Great news!

Forgotten Mexican-American Latino scholar (son of Arizona miner) to be honored again in New Mexico!  According to Russell Contreras, George I. Sanchez, was a scholar credited with helping bring attention to the plight of poor Mexican-Americans in the 1930s. Those projects include naming a street and building after Sanchez, said Luisa Duran, a retired University of New Mexico bilingual education professor.

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Forgotten’ Latino scholar to get 2nd New Mexcian honor

Posted: Feb 23, 2013 9:29 AM Updated: Feb 23, 2013 9:29 AM

NM group to honor[ed] noted ‘forgotten’ Latino scholar

By RUSSELL CONTRERAS

Associated Press

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A group of retired educators are working to honor a Mexican-American scholar who is celebrated across the country but is virtually unknown in New Mexico, where he was born.

An ad hoc committee is pushing a series of projects aimed at honoring the late-George I. Sanchez, a scholar credited with helping bring attention to the plight of poor Mexican-Americans in the 1930s. Those projects include naming a street and building after Sanchez, said Luisa Duran, a retired University of New Mexico bilingual education professor.

In addition, New Mexico state lawmakers are scheduled [last] Tuesday to read a memorial about the pioneer scholar’s contributions to Latino education.

For the Sanchez family, it’s a stunning reversal of his legacy in a state where lawmakers once denounced him and forced him to leave because of his then-radical views on desegregation, said granddaughter Cindy Kennedy, 49, a Santa Fe teacher. “I think it’s fantastic,” Kennedy said. “It’s about time he’s being honored here nearly 40 years after his death.”

Duran said the committee is working on more ideas to honor Sanchez, who wrote the 1940 classic book “Forgotten People” about Mexican-Americans in Taos. The group of educators formed the committee after reading a story by The Associated Press last year that Sanchez was relatively unknown in his birth state and in Albuquerque, an area he worked as a young school teacher.

“It’s important that we remember him because he was so important,” said Duran, 71. “He was actually writing about the town where I’m from and was probably talking about my parents.”

A dozen or so schools in Texas and California are named in honor of Sanchez – including the School of Education building at the University of Texas where he taught for many years – but not a single school in New Mexico bears his name. Few New Mexico educators or activists know much about him, according to historians and educators. No plaque exists to show his birthplace or the school where Sanchez taught. He is not listed among the state’s notable figures in New Mexico Centennial guidebooks.

A son of an Arizona miner, Albuquerque-born Sanchez worked his way out of poverty as a rural public school teacher in New Mexico to become a pioneer scholar and education activist. Sanchez developed his theories on school inequalities using New Mexico’s Hispanic and Navajo populations as examples.  He argued that bilingual students were discriminated against by monolingual school systems and testified in landmark court cases about the negative effects of segregation and IQ testing on Hispanic, American Indian and black children.

Read full story here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/02/09/4610705/nm-group-to-honor-noted-forgotten.html#storylink=cpy

He writes:

 

“I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” the President Lyndon Johnson began.

It was March 15, 1965, a week after the nation saw on television Alabama state troopers violently attack peaceful black marchers protesting voting rights discrimination. The bloody images shocked the nation. They also horrified Johnson, the former Senate majority leader who had been lukewarm on civil rights at best.

The violence sparked Johnson into addressing Congress about the immediate need for a new Voting Rights bill. It what would later be called the best speech of a his presidency and one that brought Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to tears.

It was also the first speech to Congress in U.S. history that mentioned Latinos and their struggle against poverty and discrimination—something Johnson saw firsthand as a young teacher in a Mexican American school. And it also brought a number Mexican-American civil rights leaders to tears.

But those historic words are often overlooked. 

Johnson’s long conversion began when his father, a former state lawmaker, was hit hard financial times and his family was forced into near poverty in Johnson City, Texas. To help the family, Johnson worked in the cotton fields along side African Americans and Mexican Americans. 

When it was time for Johnson to attend college, the University of Texas just wasn’t an option. It was too expensive. So, Johnson enrolled at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos, Texas (today called Texas State). But Johnson still struggled with the tuition.

After his freshman year, a 19-year-old Johnson took a teaching job in Cotulla, a small South Texas town where the majority of students were poor and Mexican American.

But the young, idealistic Johnson was appalled by what he saw among his 5th, 6th, and 7th graders at the Welhausen School. Not only were his students dirt poor, he quickly saw how the town’s whites treated them like second-class citizens. Whites encourage the Latino students to stay home and become laborers like their parents. Other whites educators complained that the students did nothing but carry dirt, lice and disease.

“I am not going to stand here and tell you that they are the best people on the face of the earth,” one congressman said of Mexican Americans at the time Johnson was in Cotulla.

They treated Mexicans “just worse than you’d treat a dog,” Johnson would say later in life. Her remembered “the Mexican children going through a garbage pile, shaking the coffee ground from the grapefruit rinds and sucking the rinds for the juice that was left.”

But an energetic Johnson decided that he could still convert his students into believers of the American Dream. He organized athletic teams, pushed literary clubs and repeatedly told them all they could all reach high school, a rarity for Mexican Americans at the time.

When he got his first paycheck, he didn’t spend it on himself. He bought playground equipment.

Johnson told one student, Felipe Gonzalez, that one day he would be an attorney. Meanwhile, he tutored English to the school janitor.

“He used to tell us that this country was so free that anyone could become President who was willing to work hard enough,” his former student Dan Garcia recalled.

But deep down, Johnson knew his students had a difficult road ahead. In nearby towns, the Ku Klux Klan ruled by terror. In addition, segregation prevented Mexican Americans from good schools, college and everyday life.

