Marisela Martinez-Cola’s new book The Bricks before Brown adds to the growing literature on what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has called “the long civil rights movement” by deepening the narratives of school desegregation. Trained as a sociologist, Martinez-Cola combines sociology, legal studies, and history to analyze three cases she posits as significant to the history of school desegregation: Tape v. Hurley (1885), Piper v. Big Pine (1924), Mendez v. Westminster (1947). These three California-based cases featured Chinese American, Native American, and Mexican American plaintiffs, respectively. Martinez-Cola spends a chapter reviewing what she calls the “105 bricks before Brown,” which are cases from Chinese American, Native American, and Mexican American plaintiffs challenging school segregation from the middle of the nineteenth century until Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. With an expanded view of school desegregation, both chronologically and racially, Martinez-Cola disrupts the traditional linear and Black/White binary histories of school desegregation.
Importantly, Martinez-Cola makes clear that her research is not meant to simply add narratives to the history of school desegregation, nor does she intend to diminish the tireless efforts of Black civil rights activists, scholars, and communities. Rather, by including multiracial, multidisciplinary, and intersectional analyses of school desegregation, multiple, complicated truths arise. She argues that these multiple truths can help disrupt dominant narratives of US history and make critical connections across people, times, and places.
Martinez-Cola emphasizes the need for an intersectional, interdisciplinary approach in analyzing the complex factors in the three school desegregation cases. To accomplish this, she employs a two-part theoretical framework: critical race theory (CRT) and theories of controlling images. Since the inception of CRT, school desegregation efforts have been a crucial point of departure for CRT scholars. Martinez-Cola uses three branches of CRT, LatCrit, AsianCrit, and TribalCrit, to analyze the racialized and political complexities of Latiné, Asian American, and Indigenous communities in the United States. The branches of CRT allow for more nuanced analyses of how race and political identity, in the case of TribalCrit, operate in each case. To make her approach intersectional, Martinez-Cola combines Patricia Hill Collins’s theories of controlling images with Evelyn Higginbotham’s respectability politics to add class, gender, and age as dimensions of analysis. These aspects of the plaintiffs’ identities, she argues, are inextricably connected to understanding how these cases played out in both the courtrooms and in the courts of public opinion. That all three plaintiffs were young, middle-class girls was not a coincidence but an essential tool for countering the controlling images of Chinese Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans at the time. Martinez-Cola argues that the three families could present counternarratives of the discriminatory controlling images of their communities through middle-class politics of respectability.
For the case of the Chinese American Tape family in the 1880s, Martinez-Cola’s use of AsianCrit emphasizes the contradictory racialization of Asian Americans as either perpetual foreigners or honorary Whites, depending on the shifting needs of the dominant society. Despite their upper-middle-class standing, the Tapes were treated as forever foreigners, model American minorities, and Chinese threats at different points throughout their highly publicized trial argued before the California Supreme Court. Martinez-Cola counters these narratives by illustrating how the Tapes fought for full recognition of their rights as citizens, not on the basis of their proximity to Whiteness, but by arguing that race shouldn’t preclude anyone from equal rights.
Alice Piper and her family were members of the Big Pine Paiute Nation in the Owens Valley in California. Martinez-Cola analyzes the California Supreme Court fight for school desegregation through traditional methodologies, such as document archives, and decolonized methodologies, such as oral histories. Admittedly, the chapter on Alice Piper and the Piper case is light on source material. Through the generous sharing of photos, stories, and documents from members of the Big Pine Paiute Tribe and the Big Pine School District, Martinez-Cola deepens the historical record of the Piper family and the case. She builds on the work of Nicole Blalock-Moore, one of the first scholars to give prominence to the efforts of the Piper family and the Paiute Nation. TribalCrit is essential to understanding the Piper case, as it emphasizes the dual racial and political identities held by Indigenous people. As members of the Paiute Nation, the Pipers were able to win their case using the Dawes Act, showing how they subverted a colonizing act for their own gain while maintaining their indigeneity.
Mendez v. Westminster is the most thoroughly sourced chapter in the book, with ample excerpts from court transcripts and documents. As in Tape, the Mendezes argued that their children deserved equal access to high-quality education, not on the basis of their proximity to Whiteness but because of their American citizenship. However, in contrast to the previous two cases, Mendez was argued at the federal level in the Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals. LatCrit reveals how differently the Mendez family was racialized, despite being legally White. They fought for equal rights based on their expectations of equality as American citizens; the diverse heritage of their extended family—Puerto Rican, Mexican, and French—played no part in their legal defense.” Public images of Sylvia in a white dress next to a piano defied the controlling images of Mexican American women as unclean, overly sexualized, or criminal.
A strength of this book is its narrative description of each case. Martinez-Cola successfully brings the girls and their families to life through newspaper articles, photographs, historical and author-conducted interviews, and oral histories. Though sometimes limited by archival material, Martinez-Cola tells the stories of each family, including the relationships between the parents and the families’ ties to their respective communities. Small but descriptive details, such as the role the appearance of a piano plays as a respectable family possession in public images of Mamie Tape and Sylvia Mendez, serve as valuable evidence of how the intersectional identities of the plaintiffs functioned in each case.
A unique contribution that Martinez-Cola’s work makes to the narratives of school desegregation is the discussion of the efforts of each plaintiff’s mother, who in each case, unlike the plaintiff’s father, is not featured prominently in the historical sources and modern retellings. For example, in both historical sources and modern retellings of the Mendez case, Sylvia’s father, Gonzalo, is the most mentioned member of the family. The efforts of her mother, Felícitas, are silenced in the narrative. Martinez-Cola asserts that mothers Mary Tape, Annie Piper, and Felícitas Mendez were equally involved in demanding the rights of their daughters, whether it was through maintaining the family business, writing letters, or organizing movements and associations. She argues that it is the historically dominant controlling images of women of color as criminal or overly sexualized that keep women out of history books, even though these women all presented counternarratives to such images. Martinez-Cola disrupts patriarchal narratives of school desegregation by identifying and countering the silencing of Mary Tape, Annie Piper, and Felícitas Mendez from the historical record.
The Bricks before Brown makes a notable contribution to the literature on school desegregation in the US. Through an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach, valuable nuances about race, class, gender, and age are added to the historical narrative.
