On the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month 2020 in the U.S., the present Doodle celebrates Puerto Rican civil rights pioneer and entrepreneur Felicitas Mendez.

Close by her better half Gonzalo, Felicitas assisted with initiating and win the great claim Mendez v. Westminster, which in 1946 brought about the first US government court administering against public school isolation—right around 10 years before Brown v. Leading group of Education.

Felicitas Mendez was born Felicita Gómez Martínez on February 5, 1916 in the town of Juncos, Puerto Rico. She moved with her folks to the American Southwest as a preteen, and the family inevitably joined the Latino people group of rural specialists in California’s Orange County.

In 1935, she wedded Gonzalo Mendez, a Mexican settler who worked with her dad in the fields. Together, the couple opened a local cafe and later managed with a fruitful homestead in the humble community of Westminster.

In 1944, the Mendez’s three youngsters were rejected enlistment at a neighborhood government funded school dependent on their nationality and skin shading. Unwilling to acknowledge this treachery, the couple chose to retaliate.

With the claim Mendez v. Westminster, Gonzalo Mendez and four different guardians sued the Westminster school area and a few others to request a conclusion to the isolation of Hispanic understudies.

Felicitas Mendez composed advisory groups to help the case and handily dealt with the Mendez’s homestead all alone, getting record benefits that assisted with sponsoring the claim.

On February 18, 1946, the government region court presumed that the school regions were infringing upon Mexican-American residents’ entitlement to approach protection under the law and decided for the Mendez family and different guardians.

Confirmed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals the next year, this milestone choice straightforwardly prepared for a law that required the mix of all California state funded schools that very year, just as the Brown v. Leading group of Education Supreme Court choice that controlled the isolation of government funded schools illegal seven years after the fact.

In 2011, Mendez’s little girl Sylvia was granted the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the United States’ most elevated non military personnel honor—in acknowledgment of her and her folks’ function in the Westminster v. Mendez case and her long lasting commitment to social liberties and instruction that followed.

Much obliged to you, Felicitas Mendez and family, for assisting with driving the path toward an all the more simply future.