Oral history interview with Graciela Sanchez, 2004, June 25- July 2

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Graciela Sanchez, 2004, June 25- July 2, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Recuerdos Orales: Interviews of the Latino Art Community in Texas

Interview with Graciela Sanchez
Conducted by Cary Cordova
San Antonio, Texas
June 25 and July 2, 2004

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Graciela Sanchez on June 25 and July 2, 2004. The interview took place in San Antonio, Texas and was conducted by Cary Cordova for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Recuerdos Orales: Interviews of the Latino Art Community in Texas.

This transcript has been lightly edited. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

CARY CORDOVA: All right, we are recording. This is Cary Cordova for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. I am interviewing Graciela Sánchez at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center [922 San Pedro, San Antonio] on June 25th, 2004. This is Disc One, Session One. And with that – with that intro – let me just ask you, Graciela, when and where were you born?

GRACIELA SÁNCHEZ: I was born here in San Antonio on April 24th, 1960 at the Baptismal Memorial Hospital – [laughs] – half a mile down from here.

MS. CORDOVA: And were your parents born here as well?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: My mom was born here 1923 – she will be turning 81 on July 1st, and my father was born in Tampico, but again, his father was born in San Antonio and his grandfather, great-grandfather. So I think on my dad’s side, we still go U.S. at least, you know, somewhere in the 1850s or whatever, and he – his dad was born in San Antonio in 1900 in the same neighborhood where they still live. So it’s just that they skipped that generation because of the Depression and go down – he goes in from the Depression – my grandfather – to Tampico to try to make a living and then later on in life, they come back – in the ‘40s – they come back to San Antonio.

MS. CORDOVA: So your father’s family already had strong ties here in San Antonio?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Yes, San Antonio and I guess Laredo, although I don’t know much of that history.

MS. CORDOVA: How did your parents meet?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Through my paternal grandmother, who was showing off her sailor son in 19 – probably at the end of the war, something like that – 40 – well, actually probably around ‘47 or something like that. So, again, both my mom and my father have roots on Veracruz Street, which is where they still live, and so met my mom on her way to work, which is right there in Guadalupe, in Salinas – that is a little corner store – was walking to work. And Samira [?] Sánchez stopped there and said, here, meet my son because you are very pretty and – [laughs] – and that was it. And they just – my mom was very, you know, just noticed this very respectful man with lots of manners and just thought him a very nice man, and my father I guess just kind of liked my mom. And they just started courting, which is not what my grandmother wanted because my mom is very dark-skinned so of course she never expected that, you know. It was just an introduction – [laughs] – nothing more than that. I think later on in life, you know – I mean the consistency that my grandmother kind of wasn’t happy that my dad married this dark-skinned –

MS. CORDOVA: How did that appear?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: I think – well, my mom has really been – again, I keep on trying to find those – that magic and those secrets and that wisdom from my mom because she didn’t ever say negative things about my grandmother growing up, so I never grew up to resent her. But I think in those little stories every once in a while, if you ask a little closer and dig a little deeper, you will find that, you know, my grandmother said some hurtful things and so – you know, in the late ‘40s, ‘50s, and my mom and my dad moved to Chicago, which is where my grandparents then moved to, you know, on my dad’s side. And so she was away from – my mom was away from her own mother in San Antonio, and the way she tried to resolve those problems was to write letters to her mom and say, you know, here is what is happening with the in-law. And my grandmother would write back and say, find out what her favorite food is, cook her that food for her and give it to her – you know, so ways to just continue to be loving and giving and just kind of forget those hurtful things and just try to win her over on some level rather than saying anything negative.

And so that was just a constant practice, and to this day, my mom – you know, by having a hard time, you must make your enemies your friends or whatever. That is not as easy, I think, because, one thing is to have a mother-in-law and you want to try a little bit harder and then, you know, when you are fighting against the politicians that hate your – the right wing that hates the progressive left wing – you know, it might be a little bit hard. But anyway – so that is – those are the signs about, you know, kind of – just those – through the tías [dad’s sisters] – or actually my dad’s sisters and maybe brothers – there were moments that – if they were eight, nine, ten growing up, they would be mean to my mother. And so that is kind of the little ways that I found out. You know, and they would always blame their mother for saying, well, my mom says you are ugly, or, my mom doesn’t like that you got married to my brother, or something. So, I mean, you know, now these women are in their 60s and 70s and my mom is the matriarch, you know, and is respected and loved because their mother died 20 years ago or so, so my mom has been the person that they look to if they are living in San Antonio or they visit from Chicago.

Long answer, sorry. [Laughs.]

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughs.] No, no, that’s great. Now, why did your parents move to Chicago, and when?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Well, that’s a good question. I think, again, my grandfather – Adrian is my dad’s father – Adrian Sánchez – he was an auto mechanic. He was also a sergeant in World War I and was stationed here in Fort Sam [Houston, Texas], and I think, again, he just probably traveled, you know? He was going to find a job, he was going to try to raise kids, and so – so yeah, he moves from here to Tampico, but then they come back up through Monterey and come back here to San Antonio to try to make it here. I guess it’s not good here, so then they move up to Chicago and follow the stream, I guess, that many other people were following. Then they stayed there for a long time. I think my grandparents – my dad’s side of the family came back to San Antonio in the ‘70s, so – I mean, again, some of their children are still there. They are my aunts and uncles, but most of them started coming back. But my dad was the one that just lived there for two years and just came back with my mom. And so we – from the Sánchez side of the family, we were kind of more isolated. You know, my mom’s side was definitely here, and still is here. So, again, it’s just – maybe it’s mechanics really couldn’t find jobs.

