Standing up for the life they wanted, the Alvarez family broke through a wall of segregation

In downtown Lemon Grove, in an alley off Broadway, a new mural is nearing completion.

Painted on the side of a building, it tells the story of “The Lemon Grove Incident,” a 1931 court fight over school desegregation.

One of the drawings shows some of the 75 students who were affected. Another depicts their school. One picture is a courtroom scene: a child testifying from the witness stand.

Look closely, and you can see something else: A promise that got kept, a dream that persisted, rippling across generations. Because this is also the story of the Alvarez family.

“That’s my dad,” Roberto Alvarez Jr. said Thursday morning as he looked at the mural. “And that’s my mom.”

His parents, Roberto Sr. and Mary, were students at Lemon Grove Grammar School 90 years ago when the school board decided to make them and the other children of Mexican immigrants go to classes in a different building, in what used to be a barn.

The families resisted. They’d come to the United States in part because they wanted better lives for their children, wanted them to be treated equally. That was the promise, the dream. So they took the school board to court.

Alvarez Sr. was `12 at the time and became the lead plaintiff, chosen because he got good grades, because he spoke English well, and — according to the ribbing he took from friends over the years — because he owned a nice pair of shoes.

He testified at the trial (that’s the scene depicted on the mural) and the families won, one of the first successful legal challenges of school desegregation in the country.

Then the parents mostly kept quiet about it, and told their children to be humble in victory, too, which may help explain why the case isn’t better known. It’s overshadowed in the public mind by the later Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark 1954 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that outlawed school segregation and paved the way for other advances in civil rights.

That we know about the Lemon Grove Incident at all is due in large part to Alvarez Jr., who first got wind of it 40 years ago when he was a college student. He’d embraced one of its core messages — stand up for the life you want — and was a budding anthropologist, studying immigration through the lens of his family tree. He didn’t know what was on one of the branches.

As he collected oral histories from relatives, his father made an off-hand comment. “What do you know,” he asked, “about the school thing?”

Opening the box

The family never talked about what happened in 1931, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t know it was important. They put records — school-board minutes, newspaper clippings, other documents — in a box and kept it in a safe place through the years.

Alvarez Jr. got handed the box by his father. He read the contents. “I flipped,” he said. “This was really something. I wanted to learn more about it.”

He learned that Lemon Grove wasn’t alone in trying to send kids of Mexican ancestry to “Americanization” schools. They sprang up amid nationalistic handwringing over immigration from south of the border, anxious scapegoating fueled in part by the economic insecurity of the Great Depression.

There was mounting sentiment then in favor of not just segregation but deportation. Thousands were forced back into Mexico.

The families in Lemon Grove fought back in part because theirs was a tight community. Many had made the long journey together from Baja California. They worked side-by-side in the agricultural fields, mining quarry or railroad packing plant.

So when their children, most of them American-born, were barred from the grammar school — literally stopped on the schoolhouse steps by the principal as they returned to classes from winter break — the parents quickly organized. They formed a neighborhood action committee, met with the Mexican consulate, reached out to journalists at Spanish-language newspapers.

The school board had hatched the segregation plan in secret six months earlier, with the blessing of the Chamber of Commerce, and they thought the families would just go along. They hadn’t anticipated blowback, let alone a legal challenge.

In court, the board said a separate school was needed because so many of the Mexican children were behind in their studies and struggled with the English language. They said it would be safer for them, too, because the other school was closer to where many of them lived. They wouldn’t have to cross a busy street anymore.

Almost a dozen witnesses, including Alvarez Sr., undercut those assertions with their stellar report cards and by pointing out that some White students struggled in class and had to cross the busy street to get to school, too, but they weren’t being segregated.

Superior Court Judge Claude Chambers sided with the families. “I understand that you can separate a few children — to improve their education they need special instruction — but to separate all the Mexicans in one group can only be done by infringing the laws of the state of California,” he said.

The school board decided not to appeal. The children returned to the grammar school.

All this excited the anthropologist in Alvarez Jr. after he finished a doctorate at Stanford in 1979. It touched on issues of not just equity, but social change and immigration policy and educational aspiration. He wrote scholarly papers about the case, and gave presentations at conferences. He helped filmmaker Paul Espinosa with an award-winning docu-drama that was shown on public television.

His academic career took him to New York, Arizona and California. He was a professor in ethnic studies at UC San Diego before retiring. Everywhere he went, he found ways to teach the lessons of the Lemon Grove Incident in workshops and classes.

He wasn’t the only one.

Striking a chord

Luis Alvarez was going to be a structural engineer.

He started down that path in the early 1990s at UC San Diego, enrolling in math and science classes. To fulfill general-education requirements, he took a couple of history classes in Mexican and Mexican-American history.

They fueled something in him, and he changed his major. He’s now an associate professor of history at UCSD, specializing in Chicano history, and he can’t help but wonder if his own connection to Lemon Grove — Alvarez Sr. is his grandfather, Alvarez Jr. his father — had something to do with the journey.

“When I was growing up, it was a family story first and foremost,” he said. “I remember it being present in all sorts of ways, formally and informally.”

Alvarez regularly teaches a large survey class in Mexican-American history for hundreds of students that starts with the run-up to the Mexican-American War in the 1840s. When it gets to the 1930s, he talks about the desegregation case in Lemon Grove and what it was like for the immigrants who had traveled there in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution.

He ties it to broader themes of courage and empowerment, and he ties it to his ancestors.

“It strikes a chord with students as something that happened down the block,” he said. “I encourage them to understand that what we talk about is not just personal but local — that it really is part of the history we all share when we live and work here.”

Classrooms aren’t the only place where the legal case resonates. It’s been the subject of two recent children’s books: “All Equal: A Ballad of Lemon Grove,” by Christy Hale, and “Without Separation: Prejudice, Segregation and the Case of Roberto Alvarez,” by Larry Dane Brimner and Maya Gonzalez.

Alvarez Jr. was a consultant on both books.

He helped artist Mario Chacón, too, with the mural that’s nearing completion in downtown Lemon Grove. They talked about the case, and Alvarez Jr. showed him photographs and court documents.

“It’s a remarkable story,” Chacón said Thursday morning when Alvarez Jr. came by to check in on the project. The artist gestured at one mural image in particular, a drawing of Alvarez Sr. and Alvarez Jr. standing side-by-side. (Alvarez Sr., a successful wholesaler of fruits and vegetables, died in 2003 at age 84.)

The muralist noted how the school board had tried to deny the elder Alvarez access to a quality education — and just one generation later, the younger Alvarez had a PhD from Stanford.

“It speaks volumes about the persistence of a people,” Chacón said, “and the persistence of a dream.”