of Juan Crow: Latino/as and the Making of the US South, 1940–2000,” PhD thesis, University of Virginia (2016)
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