MS. CORDOVA: Yeah, and then your father had been enlisted in –

MS. SÁNCHEZ: He joined World War II as a 17-year-old just to get out of the house, I think. He probably – it wasn’t necessarily a healthy – I mean, he doesn’t talk about it, but, you know, he probably just didn’t want to be around. And as he had come here in San Antonio as a 13-year-old, I think, they could be put into elementary-school-age to learn, so I think he found it very awkward to be this teen with, you know, a lot of elementary school kids. You know, by 15 or 16 – you know, junior high was also now into high school then, right, so he was able to be in those classes, but he was just a little awkward and I think he just wanted to join, so he joined a year before. But it was at the end of the war, essentially. He was born in ‘28, so he was 17, I guess, in ‘45 or something like that. I haven’t figured it out.

But what he ended up doing seemed to be a lot – he, you know – well, actually I want to say, a lot of parades – [laughs] – you know. He got to go around to, you know, to all those little ports in California and Washington, Oregon ports, and then I know that he did – that the Navy moved around and got to see other parts of the world, too, but his – you know, I knew that there was a gun that blew, and his hearing is really bad and all that sort of stuff, but he was never – I never heard of major combats – sort of, you know, anything like that, but it was more about pretty girls and parades. But, you know, like a lot of men his age, they do talk about that time of World War II and in order to –

MS. CORDOVA: Right and he was probably stationed in the Pacific.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Right, on that side. And he didn’t have tattoos, and I found out just last Sunday that part of it was that he – a lot of his friends got tattoos and they all got sick because they were – it was a bad –

[Audio break.]

MS. SÁNCHEZ: So yeah – so basically, he just saw everybody else get sick from an infected needle and so he just kind of pulled away from – you know, from probably having a tattoo. And I was wondering because everybody else I know that was in the military in the ‘40s, you know, has a tattoo and he doesn’t have anything like that. You know, again, he was also grounded, I think, in his early childhood, having been born and raised in Tampico or in Mexico. So, I mean, I use – I always am curious about, again, where we come from and why we become who we become, you know, and I think that whole sense of cultural grounding that I talk about kind of speaks to, like, just the differences between my mom and my dad in terms of, you know, their sense of who they are. My dad really – besides being a man, and I guess that helps – because that is the way this society works.

But the sense of being a Mexicano, but also very much a U.S. citizen, but just – you know, always thinking it’s important to speak Spanish, always thinking it’s important to maintain cultural traditions, and he thought us to sing Las Mañanitas and all those other songs and created a little choir when I was, like, seven and eight and nine, and, you know, took all the neighbors and my brother’s friends, my sister and myself and, you know, others just to learn all these little songs, and then to give those songs as presents to all our mothers on Mother’s Day, and then taught us songs from Las Posadas and yet another moment and so we were able to sing at churches and – or the church that we were going to and, you know, to follow up and do those sorts of things. As a little girl, I mean, my first dancing instructor was my father. He learned to dance growing up, again, trying to hustle in the streets of Tampico, and he said one time he was rounding a corner and heard this music and saw this Afro-Cubano dancing at one of the cantinas, and he just fell in love with the guy’s dancing and he says, teach me, and so this man, you know, taught my dad how to dance. Because I always thought it was my grandmother because, again, mothers teach – usually it’s through the mothers that the culture seems to be passed, you know, but it was like the staff of Afro-Cubano that taught him in the ports of Tampico.

So, again, I know that dancing happened within my Sánchez family because they’re all dancers, but he told me, it was a southern man that taught him. So anyway, my dad taught all his children how to dance as well. So it was just kind of fun to kind of learn those sorts of things that I thought were – I just took for granted; I just thought it happened in everybody’s household. Not so.

MS. CORDOVA: And what kind of cultural traditions did your mother give you?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Well, I guess it was – we talked about that and hers tended to be more San Antonio or Norteño based. My grandmother on my mom’s side was an orphan and kind of got pulled from Monterey when she was about a year old and brought to San Antonio because – here’s the story; let’s see – so my great grandmother, Teresita, I guess couldn’t have children, or wasn’t having children because I don’t know of any other great aunt or anything like that, but – so her husband was in Monterey once and kept on seeing this little girl in front of a house that seemed to be abandoned, and so he knocked on the door and said, it looks like you’re abandoning this kid, and will you give her to me? And so she was just given to my great-grandfather and he brought her over, and that’s who I get to know as my grandmother my Abeulita Panchita.

And so – and it seems like she was young, and there’s a picture of her as a 16-year-old or such with a little parasol and an American flag in the back, and it’s probably a July 4th celebration. So somehow she was getting into the groove of San Antonio, I mean, because that’s what she knew, I guess. But I don’t – that was kind of on some level – I was going to say assimilated but that’s not the word because, again, she only grew up in this culture but I guess took on whatever was contemporary and was having fun. She was born, I guess, in 1893 so I’m not sure what it was that she was up to at age 16 but just having fun, but she ended up being – she did lots of jobs like most women, and so did her mother. My great-grandmother Teresita seemed to be a businesswoman who was probably one of the “chili queens.” And, again, we don’t know too much about that but that she did set up a spa and have a couple of other women helping her and lived downtown close by to the Spanish governor’s palace, and moved away from downtown when the flood of 1921 comes around. So it seems like a lot of people were wiped out or maybe got scared and moved.

