Busy actress, Francia Raisa (Grown-ish, Dear White People, Hit the Floor) has teamed with Executive Producer Mandy Teefeyare (13 Reasons Why) to develop a feature film based on the Mendez vs. Westminster school desecration case, a landmark Supreme Court case in 1947.
The project kicked off earlier this year and soon Raisa became convinced that the story had resonance in today’s society. Although the Mendez family had been previously approached about making a movie, after meeting Raisa and Teefeyare they decided to trust them with their story.
Franscia Raisa
In the famous 1947 lawsuit, Gonzalo Mendez, one of five Mexican-American fathers, was a plaintiff in the case in which they asserted that their children of Mexican ancestry were victims of unconstitutional discrimination. The U.S. Court of Appeal, Ninth Circuit, ruled that “force segregation of Mexican American students into separate “Mexican schools” was unconstitutional and unlawful. The attorneys argued that because Mexicans were “white,” the Judge ruled, “The equal protection of laws pertaining to the public school system in California is not provided by furnishing in separate schools the same technical facilities. A paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality. It must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage.”
As a result of this landmark case, children of Mexican ancestry would no longer be forced to attend separate “schools for Mexicans” in Westminster, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and El Modena school districts of Orange County, California. Those districts would not enroll the students because they were dark-skinned and had Hispanic surnames, they argued. The Westminster school board claimed during the trial, that the enrollment denials were due to language issues. But testimonies showed that most of the children spoke English. A federal judge in Los Angeles ruled in favor of Mendez and his co-plaintiffs in finding separate schools for Mexicans to be an unconstitutional denial of equal protection.
The segregation practices violated the 14th Amendment. In January 1948, the Mendez family children were allowed to attend the 17th Street Elementary school – becoming some of the first Latinos to attend an all-white school in California.
Filmmaker Sandra Robbie’s Mendez vs. Westminster: For All the Children/Para Todos los Ninos, is an EMMY award winning documentary.
Raisa’s motivation to make this story into a movie she told Variety, is “because it is far less known than the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case” and yet the same argument was used from Mendez vs, Westminster to win this case. The U.S. Supreme Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional.
Currently, Raisa portrays Ana Torres, on the contemporary TV show Grown-ish, Season 2 set to premiere January 2, 2010, 8:00 p.m. on Freeform, produced by ABC Signature Studios. Her past credits include: Bring It On: All or Nothing, The Secret Life of the AmericanTeenager.
Francia Raisa is repped by Agency for the Performing Arts (APA), LH7 Management, and Imprint PR.
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