Abstract

This essay examines the multidimensional, cross-border actions and rhetorical strategies surrounding the 1931 case, Roberto Alvarez v. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District, the nation’s first successful class action school desegregation decision involving Mexican-origin students. A commonplace in US school desegregation history is that it started with the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education. This study argues that the Alvarez v. Lemon Grove case’s success was because it was a multifaceted, multilayered effort involving multiple agents: Mexico’s State Department, the Secretary of Public Education, and the San Diego Consul, as well as lawyers and families. It considers the ways such efforts were successful in this instance in preventing segregation, yet how they were unsuccessful in disrupting other forms of racism, particularly whiteness as the standard. Ultimately, this analysis demonstrates the need for such a multidimensional analysis of similar cases in the future, a transnational archival methodology.