Maybe she had already bought a lot of land in the west side, or something like that, but the west side seems to be a little bit higher up and safer in the area that they selected, so she moved into that west side. And my grandmother also – great-grandmother also had tenants, like I guess she rented a room and then whoever she rented it from said, “Oh, you can subdivide and make some extra money by bringing in these borders.” So they talk about a couple of boarders that ended up being famous, wealthy Mexicans, like one of the guys that started one of the – como se llaman? – where they slaughter the – the slaughterhouses of the west side, the mantanzas, right. So one of those guys ended up being very wealthy, and later in life when my grandmother needs some operation, they go to him and ask him for some sort of loan and the man just gives it away: it reminds me of when you took care of me way back when, when I got started, so I’m going to give you this and send you up to my doctor or something like that.

So that’s how my great-grandmother was a businesswoman, and so my grandmother I guess kind of learned the same sort of thinking and washing clothes, becoming a nurse’s aid and whatever the job that needed to be done, because she gets that good work ethic, because people liked her and kind of pulled her into different directions, so she had those sorts of experiences.

And I know that she was – my grandmother, my mom’s mom, married three times, and so, again, it’s like to know my mother, my grandmother would have just married once, because my mom just had this traditional sort of – what Ronald Reagan would probably love. But her mother had married three times – I guess she got married when she was 15 and then left that guy for whatever reason. The second guy she met in Oklahoma and married him, because I guess he – no, he was chasing after her and she was just looking – trying to stay alive I guess at that time and ran away from him and came back to San Antonio and he followed her back to San Antonio and told her to help him set up a store in San Antonio, and she ended up having to marry him because she had said, yes, she would marry him, but she didn’t really want to marry him, and helped him set up that store and basically made it go under, because he was a businessman – I guess he owned a restaurant or a little store in Oklahoma.

And then I guess after a while they split up and then the third one was the grandfather that I get to know, who was the Casillas. So there was – Benavidez was the first one; Martinez was the second one – and that was my mom’s dad; she never knew him – and Casillas was the third one who basically raised my mom.

And so, again, it’s just – you asked that about what was the culture.

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughs.] Actually, though, for me I know that the “chili queens” were an important here in San Antonio, but maybe you could explain why or what that lore is about the chili queens.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Well, I think these were Mexicana women trying to, again, make a living in San Antonio and downtown was where everything happened, from the Alamo down to where the Mercado is and the Mercado and the Plaza del Zacate, which I guess is known as the hay market in translation, something like that, and that that Plaza del Zacate was the area, I think, that my great-grandmother worked. And so, vendors coming from all over the region and being hungry and needing to eat, so the women put out their puestos and I guess the chili con carne is what they’re talking about in terms of the “chili queens.” And so it was – I understand that that wasn’t the only thing. It was just basically a puesto for the men, or the tamales and chili con carnes to whatever else the mujeres would want to cook, and they had – they all had good businesses and were doing fine, and then I think from the competitive business – white businessman they probably got a little angry that they were – at least that’s what we hear from our own stories, that they got upset and basically wanted to get rid of them because they were taking away business from them. So they started to impose all these health permits and so basically wiped out the women from the downtown area.

And yet, apparently the “chili queens” were so famous that, again, more of the white businessmen kind of exoticized them and pulled a few of them to go up to the Chicago World’s Fair [1893] in, I think, 1898, or the 1890s, and so that’s how they kind of got more of a national prominence in the storytelling, and yet they were basically wiped out. And so what I say is then they don’t come back until, again, it’s just the sort remaking of the history of these women. And so nowadays that all have their little stalls and they charge a lot of money, and they do have to follow city code, and they’re only there on weekends and are allowed to be there on weekends. And that’s it. But it’s not the same re-creation of that time period.

I think we hear that people like Lydia Mendoza and a lot of the troubadours of that time, for nickels and pennies used to – while the women cooked their food and people ate, these other folks came around and sang for them. So, again, you can imagine Mexico more than you can imagine the U.S. when you think of those images. It’s what still exists in Mexico that has been erased from San Antonio, unless it’s, again, tourist – the cultural tourism that plays itself out nowadays.

MS. CORDOVA: Yes, I know you’ve confronted that a lot. Now, when your father came back from the war, what did he do first? What kind of work did he do?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: I think he was looking for jobs, and probably because his father had been an auto mechanic he kind of got into working with my father, and at some point in that time period he then started painting cars. I mean, that was what I knew him – he’s an auto painter for many years, but I think initially probably did a little bit of auto mechanics. Although when I think about him being an auto mechanic I laugh, like he doesn’t know anything about cars – [laughter] – but he does. He’s just never been somebody that likes to fix things up in the same way, I think. What he always said is, I’m an artist; I paint bodies or something like that.

