Went to see The Rochester Latino Theatre Company’s “Separate is Never Equal” at MuCCC last Saturday. It’s a play about Sylvia Mendez and her family’s fight to desegregate schools in California, seven years BEFORE Brown v. Board of Education, which brought school segregation to an end in 1954. Mendez v. Westminster was filed in 1947 and set an immensely important precedent. It was Thurgood Marshall who filed the amicus brief for Mendez on behalf of the NAACP. It contained the arguments he would later use in the Brown case. Two things that struck me. First the invisibilization of Latino history (Puerto Rico’s independence movement obviously comes to mind). Second, the year 1947 which is very familiar to me on account of the partition of India. My friend Sarita Arden drew a parallel between the two “partitions.” Both contained and expressed violence by dividing people arbitrarily. Isn’t it sad that 69 years later we’re still talking about “walls” as a way to make sense of the world?
[Photo credit: The Rochester Latino Theatre Company]