Don Bartletti/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images In 2004, student Hector Flores (L) marched through the rain near Hoover Elementary in California. The walk commemorated the Mendez v. Westminster, the case that led to California being the first state in the nation to end school segregation.
Nearly a decade before the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education made segregated schooling of black students unconstitutional, a group of five Mexican-American families fought for integrated schools in Mendez v. Westminster.
It was 1946. For years, the state's Mexican-American students had languished in inferior "Mexican schools" to which they were assigned based on name and complexion. Plaintiffs in the case argued that their school facilities were severely under-resourced compared to nearby white schools, and experts testified on the negative impact segregation has on children's self-esteem. Defendants in the case -- four school districts -- argued that Mexican students had poor hygiene, carried diseases and were intellectually inferior.
The case -- which was decided in the plaintiffs' favor -- never made its way to the Supreme Court, and thus its impact was never felt on a federal level. But soon after, California became the first state to ban state-sponsored school segregation
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It's now 2015, and while much has changed in California, much has remained the same. Segregation is no longer based on official policies or law -- called de jure segregation -- but based on voluntary housing or schooling choices. Still, the Golden State remains the most segregated one in the country for Latino students, according to research from the UCLA's Civil Rights Project, which studies civil rights issues.
To be an average Latino student in California today means that you likely attend a school that is 84 percent nonwhite, with high rates of concentrated poverty. It means you live in a two-tiered society where only 20 percent of Latino students taking the SAT in California are deemed college-ready, compared to 41 percent of students statewide
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California's situation is extreme. Its Latino population is exceptionally large and exceptionally segregated. But the state's issues are symptomatic of a long-term, nationwide trend of Latinos quietly becoming the most segregated minority population of students in the country, the UCLA center has found
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In 2011, the typical Latino student attended a school that was 57 percent Latino, according to the UCLA research. Comparatively, an average black student student attended a school that was 49 percent black. A typical white student attended a school that was 73 percent white.
Why Is No One Talking About This?
There is a dearth of research on how segregation impacts Latino students specifically, although there is plentiful data on how racial isolation impacts African-Americans. As efforts to address African-American segregation have faltered, public discourse on growing Latino segregation remains elusive.
"We’ve been through a demographic revolution with almost no policy attention to the racial dimensions of these changes," Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, told The Huffington Post. "It's not exactly true that anyone is paying attention to black segregation either -- we’re a third of the century into kind of doing nothing and a quarter of the century into systematically dismantling what we did earlier."
Little attention has been paid to the issue of Latino segregation because segregation has historically been a black-white issue, said Patricia Gándara, Orfield's co-director at the Civil Rights Project.
Brown v. Board of Education focused specifically on African-American students. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruling in Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado, recognized that Latino students also have a right to integrated schools, but the case had minimal impact. When African-American and white students were being bussed away from their neighborhood schools to help achieve racial balance, Latinos were mostly ignored.
"We’re stuck in a black-white paradigm that doesn’t work quite the same way for Latinos," Gándara said.
Jennifer Lee, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Indiana, predicts that in the coming years, we will start to see more research about the schooling of Latino students.
"With this increase in the Latino population I think there are lots of scholars who are very interested the Latino student community. It just takes time," she said. "We can't extrapolate studies on African-American students to Latino students."
With little research on the topic, it is difficult to come up with potential fixes.
"We have to really understand what it is we’re studying," said Lee. "We can't assume the mechanisms are the same across different populations -- or all Latino students."
David Garcia, an associate prof…