So, yeah, he was good at what he did and he kind of excelled also. So he would win – he worked for Chevrolet, he worked for Volkswagen, he worked for different companies and he’d always seem to win these little prizes while I was growing up so he was known as a pretty good painter. And when I was a little older, back in junior high and high school, he was able to become a subcontractor for Mission Chevrolet and then he started hiring and he started hiring kids from the local high school in town as interns for him, and always very frustrated that – the work ethic probably – well, I know it continues to change as each year comes along. But it was exciting for him to be able to hire kids from the local high school, which was my high school, and I was at Lanier Vocational, right, so – and we’re known as the Voks, V-O-K-S, and people say, what’s a Vok, and it was like if you look at the image, the icon, it’s a screw basically; it’s a little screw. [Laughs.]

And so that’s the image there, but we were vocational students, and so that’s where you had all those types of departments and auto mechanics and auto painting was one of them, so he had access to those students and for many of us to pull away from that vocational track was something to be done. And, again, each year less and less of the vocational stuff goes on, but that was, I guess, from the 1920s to probably the 1960s or ‘70s – I guess the ‘70s when affirmative action really starts to take – the late ‘60s when young people have more access to other venues to be educated a little bit.

MS. CORDOVA: And so, did your mom – did your mom ever work outside the home?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: My mom graduated from high school, which, again, from friends – her age it seems like not too many of them graduated. And then my father just went up to 7th grade and then joined the Army – I mean the Navy. And then after that I think – well, during the war she went, like many of the women, to work at Kelly Air Force Base, and she ended up working the night shifts and just doing assembly work, and I guess she just did that for a few years until she got married and then basically became a housewife. And then I think that was my parents’ agreement that she would stay home and raise the kids and he’d just make the money that was going to feed all the children. It took them three years to have their first kid, though, and so – first of all, she was 26 when she got married so people thought she was going to be a hijas de Maria – you know, how students changed – como se dice in Español? Los Santos – Vestir Los Santos, because she was just going to be an old matron and whatever, and then she did finally get married and then they complained because it took them three years to have babies. And so she was 29 when she had her first child, and then they had six children and they were like getting upset with her, like, it’s time to stop having babies. [Laughter.]

MS. CORDOVA: So what year did your parents marry?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: In ‘49.

MS. CORDOVA: In 1949. So you must have been one of the youngest –

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Yes, I was born in ‘60 – I was number five out of six; four older brothers and myself and then my sister. And I think there was a baby that died in between there so – I always say six but there is that seventh one that comes somewhere – I’m not sure – between myself and my brothers.

MS. CORDOVA: That must have been a challenge with that many brothers.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: It was. I mean, I think it was always keeping up with my brothers. I remember from being able just to walk next to them, right, so I learned my long stride from trying to keep up with my oldest brother, and to this day I have a long stride. [Laughs.] And then my third-oldest brother was just not going to let a kid sister around, so he was always pushing me away, pushing me away, and he and I just were always at each other, where I think my older two brothers – I was that much younger so they didn’t bother me that much. This other one was four years older than me so – you know, he would play war with his friends and I’d want to play with them and he’d just push me aside. So I was just watching every move that he did and I just kept on being pushed aside.

But on the other hand, I think my dad did teach them to be loving brothers, right, and all that sort of stuff, so they were probably not as mean and ugly as they could have been – or, again, they didn’t have that – they weren’t taught that. They weren’t taught to beat up on anybody. So I guess, again, I talk about that as an experience that – when I moved out of the house it was this major blow to what I understand of men, who are supposed to be respecting me and loving me and thinking of me kind of as equals. Again, it’s just that one brother that kind of challenges that, but it has never been as ugly as I’ve seen sexism and misogyny really play itself out as I try to speak my truth or – and I guess it was also the reason, in relating to boys and then men, myself, you know, I have always wanted to be respected for what I think, and – even yesterday, just thinking of a conversation I had with one of these important men in the community and they’re not interested in hearing what I have to say; they’re just doing regular little chit chat, and if I put out something important they just kind of dismiss it. And so I’m always blown away by that because that wasn’t my experience growing up, but it allowed me at least to say, “Well, I can be equal and I should be equal.”

Thank goodness there were four older brothers, that they did get to practice, you know, to raise children, and there was definitely a distinction between taking care of the girls versus taking care of the boys. And growing up we traveled up to when I was 12, so as we went from San Antonio – you know, we started in small little trips up to maybe Corpus and then further down, and then the idea was to visit my grandparents and my great-grandmother that lived in – Tampico, so that we would know her before she died. And it was all of us scrambling to a car and all of us sleeping either in the car or small hotels or whatever as we went into Mexico. But we would rent two rooms and the boys would stay with my father and my mom and my sister and I – it was just always separated that way.

So there was some – they did take care of just kind of acknowledging that there were differences, and they never talked about anything else and there was no – again, thinking of all the – eight of every 10 women that I run into nowadays – in thinking of incest, you know, in their own families and things. Wow, again, I was so lucky not to have ever run into it because there were so many men in my life and with all my brothers they also have friends that would come around, and there were the grandfathers. But that never happened in my family.

So I think, again, it was people were just watching out all the time as well. I mean, to this day my mom still talks about, you’ve just got to be there, you’ve got to be alert, you’ve got to take care of everything that’s going on.

MS. CORDOVA: Were your parents political at all?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: They’ve always been active in the community. They’ve always been involved. Mainly I saw them involved in schools – in the schools, my mom in the PTA [Parent Teacher Association], and getting my dad involved as well, but I know that there used to be programs in the ‘60s and the ‘70s through the church my parents were involved – or my dad even, through the church, he was somebody in the church for a little while and then they kind of moved away from the church. But there were probably community development projects going on in the urban renewal efforts of the ‘70s, and prior to that there was another project, which I can’t think of, and I think my dad probably sat on their committee and made decisions, and then got frustrated about a lot of stuff.