Johnson later become a congressional aid, a congressman himself and later a U.S. senator. On his road to become the country’s most powerful Senate majority leader in its history, however, Johnson sought to appease Southern segregationists with speeches and his actions. He quietly helped a family of Mexican American soldier Felix Longoria, who was killed in action in WWII but refused burial service by a white-owner funeral home, get a spot in Arlington National Cemetery

……

As President Obama prepares next week to address Congress and to urge lawmakers to pass comprehensive immigration reform, it’s important to remember that whatever he says, it was Johnson who spoke from the soul, even when he knew it would hurt him politically later. But for Johnson  it didn’t matter in 1965. That’s because 1928 and those students were with him, and always would be.

READ FULL STORY HERE>>>

Enjoy!

The original ‘DREAMer’: WWII Medal of Honor winner Macario Garcia

By Russell Contreras

He was born in Villa de Castaño, Mexico to poor farmers. But facing starvation, the family of Macario Garcia came to Texas to work as sharecroppers. Like the Joads in the Grapes of Wrath, the family followed the crop during the Depression, except their lives were dictated by the Texas cotton harvest. Macario would only finish the 3rd grade and was forced to help his family on their Sugar Land, Texas farm out of survival. Like other Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in the 1930s, the Garcia family was destined to face a life of poverty, discrimination and a bleak future.

Then came World War II.

Since all residents were required to register for the arms services, Macario did as asked and was drafted into the U.S. Army as a “resident alien.” On Texas Spanish-language radio, community leaders urged Mexican Americans to join the fight against fascism so that maybe — just maybe — upon their return they could show political leaders back home that they were true Patriots and that Jim Crow laws aimed at Latinos were wrong.

In 1944, Macario was wounded by a shrapnel while his regiment tried to take a Nazi German artillery unit. He was treated but refused to evacuate to a hospital and returned to battle.

On November 27, 1944, in actions near Grosshau, Germany, he earned the name “The Fearless Mexican.” According to military documents, Macario single handedly assaulted two German machine-gun emplacements that were blocking his company’s advance. Wounded in the shoulder and foot, he crawled forward alone towards the machine-gun nests, killed six enemy soldiers, captured four and destroyed the nests with grenades. Only after the company had secured its position did he allow himself to be evacuated for medical treatment.

In a White House ceremony on August 23, 1945, President Harry Truman presented Macario, a Mexican immigrant, with the Medal of Honor. He was the first Mexican  immigrant to receive the Medal of Honor. He also received the Purple Heart Medal, Bronze Star Medal and Combat Infantryman’s Badge.

When he returned to Houston a couple of weeks later, he was met with a hero’s welcome. The League of United Latin American Citizens — then the largest Latino civil rights organization — sponsored a special dance in his honor and Mexican American civil rights leaders retold the story of his bravery on radio and in speeches.

But despite that celebration, the decorated soldier soon discovered that the situation in Texas had changed little.  A day after the dance in his honor, Macario was refused service at the Oasis Cafe in Richmond, Texas, despite being awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor less than a month before. According to restaurant owner Donna Andrews, she refused him service ”because he had been drinking.” But Macario would tell others he was refused service because he was “Mexican.” Macario would refuse to leave and, following a heated argument, he broke dishes and other cafe equipment. He also slapped Andrews after she allegedly made racial slurs.

“He disabled the place,” said Ernest Eguia, a fellow WWII Army veteran and friend.

Macario Garcia was soon facing aggravated assault charges.

The case drew the attention of Houston civil rights attorney John J. Herrera who started publicizing the event as an example of the discrimination Mexican Americans still faced in 1945, veterans or not. A ”Garcia Committee” was formed to raise funds for his defense as Mexican Americans throughout Texas, poor and middle-class, began sending in money. Even sympathetic whites started lending support. Former Texas attorney general and former governor James Allred agreed to represent Macario for an upcoming trial in Fort Bend County.

The publicity around the case, now drawing national attention, was too much for Fort Bend County officials and the charges were dropped. But the community was galvanized.  LULAC Council 60, the council of growing Houston, reported a spike in membership. Congressional hearings were called to investigate how other Mexican American returning veterans were being denied services and experiencing discrimination despite putting their lives on the line. A movement had begun.

Macario would become a U.S. citizen in 1947, earn his GED in 1951 and marry Alicia Reyes in 1952 after a blind date. He would remain a hero to Mexican Americans in Houston and would eventually land a job with the Veterans Administration.

In 1954, Macario accompanied civil rights attorney John J. Herrera and Gus Garcia to the U.S. Supreme Court as they argued their case in the landmark Hernandez case that barred Mexican Americans from serving as jurors in Texas. He would hear Gus Garcia tell Supreme Court justices that, “my people were here long before that wetback Sam Houston” came to Texas.

When President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jackie Kennedy dropped by to “say hi” to Mexican Americans as at a gala in Houston’s Rice Hotel on Nov. 21, 1963, it was Macario who greeted the president and helped convince him to come inside for a few minutes. It would be the first time a sitting president acknowledged the importance of the Latino vote and it was the night before JFK’s assassination. (AP story here)

This Christmas Eve marked the 40th anniversary of Macario’s tragic death from a head on collision in Sugar Land. He was 52. There were no ceremonies to mark the occasion. Very few people even acknowledged the date, much less know about Macario Garcia’s contributions to Latino history.

As advocates continue to press for the DREAM Act — the federal proposal that would give young illegal immigrations a pathway to U.S. citizenship through college enrollment or military service — very seldom is the name of Macario Garcia invoked. Hardly is his story repeated as an example of service and what is possible. He remains virtual unknown to the student immigrant movement and history. Yet, the actions of Macario Garcia and the movements he started can be directly linked some of the greatest movements in Latino civil rights history and the current dreams of today’s immigrant activists.