George I. Sanchez regularly is left out of books on the civil rights movement. His role is seldom mentioned in studies on desegregation cases. Even people in his birth-state hardly know his name, though his imprint on New Mexico’s educational system still is felt today.
A new biography seeks to change that.
This month, Carlos Blanton released “George I. Sanchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration.” He’s hoping the biography finally places the Latino scholar in his proper place among civil rights giants.
A project that took more than a decade, Blanton wrote the book after combing through previously unknown letters, writings and materials to reconstruct the life of a man who was at the center of some of most important civil rights moments in history.
“I started this book only thinking of him as a cultural scholar,” said Blanton, a history professor at Texas A&M University. “Then, I found a civil rights activist.”
Sanchez was born in Albuquerque in 1906. At 16, he worked as a public school teacher at a small rural school in Yrisarri, New Mexico. He became superintendent of the Bernalillo County school district six years later.
That experience sparked his mission to reform the state’s educational system, particularly IQ testing of Latinos and American Indians, which he viewed as racially biased. Eventually, Sanchez became what would be equivalent to the state’s deputy secretary of education.
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