I think – we were raised also to always eat together at dinnertime, you know, so we could play around when we got home, from like 3:00 to 5:00 but then at 5:00 you’d come home and help clean up and set up the table, and then we all ate together. And so it was just always that. And then within those conversations we talked about the day, right and so I would hear what they were thinking and I would hear if my father was on this committee and my mom was in some sort of activity, you know, what they were thinking. And that was within the community of Chicanos, and I think that’s where at least I acknowledged that. They were holding our own Latino community to the same standards. I could see that all Latinos weren’t always up to par to taking care of their own communities, but – my parents saying, well, that can’t be. You have to – this is the trust you have to create. You have to be honest; you have to be all of these things no matter what color you are.

And so they were – so, those are the stories, again, and those experiences that kind of allow me to understand the complexities, I guess, so it wasn’t just about the bad white people and the good brown people or – and I think it was just more complex that way. And again, nobody said it and such but it was just the storytelling that, again, nobody does anymore, and in those stories you find out – you’re teaching. And we all got involved, so it wasn’t just about what they were doing; it was what we were doing, and then they would get involved, and like something happened at school and they’d say, well, why don’t you document stuff and why don’t you try to talk to the teacher? They wouldn’t just come in and solve the problems for us; it was just like, here are some ideas that you might take back and try to do. And you’d come back and say it didn’t happen or it didn’t work, or whatever. And I think on their own they were probably going around asking a few questions, but they were also allowing us to kind of create our own actions if we needed to as well.

MS. CORDOVA: What kind of challenges were you finding in your schools?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Well, I mean, again, because my mom was a PTA mother, whatever the situation was, from like bad food during – which nobody wanted to eat, and just kind of being concerned because a lot of the kids were eating free lunch, so people would complain, to just the types of classes that we could take or not – weren’t even available and so kind of challenging that, or teachers who – a few teachers who might not really be supportive and we were wanting them to just be better teachers for us, were kind of things that we responded to. And again, we just wanted more and we figured if other schools were having access to these programs – because we would be in exchange with some of these students – or, again, I had cousins that would be at other schools who were like, well, why can’t we have that too? And when the PTA mothers would seem to get together it seemed like those PTA mothers from our side of town didn’t have any ability to change policies as parents whereas parents from other schools seemed to be able to do that.

So I think that from junior high to high school I started seeing class differences, right, and kind of saying, oh, well, because in that neighborhood even though they might be a mixture of white and Latinas, those parents are lawyers and doctors and over here what we have is working-class people who don’t even have a high school education. I remember even between 11th and 12th grade we were devastated because they had switched out a really, really good principal and we really loved that principal, and he had worked really hard to offer students trigonometry and Russian and all these – we were trying to get Tejano history class, and he was going to help us do that.

I mean, I remember him going to classrooms: I need some kids to take Russian because we need to have Russian. I didn’t end up taking it but he was: we need more classes so you all have more choices. You need to take these classes, calculus and things. So he expanded that and within the time that he was a principal, so many kids got to go get lots of scholarships to go through college. So that’s what we wanted and we had kind of – since 7th grade – because my brothers went to those schools – I wanted him as the principal and he had been our principal for a couple of years and then they switched him out because politically he wasn’t following the superintendent’s desires and so they kicked him out. So we protested and we held demonstrations at independent school districts headquarters.

I think – I was helping to organize with my friends and lots of other people and we went before the school board, and like when I read something of course they said, some adult wrote that for you. It was like, no. [Laughs.] But that was the way we were treated and mistreated – anyway, just disrespected I guess, in so many ways that way, that we just kind of wanted to respond to those things.

MS. CORDOVA: Was that your first experience protesting?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: No, I think in 7th grade – it really was about food in 7th grade. [Laughter.] It was a really important thing. I mean, we protested even by bringing our own food and making a bigger deal of it, and people had food fights, and little things like that because, again, people didn’t know how to protest. And so we did go to the principal and we did kind of ask, you know, for better quality of food, and that really never changed much. But I think it was in 7th grade probably when – most of that protesting started.

MS. CORDOVA: How were you learning your strategies for protesting?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: That’s a good question. I don’t think that I actually have thought through that, but, I mean, this is the ‘70s so – but I’ll really have to think about that because I want to – I know that there was a lot of activism going on in San Antonio but on some level I don’t remember it, and yet maybe – and I had, again, the older brothers, that I’d know there was a walkout one year in the ‘70s, so maybe I heard the stories and kind of knew about it and thought, well, we can do that here as well. But there was nobody coming in to organize young people at the junior-high level or when I was in high school either. But I think we were just a few years younger than the whole – you know, the ‘60s and ‘70s movement, I was 10 years behind everybody. But maybe it was being able to hear it and see it on TV or something like that. So that’s a possibility.

But, yeah, I don’t remember going to protests with my parents, say, and they actually weren’t really impressed with the Chicano movement because – I think it was really about respect. They just saw that they were – that the people protesting didn’t respect other people, didn’t say it nicely, cursed, and so you’ve got to have your manners, like I think a lot of our parents, right? And they didn’t use the word “Chicano” and then all of their kids go off – or some of their kids go off to college and we all become MEChA [Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan] Chicano and all that sort of stuff, so they kind of learned from us what the words meant and so they’ve been better about it and they probably self-identify as Chicanos – Mexicanos themselves. But, again, it was about how you treat each other.

