Felicitas Méndez

Felicitas Gómez Martínez de Méndez (February 5, 1916 – April 12, 1998) was a Puerto Rican activist in the American civil rights movement. In 1946, Méndez and her husband, Gonzalo, 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 and public-school reform.

Méndez (birth name: Felicita Gómez) was born in the town of Juncos in Puerto Rico. The Gómez family moved from Puerto Rico to the U.S. mainland. There, they faced, and were subject to, the discrimination that was widespread throughout the United States. Felicitas and her siblings were racialized as "black."

When she was 12 years old, the family moved to Southern California to work the fields – where they were racialized as "Mexican." In 1936, she married Gonzalo Méndez, an immigrant from Mexico who had become a naturalized citizen of the United States. They opened a bar and grill called La Prieta in Santa Ana. They had three children and moved from Santa Ana to Westminster, where they leased a 40-acre asparagus farm from the Munemitsus, a Japanese-American family that had been sent to an internment camp during World War II. Although the farm was a successful agricultural business venture, it was still a period in history when racial discrimination against Hispanics, and racial and ethnic minorities in general, was widespread throughout the United States.