Felicitas Mendez
| Felicitas Mendez | |
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Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez
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| Born | 1916 Juncos, Puerto Rico |
| Died | April 12, 1998 Fullerton, California |
| Occupation | American civil rights pioneer |
| Spouse(s) | Gonzalo Mendez |
| Children | Four sons: Victor, Gonzalo, Jerome and Phillip; two daughters, Silvia Mendez and Sandra Duran |
| Notes | |
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Thurgood Marshall's amicus brief filed for Mendez's on behalf of the NAACP contained the arguments he would later use in the Brown case.
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 You may view: "Civil Rights- Mendez vs. Westminster"; By: Oscar Rosales on YouTube. |
Felicitas Mendez (1916 – April 12, 1998) was a Puerto Rican who was a pioneer of the American civil rights movement. In 1946, Mendez and her husband led an educational civil rights battle that changed California and set an important legal precedent for ending de jure segregation in the United States. Their landmark desegregation case, known as Mendez v. Westminster, paved the way for meaningful integration, public school reform, and the American civil rights movement.
Mendez (birth name: Felicitas Gomez) was born in the town of Juncos in Puerto Rico. The Gomez family moved from Puerto Rico to Arizona. There they faced, and were subject to, the discrimination which was then-rampant throughout the United States. Mendez and her siblings were racialized as "black."
When she was 12 years old, the family moved to Southern California to work the fields - where they were racialized as "Mexican." In 1936, she married Gonzalo Mendez, an immigrant from Mexico who had become a naturalized citizen of the United States. They opened a bar and grill called La Prieta in Santa Ana. They had three children and moved from Santa Ana to Westminster and leased a 40-acre asparagus farm from the Munemitsus, a Japanese-American family that had been sent to an internment camp during World War II. Although the farm was a successful agricultural business venture, it was still a period in history when racial discrimination against Hispanics, and minorities in general, was widespread throughout the United States.
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