So I think – I mean COPS and Metro is across the street and the community is organized for public service, and they were organizing in the ‘70s as well, and my parents – and so those were adults like my parents, and they felt that they didn’t like the way that they acted out and booed at city leaders and walked away and walked out, and so they just kept on saying, “You don’t do those things.” I think, again, if you asked them to understand it they probably couldn’t understand it. But it’s those sorts of things that – I mean, I still act out more than my mom would probably like me to.

But I remember like in high school probably being angry at that superintendent that kicked out my principal, so I would want to boo and say – Graciela, no – [laughs] – or I would just slouch down, and it’s like sit up, all those sorts of things – you can’t do that and you can’t do that. And nowadays when I see the city leaders and their board and they’re making fun of other people – I mean, they’re being seen by masses of people and they forget that they’re being watched, and I think, oh, that’s why – that’s why – be alert, be respectful, and people notice. Because yesterday the city mayor was making fun of about two or three people that walked up, and it was all as a jest – as a joke, and people laughed in the audience and I thought, well, I don’t know; that person must feel, okay, he’s going to laugh and it’s going to hurt – it’s hurting. So it’s like – I just thought that was problematic coming from the mayor. And I’m sure he didn’t have any mean-spiritedness out of it, or he just doesn’t understand the consequences.

That’s too long of an answer.

MS. CORDOVA: Well, to go back to your high school, now, what did you want to be when you grew up, in high school?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: I was very involved in everything. In growing up, again, having four older brothers I think – they were in school before we were in school. Because my parents were involved, you know, some teachers would give them books, so my sister and I had all these books to play around with and to underline and scratch up. So we played school all the time, right, and so – and taught – and we’d always bring in all our friends to teach – you know, to have something to do to entertain us – I guess three, four, and five, or whatever your age, and then when we finally went to school, I really enjoyed going to school and socializing, where my sister liked school but didn’t like it for the social reasons that I did.

And so I just kind of took anything that was extracurricular just to be involved. So I did band, and all my brothers had done band, so, again, music is just part of us, but my brothers were brass players and they played trumpet and trombones but I had to play something that was different so I wouldn’t be like them. And my parents also talked about being different, to always be different, always be different; don’t be like everybody else. Don’t follow the sheep, don’t try to – if something’s wrong and everybody else is going away from it, follow through, and people may not like you, people may say you’re different and ugly and whatever, but that’s okay. You have to be different because that’s going to be good for the community. Just don’t follow the sheep. Especially my father said that.

So therefore I couldn’t – I had to play French horn so that I wouldn’t be like my brothers. They didn’t do drama so – there was a new teacher so we did drama, and I ran away from my friends because I didn’t want them to follow me there so I could do something by myself, and all my friends followed and so we did drama and we excelled there. So there were a lot of the arts definitely involved in all of this. But any other after-school extracurricular project, I would be doing it. I think when I probably left to college I was thinking of being – I probably thought, what would it mean to be a city councilperson or a leader, a politician of some sort? I could probably do better than what they’re doing. But I didn’t necessarily – this is probably the first time I say it out loud, but that might be something I was thinking, and I think I was that naïve also on some level, because then I think in college I was realizing, that’s not at all what I want to do and I wouldn’t want to be part of the system, and kind of being able to see systems and institutionalized – racism, sexism, homophobia and all of that.

But I think that’s kind of – and I was going to come back – my parents had also said, come back home, you know, people – not really saying, Graciela, you need to come back, but kind of saying, notice how kids are going away to school but they’re not coming back home. All your brothers’ friends are going away but not coming back home. So, again, affirmative action, that’s really good for San Antonio but then a lot of people don’t come back. And many haven’t come back, but – so it was really important for them to have us come back, and so I think we’ve all come back except one. [Laughter.]

MS. CORDOVA: That’s pretty good. What about the process of applying to Yale? How did that come about?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Well, I think – the brother that I fought ended up going to every school. He went to prep school and there was – some Chicanos did what’s called the Wolverine – a Chicano group of people raise money and somehow made contact with some professors that were in the East Coast and somehow got one or two kids a year to go to a summer program like Choate and Worchester and little private schools. And so my brother, when he was 14, got to go and finished up there and then ended up going to Yale. And so like we followed – when he went north, we went to pick him up – instead of going back to Mexico to pick him up – to go on vacation, we started going north to pick up my brother. And so when he graduated I was like, he’s going to Yale; I’m going to Yale. It was like; I don’t want to go to the same school he’s going to. I was very upset, because there he was, the one that was my antithesis, or whatever.

MS. CORDOVA: What is his name?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Fernando.

MS. CORDOVA: Fernando, ok.

MS. CORDOVA: Yes, Xavier is the oldest – Xavier with an X – Bernard, Fernando, Gustavo, myself, and my sister Leticia. So there’s that element. Actually, growing up – in elementary school I read a lot of biographies – really, those dumb little children’s biographies, but the bigger ones, the better, and yet most biographies were written about boys, right, and about men, but I always tried to look for the women and I always tried to look for the people of color. There were only Native American and black – I think. But looking for those stories, and the men went to those schools, right, I think. So in my head probably was recognizing the name of the school, and that really was what it was.

