​

Welcome to a vital piece of American history, a story of community activism and determination that unfolded in the heart of Southern Colorado. This website is dedicated to the Maestas case, a landmark lawsuit waged by Mexican-American families in Alamosa against educational segregation. 

 

• Maestas v. Shone is recognized as one of the earliest successful legal challenges to school segregation brought by Mexican Americans in the United States.

• It highlights the early struggles for civil rights and educational equality faced by Mexican American communities.

• It's a reminder of the long history of Mexican American activism in the fight for justice.

 

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. Mexico ceded 55 percent of its land, and its people, to the United States of America. The following decades were full of struggles. One of those struggles happened in Alamosa, CO from 1912-1914. 

 

Railroad Forman Francisco Maestas sought to place his son 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 boycott in protest, an action the school district later seized upon to claim Maestas wasn’t interested in his son’s educational progress. The boycott went on for three months. 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.

​

The lawsuit was the first time in the history of America that a court fight was made over an attempt to segregate Mexican Americans in school.

​

The school district argued that the Mexican-American students were attending a separate school due to language proficiency issues and not due to racial differences. They asserted that Mexican-Americans were Caucasian under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and therefore the district was not discriminating based on race, but rather, the district was providing support for the students' English language deficiency. Raymond Sullivan disproved this when he put the students on the stand and they answered questions in English before an interpreter could translate into Spanish.

 

District Court Judge Charles Holbrook ruled in favor of Francisco Maestas and the other families stating that “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 school nearest them.