Lemon Grove Incident Essay

Essay 2

Since 1950, it has been an increasingly common thought that politics and policy process were the direct result of a network of actors, institutions and rules. This approach, called institutionalism, was the natural consequence of numerous past cases where the interaction – or rather the confrontation - between official and unofficial actors, played a fundamental role in the policy process, bringing, in some cases, to radical court decisions that totally changed the American law. This was the case of the so called “Lemon Grove Incident”: the documentary tells the story of the little rural town of Lemon Grove that experienced the first successful legal challenge to the segregation of Mexican students in the public schools of the United States. In this legal challenge both official and unofficial actors take different actions to advance or hinder the students’ civil rights.

Everything started on 23rd July 1940, from the request by the secretary of PTA (Parents Teacher Association), after the endorsement of the Chamber of Commerce, to create a separate school for Mexican Students. Therefore, the School Board of Lemon Grove - the principal official actor of the documentary – began to discuss about the emergency of the growing number of Mexican Students who were attending the elementary school and about the possible advantages of creating a segregated class in order to “Americanise” Mexican children (as they used to do, for example, in Chicago with foreign students). The decision of segregation was taken in a very short time, but it immediately marked the beginning of radical consequences that any member of the School Board couldn’t predict. In fact, as in the 1920’s schools it was a common practice to segregate Indian, Asian and Black pupils, the School Board didn’t take the decision seriously and so they didn’t expect any kind of concrete reaction by students’ parents, but only a tacit approval of their decision. Actually, the Board, during an emergency meeting on August 13th 1940, decided intentionally not to make any attempt to inform the Mexican students’ parents, in order not to commit themselves in an official notice.
But the answer from the parents was not long in coming: in January 1931, the students were obliged to go to the new school building and once they came back home from school, guided by their parents, refused to attend classes in the new building again. “It wasn’t a school - they claimed- it was an old place that everyone called La Caballeriza”. It was that point, that another official actor, Enrique Ferrara - Mexican Consul in San Diego for 10 years - took action in the emergency situation and responded with strong support to the request of the help by the “Committee of Vecinos” (founded by Mexican students’ parents). He immediately arranged for San Diego’s attorneys to challenge the school, sending a petition to block the board from forcing Mexican children to attend segregate school: “The board has no legal right or power to exclude the Mexican children from receiving instruction upon an equal basis, as the majority of the students were second generation American citizens by birth and so totally entitled to all the rights and privileges common to all citizens of the USA”.
The situation exploded and although the board school felt that segregation had been disposed, the community decided to take the issue to San Diego County’s Superior Court. The court accused each of the school’s boards member of illegal segregation and violation of the rights of students as the School Board was without the right and the power to constitute a different class only for Mexican students.
Thus, what has begun as a simple and superficial decision by the School Board, revealed to have a far greater impact not only on the little town of Lemon Grove, but on the school segregation situation of the whole state.