Both the permanent residents and the braceros suffered anti-Mexican discrimination that persisted in the postwar years. Public facilities like swimming pools denied access to Mexicans or limited their and other minorities' use of the pool until the day before the water was drained to prevent "contamination" (Camarillo, p. 79). Movie theaters at the time restricted Mexican Americans to separate seating sections, and schools practiced segregation. In California the school segregation lasted ostensibly until it was outlawed by MendeZ v. Westminster in 1946, yet little could be done after that to end de facto segregation. Mexican American families mostly lived in segregated neighborhoods, and so their children continued to attend segregated schools as the decades progressed. Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of the community's males and almost as many females continued to labor in unskilled or semiskilled jobs, making only modest progress in the 1950s, when Richard Rodriguez was coming of age.
The 1960s promised to hasten change. While Mexican Americans had begun organizing on their own behalf in earlier decades, they did so in much greater numbers in the 1960s, giving birth to a genuine Chicano movement.
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