So I knew the top 10 football team schools and then these Ivy League schools. I didn’t know anything about California at all, right, so those schools didn’t come up. And then, like I said, that principal that was at my high school the year before, they had just gotten their counselors to really get kids into schools, and I was friends with some of the seniors so I was able to see them applying for college, and the process. And there was Project STAY, which is like a 30-plus-year-old nonprofit that helped to teach lots of the Chicanos around here how to apply to schools and how to get some scholarships, or not get to pay all those little $10 and $20 fees for applying. So I didn’t have to pay any of those fees because – but I had learned from the friends that I knew that had applied.

So basically I had a head start with my process of applying. I knew what to do and just kind of started doing that. But nobody told me where to apply, so I applied everywhere, like 20-30 schools, because I didn’t know, you know, and I figured, well, okay, if I don’t get out of San Antonio I’m going to apply to Trinity. If I go into the state of Texas – you know, I’ve heard of UT Austin, I’ve heard of – I don’t remember but I applied to Southwest Texas State, three or four in Texas and then I went national and all the Ivy League schools, probably a couple – I probably didn’t even know about the women’s schools either because, again, in hindsight maybe I would have gone to a women’s school, and I didn’t know about sizes – small, medium, and large – and I think I was really just lucky because, I mean, the size that I got – I might have been a little overwhelmed with Austin.

And UTSA had just opened up and I remember being taken there and hating how ugly it looked. The architecture is real cold and sterile, and so I’m thinking, why would I want to come here? But that was like the only time I’d traveled to see anything. We weren’t given money to go anywhere else. But because I guess I did get to travel to the East Coast my parents were also comfortable with that area. My mom had heard stories about California being – from my dad, so California was not where they were going to send me off to. But, again, I didn’t even – I wouldn’t have been able to say Berkeley or Stanford or anything like that. So that’s kind of how –

MS. CORDOVA: She’d heard stories about California from your dad’s travels as a Navy sailor.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Probably so.

MS. CORDOVA: I see. [Laughs.] That might scare a mother.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Again, I’m not sure about, again, Yale versus whatever, but I ended up having second interview because they had interviews and the first interview I went to school not knowing there was going to be an interview, and I was wearing corduroy pants and whatever, and some other friend of mine had applied also and got an interview, and the guy was like, “Well, how come you didn’t dress up like her?” I said, “What do you mean, how come I didn’t dress up like her?” I was, like, dressed fine, and besides, it doesn’t matter how you’re dressed. And so I kind of challenged that whole notion of how one looks and whatever. And he was really, really upset and I thought my interview was going to be based on looks and all. And of course, I just cried and told my mom, and somehow she knew somebody who had gone to Yale, and it turns out to be Henry Cisneros’s cousin Mungia. She was a teacher at one of the high schools in Burbank. So my mom just made her a little call and all of a sudden I got a call from Mungia and said, “Well, you don’t really need a second interview; you got a really good interview and it was just fine.” She said, “But if you want one, I’ll get you another one.”

And it was through her that – just the moment of friendship, and she took me out to eat a little cheesecake and whatever, and I remember when I became a recruiter for kids to go to school, I kind of took that process, like, oh, this is friendly versus the white man who – the lawyer who put me in a bank and interviewed me there and he – for Princeton, or the one from Harvard. So maybe it was because Yale also had Chicanos that were really working actively versus the other Ivy League schools that didn’t have it, so I guess it just was a friendlier space and that’s how I ended up there.

MS. CORDOVA: Had you ever felt trapped in the San Antonio school system? I mean, it’s interesting to hear you didn’t have any college counseling at all, it sounds like.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Yeah. Well, again, there was tracking and there wasn’t tracking. So I remember in elementary there was A, B, and C, an I was in the A group until fifth grade and then I had a teacher who couldn’t keep any sort of discipline, so my mom could hear from a block away that – my classroom, because it was the classroom that faced that street, so a block away my mom could hear it. And I would probably come in complaining, and she’d say, “We’re going to move you.” So, again, these are the places that she would – and I got moved down to a B, right, and I was – so then it’s like, oh, I felt bad because – so I knew that there was something about tracking. And then by – and I think it followed a little bit in junior high but in junior high it kind of – I felt more mixed and so I saw, again, different schools coming together and kind of feeling, well, these people are keeping me behind, because my elementary was small compared to a couple of other feeder elementaries into the junior high, and so I think – I would say to you that my best education – public school education came from 1st through 6th grade.

And then after that I was basically repeating and bored a lot. And so in high school when I finally – there was, yeah, you could take English for those that were going on to college, and I remember again being bored because – reading some Shakespearian thing and people are going, well, me, oh, oh – you know, and in 10th grade learning stuff I had learned in 5th and 6th grade. So I was really upset by that. So, again, it’s like, okay, can I leave class and let me go and do something else and just kind of learn that way. And so, you know, again, I was going to go on to college, I guess. I knew that my parents were going to not keep their daughters – which, again, most of the other young Chicanitas, that was the problem is they wouldn’t let their daughters grow up, but in that case my parents didn’t have that problem.

