Sanchez, George

A pioneering educator who worked tirelessly on behalf of improving education for Mexican American children, George I. Sanchez (1906–1972) first attended school in Jerome, Arizona. Moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, he completed high school there in 1923. Becoming a school teacher in Yrisarri, New Mexico, he often had to travel by horseback to get to work.

As a recipient from several eastern foundations, Sanchez received his M.S. in educational psychology and Spanish from the University of Texas in 1931. His thesis was concerned with issues of validity on language IQ tests in English for Spanish speaking children. Sanchez went on to complete his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. He returned to New Mexico, where he worked in the New Mexico State Department of Education and became president of the New Mexico Educational Association. Battling for improved tax support for schools, he began to acquire an understanding of how to improve funding for public schools.

Continuing his foundation work, he surveyed rural schools in Mexico and African American schools in the southern United States. He became the Minister of Education in Venezuela for 1 year and returned to become a nontenure-track faculty member at the University of New Mexico from 1938 to 1940. During that time, he wrote Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans. In 1940, he was elected president of LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) and became the first professor of Latin American studies in the United States. However, he came up against vested interests as a result of his advocacy of improved funding in New Mexico, and he was not going to obtain a full professor position at the University of New Mexico.

During this time, the University of Texas offered him a full-professor position. In Texas, he worked with LULAC, the Alianza Hispano-Americana, and other organizations in pushing lawsuits for improved funding and for equal rights for Mexican Americans. He worked to utilize the courts to establish better funding and to fight segregation of Mexican American students in the public schools. In the landmark case Delgado v. Gracy et al. (1948), he helped strike down segregated schools for Mexican American students. He was instrumental in fighting for and winning several other critical cases in the courts. He was honored by the University of California at Berkeley Law School for his work in improving education for Mexican American students. A special location in the U.S. Department of Education is named after him.