 Initially, Gonzalo received little support from the local Latino organizations, but finally, on March 2, 1945, he and four other Mexican-American fathers from the Gomez, Palomino, Estrada, and Ramirez families filed a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles against four Orange County school districts — Westminster, Santa Ana, Garden Grove, and El Modena (now eastern Orange) — on behalf of about 5,000 Hispanic-American schoolchildren.During the trial, the Westminster school board insisted that there was a "language issue", however their claim fell apart when one of the children was asked to testify.The testimony proved that most of the children spoke English and showed that Hispanic-American students had the same capacity for learning as their white counterparts.