by the governor's need to request Phoenix businesses to take down signs barring Mexicans. Discrimination against returning Mexican American veterans hurt the prospects of the entire Mexican American community. While medical, financial, and educational benefits from the GI Bill helped lift millions of Anglo-American families into the growing American middle-class, the application of the bill's benefits to African and Mexican American veterans was uneven. As a result, the Mexican American community did not ever gain full economic and political equality in the postwar era. Rather than being simply exclusionary, however, the GI Bill had several important failings which resulted in its discriminatory outcomes. The bill offered loan guarantees, yet few banks honored such guarantees to non-white veterans, and for those who did, restrictive racial covenants meant that African and Mexican American veterans were only able to live in redlined neighborhoods, where property values often remained low. Furthermore, many Mexican American veterans complained about consistently late tuition disbursements, which forced them to drop out of their job training and university programs, and reports of "outright racism within the VA" were common. Contemporary scholars have found that overall, the GI Bill "did not profoundly alter the occupational profile of all Mexicans ... and its immediate impact on upward mobility among families ... was inconsistent". Some of these issues were challenged directly. In 1948, the Corpus Christi physician, Hector P. Garcia, founded the American GI Forum in order to demand equal rights to GI Benefits, medical care, burial rights, desegregated education, and other civil rights. In a famous early instance of the Forum's civil rights advocacy, Garcia took up the case of Private Felix Longoria of Three Rivers, Texas. Longoria had died in combat in 1945, but his remains weren't shipped home for several years. When they finally arrived, his widow Beatrice went to the local funeral home to plan a wake in his honor. The funeral home director refused to allow the family to use the chapel, because of their race. The director told the media at the time that he would never allow Mexican Americans to use his facilities, saying, "We just never made it a practice to let them use the chapel and we don't want to start now." When Garcia found out about the situation, he was outraged and immediately sent letters of protest to the media, elected politicians, and government officials. One of these letters was sent to