page_title: Mexican Americans
section_title: Segregated schools
hierarchical_section_title: Mexican Americans / Segregation issues / Segregated schools
caption_attribution_description: English: The hot lunch, school at Penasco. Children pay about once cent daily for this hot meal made up primarily of food from the surplus commodities program, and prepared by WPA paid cooks December 1941 in Taos Co, NM.
context_page_description: Mexican Americans are Americans of full or partial Mexican descent. As of July 2018, Mexican Americans made up 11.3% of the United States' population, as 37.0 million U.S. residents identified as being of full or partial Mexican ancestry. As of July 2018, Mexican Americans comprised 61.9% of all Latinos in Americans in the United States. Many Mexican Americans reside in the American Southwest; over 60% of all Mexican Americans reside in the states of California and Texas. As of 2016, Mexicans made up 53% of the total population of Latino foreign-born Americans. Mexicans are also the largest foreign-born population, accounting for 25% of the total foreign-born population, as of 2017.
  The United States is home to the second-largest Mexican community in the world, second only to Mexico itself, and comprising more than 24% of the entire Mexican-origin population of the world. Mexican American families of indigenous heritage have been in the country for at least 15,000 years, and mestizo Mexican American history spans more than 400 years, since the 1598 founding of Spanish New Mexico.
context_section_description: During certain periods, Mexican American children sometimes were forced to register at "Mexican schools", where classroom conditions were poor, the school year was shorter, and the quality of education was substandard.
  Various reasons for the inferiority of the education given to Mexican American students have been listed by James A. Ferg-Cadima including: inadequate resources, poor equipment, unfit building construction. In 1923, the Texas Education Survey Commission found that the school year for some non-white groups was 1.6 months shorter than the average school year. Some have interpreted the shortened school year as a "means of social control" implementing policies to ensure that Mexican Americans would maintain the unskilled labor force required for a strong economy. A lesser education would serve to confine Mexican Americans to the bottom rung of the social ladder. By limiting the number of days that Mexican Americans could attend school and allotting time for these same students to work, in mainly agricultural and seasonal jobs, the prospects for higher education and upward mobility were slim.
caption: Mendez v. Westminster was a 1947 federal court case that challenged Mexican remedial schools in Orange County, California. In its ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in an en banc decision, held that the forced segregation of Mexican American students into separate "Mexican schools" was unconstitutional and unlawful because Mexicans were white. It was the first ruling in the United States in favor of desegregation.
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