In Orange County in 1947, Mexican-American Gonzalo Mendez and his Puerto Rican wife Felicitas challenged the practice of school segregation in California. The Mendez couple, joined by the families of Ramirez, Palomino, Estrada and Guzman, filed a lawsuit against the Westminster, Garden Grove, Santa Ana and El Modena (in Orange) school districts on behalf of 5,000 children who had been excluded from attending white-only schools. Mendez v. Westminster made California the first state in the nation to end school segregation and helped pave the way to Brown v. Board of Education.