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"Some Mexicans are very bright, but you cannot compare their brightest with the average white children."
-A superintendent of schools circa 1940
Mexican School Desegregation: A Different Racial Paradigm
An Unheralded Event
In 1931, the Southern California community of Lemon Grove served as the unlikely stage for a dramatic and significant civil rights court case. A group of courageous Mexican and Mexican-American parents and their children won a major victory in the battle against school segregation and the perfidious notion of separate but equal facilities.
The case, now commonly referred to as the Lemon Grove Incident, was the nation's first recognized court-ordered school desegregation case. The Lemon Grove parents' efforts and legal struggles involved more than 70 children of Mexican descent who were summarily directed by their school principal to attend a hastily constructed, two-room segregated school, the "caballeriza," the barn, which was situated in the "Mexican side of town."
The Lemon Grove case is not well known and one could surmise that its most distinguishing characteristic is its obscurity. Similar to the post World War II landmark Méndez v. Westminster case, the Lemon Grove matter could be deemed an item of "neglected" history not only because of the public's ignorance of it, but also because of its absence from the public school curriculum (Madrid, 2007, p. 29).
As with Lemon Grove and Mendez, many important historical events pertaining to the Mexican-American experience are not taught in the public schools. For example, there were approximately 100 school desegregation and education-related cases that were heard during the 19th century (Bowman, 2001, p. 9), many of which pertained to Mexican-American civil rights and social justice, yet there is little mention of them in the history texts.
Many, if not most of the better known desegregation and civil rights issues have emerged from the Black experience. That is, events related to the Black civil rights movement generally are well known and rightfully are considered important aspects of U.S. history. In stark contrast to Black civil rights issues, many incidents pertaining to the Mexican-American struggle are neither familiar nor renowned. Why?
A Brown/White Paradigm
Matters of civil rights and school desegregation traditionally have been perceived within a Black/White context or paradigm, which is problematic because it tends to marginalize...