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– How did school systems treat the Mexican problem? What objectives guided school administrators? What methods did they employ to realize those objectives? The first administrative proposal for solving the Mexican problem was simple: segregation into all-Mexican schools. Several reasons were proffered for separating Mexican children from Anglo-American children. First, educators and academicians claimed that segregation provided a fitting environment in which to meet the educational needs of the culturally distinctive Mexican child. Administrators and educators confidently insisted that Anglo-American and Mexican children were substantially distinct culturally. Moreover, the culture of the Mexican child diminished his or her capacity to learn to such a degree that it was unwise to place both in the same school setting. The crux of the learning problem pivoted around language. Slowed by speaking Spanish, Mexican children progressively fell behind through the grades. Simultaneously, seg- regation unburdened the Anglo-American child from the “slower” Mexican pupils, who in turn benefited by avoiding competition with “faster students.” Second, the inherited intelligence of Mexican children, as measured by IQ tests, purportedly fell well below that of the average Anglo child. This also required segregation to educate at the special ability levels of Mexican children. Third, the level of measured intelligence and the employment pattern peculiar to Mexicans (which parents seemed to pass on to their children) appeared to contain the seeds of a social inevitability. Educators therefore implemented a strict emphasis on vocational education in the segregated environment.
– The Americanization program in California, for example, initiated in 1915, targeted language because it was believed that all non-English-speaking sectors of the population held the potential to develop a class consciousness capable of evolving into radical, even communistic, organization and activities. In the Americanization agenda, more than ethnic rivalry was at stake; clear political objectives grounded the exercise. Americanization, fundamental to the agenda of the segregated school, served as a preventive measure that promised the elimination of cultural disintegration and political disaster that loomed within the Mexican psyche.
-In February 1946, U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. McCormick ruled that the school districts were guilty of violating the Fourteenth Amendment in forc- ing Mexican children to attend segregated schools. Judge McCormick found that a “paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality. It must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage.” The judge clearly broke with Plessy by maintaining that separation implied inferiority, and that inferiority was obtained through arbitrary administrative practices. He wrote that the country’s practices “foster[ed] antagonism in the children and [suggested] inferiority among them where none exist[ed].” The county counsel appealed to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but the appeals judges upheld the lower court’s ruling. The county was ordered to begin the process of dismantling segregation in the fall of 1948. The class action suit, known by the legal title Méndez v. Westminster, reverberated throughout the nation, particularly in the Southwest, and led to successful challenges in Arizona and Texas. Legal analysts quickly focused on the case. An article in the Columbia Law Review argued that the case strongly suggested that the Plessy doctrine might be in for a constitutional test. The author noted that the “courts in the [Méndez] case breaks sharply with this approach and finds that the Fourteenth Amendment requires ‘social equality’ rather than ‘equal facilities.’” A piece in the Yale Law Journal affirmed that the Méndez decision “questioned the basic assumption of the Plessy Doctrine. . . . A dual school system even if ‘equal facilities’ were provided does imply social inferiority.”
