George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration by Carlos Kevin Blanton (review)

Carlos Kevin Blanton’s biography of twentieth-century Mexican American education professor and activist George I. Sánchez (1906–1972) amounts to a defense of the World War II–era “Mexican American Generation” and its politics (p. 6). Historians have often presented the group as largely conservative and overinvested in achieving U.S. citizenship and in promoting legal claims to whiteness in the era of segregation. While that depiction may accurately describe some of the generation’s leaders, Blanton develops the story of Sánchez to provide a counterpoint, seeking to recast the era’s activists as “a transnational, global people despite however much they may have stressed U.S. citizenship for strategic and ideological reasons” (p. 47). Emphasizing context, Blanton argues that Sánchez always “stayed as far left as he believed was possible” given the constraints of his times (p. 126).

Blanton depicts Sánchez as something akin to a brilliant Chicano Forrest Gump, a man who shaped nearly every major Chicano event, civil rights lawsuit, and organization from the 1930s through the 1960s. Born into poverty in rural New Mexico, Sánchez attended universities in New Mexico, Texas, and California, lobbied legislatures on Mexican American educational issues, and taught for decades at the University of Texas. Sánchez also wrote Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans (Albuquerque, 1940), one of the first major books about Mexican Americans. He served as president of the League of United Latin American Citizens and worked with the Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Española, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and other organizations to fight for civil rights for Mexican Americans.

Throughout the book Blanton reminds readers that Sánchez and his generation were waging “a depressing battle for the most basic recognition” (p. 259). Many of their actions and campaigns were in fact radical, although they may not seem so in hindsight. Indeed, Blanton shows that Sánchez often paid a steep professional and financial price for his politics, as when the University of Texas withheld pay raises for years in retaliation for his activism. Blanton also argues that Mexican American leaders’ decision to argue for their own Caucasian status in the courts during the civil rights era was a legal strategy accepted by all parties, including the ACLU and the NAACP, and did not, as some historians have alleged, represent antiblack feelings or politics.

At its heart, this book is a political and intellectual biography, and digressions into Sánchez’s personal life sometimes feel awkward and disconnected from the overall narrative. Nonetheless, the strong and often witty personality revealed through Sánchez’s writings keeps the sometimes dry narrative engaging. Sánchez was not afraid to call segregated schools “concentration camps,” assert that “the so-called problem of American minorities is, in reality, the problem of the majority,” and verbally eviscerate those who disagreed with his liberal principles and commitment to integration (pp. 106, 163). The book’s historiographical discussions cite other scholars by name, but in a way that is clear and accessible, making this text an excellent choice for upper-division undergraduates as well as graduate students, if not for lower-division undergraduates. Scholars of Chicano history should not miss this opportunity to push beyond generalizations and come to understand the politics of Sánchez’s generation of Mexican Americans in its all of its fascinating complexity.