Film spotlights oft-overlooked case

Deepa Bharath

Mendez vs. Westminster was a historic case that changed education for

Latinos in Orange County.

Yet most people familiar with Brown vs. Board of Education, which

sent out a clarion call to end segregation in public schools, don’t

know about this landmark case that happened seven years before Brown,

said Leda Albright, director of Families Costa Mesa.

The nonprofit organization, which serves as a family resources

center, will screen an award-winning documentary by KOCE today at the

Lion’s Park Neighborhood Community Center that explains the Mendez

case many Latinos haven’t even heard about, Albright said.

“Our main goal with this event is to instill the importance of

education in our children,” she said. “The children need to look at

the battles that were fought on their behalf many years before they

were even born and see the value of the education that they are

receiving today.”

The Mendez case is said to have won access for Latinos to white

schools in 1947 and helped set the stage seven years later for Brown

vs. Board of Education.

Velvet Lopez, who’s on the Families Costa Mesa parent advisory

committee, said it would be important for her children to watch the

film.

“My children were born in Central America,” she said. “They

consider themselves to be Americans, but sometimes they wonder where

they really belong.”

This film would help resolve their identity crisis to some extent,

Lopez said.

“They’ll see that they are not alone,” she said. “They’ll also

understand that they’re not different from other kids, that they can

belong to a different race and still be part of the same community.”

KOCE’s Sandra Robbie, who wrote and produced the documentary in

2002, said the goal is to get the film in every California school to

show the Mendez case’s influence on the history of segregation in

California.

The so-called Mexican schools in Westminster, where the Mendez

children had to go, were like chicken coops, she said.

“There was an electrical wire that separated the school from a

ground where cows grazed, and a few children even got electrocuted

over the years,” Robbie said.