The Lemon Grove Incident (KPBS, 1985)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, January 19) KPBS celebrated the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday with a couple of unusual TV shows that made a more appropriate commemoration, at least to my mind, than the four National Basketball Association games in a row NBC was running. The first was The Lemon Grove Incident, a 1985 hour-long TV-movie actually produced by KPBS itself under the supervision of the late Gloria Penner. It dealt with a little-known backwater of San Diego County history: a lawsuit filed against the Lemon Grove school district in 1930 after the school board voted to build a separate and decidedly unequal elementary school for the schoolchildren of Mexican descent. At the time Mexican-American children were just a shade over half of the total enrollment of the Lemon Grove school district, and the all-white school board voted in secret (they held the meeting at the private home of one of the members) to set up a converted barn as a “school” for the Mexican kids. This came at a time when the Great Depression was creating a major anti-immigrant backlash and the Hoover Administration was calling for mass deportations of Mexicans and other Latinos on the ground that they were taking jobs away from deserving white Americans. (Plus ça change, plus ça même chose.) Like the Eisenhower administration’s “Operation Wetback” of 1953-54 and the Trump anti-immigrant campaign of today, the Hoover sweeps targeted anyone who looked brown or spoke English either haltingly or with an accent, without regard as to whether they were undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, naturalized citizens, or U.S.-born citizens. Apparently the deportation campaign was also assisted by the government of Mexico (which was then under the leadership of one of the country’s most corrupt politicians, Plutarco Elías Calles), in hopes that Mexican farmworkers returning home after stints in the U.S. would have learned American agricultural techniques they could pass on to local growers.

The Mexicans in Lemon Grove had mostly settled in and around Olive Avenue and worked in the lemon and orange orchards that gave the town its name. It’s not entirely clear why the drive to segregate the Mexican students in Lemon Grove took the racist form it did, but it was pushed by the local Chamber of Commerce, whose leaders thought that the presence of a large Mexican community would interfere with their attempts to market Lemon Grove as a desirable place for white people. It was also based on the belief that the presence of Mexican kids in the classroom was harming the education of white children because the Mexicans didn’t speak English well and the teachers had to explain their lessons over and over so the predominantly Spanish-speaking children would understand them. Actually, a lot of the Mexican children were proficient in English and certainly knew it well enough to be able to learn in it (another racist stereotype that refuses to die). The Lemon Grove school board planned to do this in secret, without any advance notice to the Mexican-American parents, and present it as a fait accompli when the new school year started in January 1931. That plan was blown by the school principal, Jerome Green (played in the re-enactments by Donald Browning), who started a public survey to determine just what the Mexican parents would think of having to send their kids to a separate and decidedly unequal school. The first parent presented with Green’s survey, Juan González (played by local Mexican artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña), literally tore it up.

On January 5, 1931, Green, under orders from the school board, made the children at Lemon Grove Elementary form two lines and sent the Mexican children to the new “school,” which their parents derisively called La Caballeriza (“The Barn”). There’s one chilling scene in the film that shows the local whites were willing to use the same intimidation tactics regularly employed by white Southerners to stop civil-rights actions: a widow who’s supporting herself and her two children on county relief payments is told by a local truant officer that she will lose that income if she keeps her kids out of school. She asks, “What do you have to do with the county?” – obviously she was aware that the Lemon Grove School District and the County of San Diego were separate entities – but the man tells her, “Word gets around.” The Mexican parents, under the leadership of Gonzålez and Roberto Alvarez, sought a meeting with the Mexican consul in San Diego, who put them in touch with a local attorney named Fred Noon (John Mathers), who agreed to file a lawsuit on their behalf. The film alternates between re-enactments of the trial scenes and fresh interviews with some of the people involved, including Robert Alvarez, Jr., who (probably because of an accident of alphabetization) got to be the first plaintiff in the case. It’s a lucky thing that this film was made in 1985, when many of the original participants were still alive and available for interviews.

Amazingly, the Mexican plaintiffs in Lemon Grove actually won the case – the first time in U.S. history a lawsuit challenging segregation in education had resulted in a legal verdict against it – though at least part of the judge’s ruling is wince-inducing today. He said in his opinion that Mexicans were “of the Caucasian race” and therefore the California laws permitting the segregation of African-American, Asian-American and Native American children didn’t apply to them. A lot of people don’t realize that there was a time in the history of American racism that Mexicans and other Latinos were considered “white.” It’s how Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were allowed to marry in 1940 despite California’s anti-miscegenation law because they were both “white.” I remember doing research in the early 1990’s on San Diego Gay rights activist Nicole Murray Ramirez in which I and my fellow researcher uncovered his birth certificate, which listed both him and his parents as “white” even though his parents had both been born in Mexico. This explained the long-standing rumor that he was appropriating a Latino identity that wasn’t his; though he actually is Latino, it’s likely a lot of people had got the idea from his birth certificate that he was “white” because that’s what it said on the form. The Lemon Grove school board decided not to appeal their loss in court, partly because the Chamber of Commerce withdrew their financial support on the ground that the suit had already damaged Lemon Grove’s reputation and it would be best for the community if they let the controversy die out. But they got their revenge against Principal Green by firing him when his teaching contract expired.