Jonna Perrillo. Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands Chicago: University of Chicago, 2022. 200 pp.

Abstract

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 andmodern retellings. For example, in both historical sources andmodern 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 organizingmovements 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 ofMary 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.