David-James Gonzales, "Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Apr 14, 2026

David-James Gonzales, an assistant professor and historian of Latina/o/x politics, explores how Mexican American communities in Orange County built grassroots movements to challenge segregation. He traces citrus capitalists' role in creating barrios, the rise of local mutual-aid groups and legal mobilization culminating in Mendez v. Westminster, and the long-term political legacy of those organizers.

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ANECDOTE

Hector Tarango Sparked The Project

Hector Tarango's oral history sparked David James Gonzalez's research and revealed a personal trajectory across the Southwest into Orange County activism.
Tarango moved from Arizona to Boyle Heights to Orange County and helped form the Latin American Voters League that led desegregation efforts.

INSIGHT

Et Al Paradigm Names Unheralded Activists

Gonzalez uses an et al. paradigm to decenter great-man narratives and surface the many ordinary activists behind Mendez.
He conducted community-engaged research, oral histories, barrio reunions, and archives to name otherwise overlooked participants.

INSIGHT

Citrus Capitalists Built Segregation For Profit

Orange County's segregation was engineered to serve citrus capitalists' profitability rather than mimic Jim Crow labor systems.
Growers built grower associations, banks, utilities, and political institutions to secure Valencia orange profits and institutionalize Mexican barrios and schools.

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On March 2, 1945, five Mexican American families and their Jewish American lawyer filed a class-action lawsuit against four school districts in Orange County, California, to end the segregation of ethnic Mexican children. In a shocking decision, the court ruled in favor of plaintiffs, setting a legal and historical precedent in Mendez, et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County that shook the foundations of Jim Crow America and led to the end of de jure school segregation across the nation.

Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the story of how ethnic Mexicans in a relatively unknown agricultural backwater built the unprecedented movement that led to this decision. Beginning in the 1880s, David-James Gonzales details the social and economic history of Orange County, explaining how citrus capitalists, seeking increased market share and profitability, established the walls of segregation to manage ethnic Mexican family labor. By the early 1930s, ethnic Mexicans were segregated into over fifty underserved colonias and barrios. Without training or support from national civil rights organizations, they mobilized against segregation and inequality beginning in the late 1920s. Ethnic Mexican grassroots organizations proliferated throughout the county, intent on engaging in civic affairs and ending anti-Mexican discrimination and segregation. This movement, comprised of immigrants, citizens, parents, children, emerging activists, and their non-Mexican allies, paved the way for the growth of LULAC and nationwide organizing. As an essential part of the "long civil rights movement," the ethnic Mexican struggle against segregation in Orange County illustrates how minoritized groups have historically pushed US social, economic, and political institutions to live up to the nation's founding ideals.

David-James Gonzales is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements.

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