Sixty years ago, in a relatively lesser-known but important chapter of the civil rights movement, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that segregating Mexican and Mexican-American students into separate schools from white students was unconstitutional.

Last night, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and El Centro Chicano sponsored a celebration of the desegregation order and showed a screening of the Emmy Award-winning documentary Mendez v. Westminster: For All the Children/Para Todos Los Ninos” in Tresidder Oak West.

The documentary focused on the events surrounding the 1947 decision, which prompted the desegregation of schools throughout the Southwest.

“I’m Mexican American and it’s part of my history,” said Bernard Fraga ‘08. “My grandfather was forced to go to Mexican schools in Texas. To me, this is one of the great untold stories about civil rights in this nation.”

Beginning in 1919 with the establishment of the first Mexican-only school in Orange County, segregation of Mexican students spread throughout the Southwest. Then, in 1947, a California farmer named Gonzalo Mendez challenged racial segregation in schools and took the Westminster School District to court after his children were denied enrollment at the white-only elementary school.

Sylvia Mendez, Gonzalo Mendez’s daughter, is now in her seventies. She watched the film again last night and answered questions afterwards. She said she is proud of the progress her parents set in motion. She credited them with helping to further the civil rights movement. She said that children are inherently good and that social factors are responsible for other forms of intolerance.

“Children are not born bigots,” she said. “They are not born with hatred. It is instilled in them.”

The film’s producer, Sandra Robbie, said she was inspired to create the movie after growing up in southern California.

“I was sitting on my mom’s counter [with the newspaper] reading about segregation that went on just outside my house,” said Robbie, who grew up in the Westminster School District, unaware of the area’s past. “None of this was in the history books. I knew this was a story that my children had to know, that all children had to know.”

The Mendez ruling catalyzed a flurry of civil rights activism across the country. A year after the decision, school districts nationwide began to desegregate schools for Asian-American and Native-American students. Soon afterwards, California Governor Earl Warren, who would later become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, signed into law a bill that made California the first state to effectively desegregate all of its school districts. The decision created a precedent and laid the groundwork for the Brown vs. Board of Education, which ordered schools to desegregate with “all deliberate speed.”

Robbie emphasized the importance of the Mendez case.

“The American civil rights struggle is not just about blacks in the South,” she said. “It’s about each and every one of us.”