Portal:Hispanic and Latino Americans/Selected Individual/36

Felicitas Mendez (1916 - April 12, 1998) was a Puerto Rican woman who became an American civil rights pioneer. 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." (more...)