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Maestas v. Shone is recognized as the earliest successful legal challenges to school segregation

brought by Mexican Americans in the United States.

 

At the end of the Mexican/American War in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo changed the economic, industrial, political, linguistic, cultural and educational landscape overnight as the border was redrawn. Mexico ceded 55 percent of its land, and its people, to the United States of America. What unfolded 60 years later in Alamosa, Colorado was a community that knew their rights as US citiznes and used the courts to afirm them.

 

Railroad Forman Francisco Maestas sought to place his son Miguel into the public school closest to their home. They were denied by the Alamosa Superintendent because all Mexican Americans were required to attend the Mexican School. The community united and petitioned for change with a resolution that was signed by the community. They were denied. They contacted the Colorado State Superintendent to no avail. They staged a three month boycott in protest. The school did nothing.

 

The community organized further, with the help of the SPMDTU, America’s oldest, and still active, mutual aid society, a Catholic Priest, and other key community members, they raised funds to hire Denver lawyer Raymond Sullivan. Sullivan contended racial prejudice was a driving force behind school administration efforts and the Colorado Constitution prohibited discrimination based on race. ​​

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After a lengthy trial, District Court Judge Charles C. Holbrook ruled that the school board had illegally segregated Mexican American children into a separate school building based on race  and "In the opinion of the court, the only way to destroy this feeling of discontent and bitterness which has recently grown up is to allow all children so prepared to attend the schools nearest to them."

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Learn more about the case and the places we have shared it on our ARCHIVE page.