But, yeah, it was really – the first semester of Yale was – it was the first time I got B and a C, you know. I got C’s. I had never gotten C’s. I had gotten probably a B and been traumatized by those B’s in high school for band because I thought I deserved the A also, and I didn’t know what it meant to have one class and eight books for that and four 20-page papers, or whatever, and you multiply that by four classes. And I didn’t understand what it meant to work and also have all this free time. And so the first semester I was working more hours than I should have probably worked, and I was the only one in my group of friends that had to do any work-study and had loans. Everybody else seemed to have the time and all of them seemed to do really well really quickly, but, again, until I learned about their experiences, for them, that’s all they had been doing for all their lives, so it was easy for them. They were probably repeating in the way I was repeating 5th grade stuff in 10th grade; they were probably repeating stuff they had learned in high school as well because they’d got to go to really good schools.

I mean, they didn’t have remedial classes or anything like that, but I just had to learn. So by the second semester I kind of said, okay, I can only work so many hours, and I was the first one in the library and I would park myself there and just study for a few hours and then leave my books, so I knew I would have a place to come back to, which is not – being hoggy I guess, but I kind of learned those sorts of things. Otherwise you don’t have a place to study.

And then by second semester I was getting A’s and B’s so I had stopped moving into the C. And then by the final year I was getting C’s again, but then it was a political decision. What I was writing was the concern, right, so I was going to get a lower grade because my political viewpoints weren’t what the professor liked, and I knew that and that was okay. So there was definitely a growth for me from not caring, also, about what the grades were going to be like at all.

MS. CORDOVA: How did that happen? How did that shift?

MS. SÁNCHEZ. I think, I mean, what was wonderful was having those eight books to read, right. And probably whoever those professors were – maybe they were liberal ones that said, okay, “I’m going to give you a whole lot of Marxist stuff, but I’ll give you a conservative one and you decide what you like.” And so, one of them, I guess when I was a junior, I remember being – during mid-term or spring break – I would just stay at school, right, so I had more time to keep up and catch up with the reading. And so reading like Schooling in Capitalist America [Schooling in capitalist America: educational reform and the contradictions of economic life by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. New York: Basic Books, 1976] – so, okay, I underlined almost every word – [laughs] – or something like that. I was like, oh, I enjoy what I’m reading.

All of this is making sense and kind of following that. Just finding those books – I was taking labor history classes and saying, oh, this is what’s happening because I wanted to take Chicano history, but there was only one Chicano history class, right, and I wanted to take other things. And so it was in those places that I guess I got to have a better critique of the world and that’s how I understood it.

And again, I can’t remember any professor that just really guided me. It was just – they were mainly quite professors that were there too, but they may all have been somewhat liberal in that – they weren’t somebody I wanted to be attached to and so I kind of left without having that guidance. When they come back here and now see all these Chicano professors working really hard with Chicano young students and saying you’ve got to continue with the track of going on to college and being a professor. You have to do this, you need to be there, you need to go on to graduate school – all this guidance, just like, that wasn’t there.

To have an Antonio Castaneda – [inaudible] – was like, wow. [Laughter.] There’s so many more, but, yeah, there was the one. Juan Bruce-Novoa, who is actually Colombiano, but he was there, and –

MS. CORDOVA: Did you take a class with him?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Actually, no because he was there when I was a freshman, so he was teaching upper-level courses. But I remember going to some lectures and he was involved with helping the Chicano students any way. So, I always engaged my older brother, who ended up taking a year – he and I were there when he was a senior and I was freshman because he took a year off. So, through him, I kind of saw – it was when I was in college there, all off the sudden, we became friends.

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughs.]

MS. SÁNCHEZ: And I think, political stuff, too, I think. So, he got to know him and I didn’t get to know him, and he took two years off, and came back, and whatever. And only some deans, the Chicano dean, who wasn’t a teacher – those were the people who were the only Chicanos at the school besides the students and there were a hundred students, I think. Well, 30 students for every incoming class.

MS. CORDOVA: The East Coast must have been a bit of a culture shock for you.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: I loved it, right, because I also went to movies all the time when I was a little kid. My sister and I would take the bus. I mean, again, this was where a teacher tells you, like, here are all these films, maybe you can check them out. We don’t have access to anything but the bus, so my parents gave me – We would catch a bus at 5:00, do the double feature up on San Pedro, which is the [Omnis?] theater that doesn’t exist any more, and we would see foreign films, or old ‘40s and ‘50s movies. And so we were there for four hours and my dad would pick us up.

So I think the exposure to other places was just something I wanted, and so when I was there, sure it was a culture shock, but I liked the pace, I liked the – I liked the diversity in people. I mean walk out in New Haven and some guy comes up to me, ¿Tu hablas Español? And I say, sure. And then he talks like Puerto Rican and so it’s like oh no. [Laughter.] I don’t understand what you’re saying. Slow down, slow down, slow down. And then to be able to differentiate that and New Haven wasn’t necessarily pretty as New Haven until you get into the campus and then – it’s all – that’s pretty.

And did do so some – I was thinking of coming back to San Antonio to teach. So, when I started taking those Schooling in Capitalist America, or whatever, I was like, well, maybe I should just kind of take extra classes, so I can teach when I come back to San Antonio before I become a lawyer. I think by that time I was thinking of maybe doing that. So then I was teaching within in my senior semester, the first or – the first semester I teaching in the schools – one of the schools. In New Haven so it kind of got to be more integrated into the community. And I walked to work and walked back and so it was a lot of poverty and a lot of East Coast, urban, ugly. [Laughs.] What is it at its worst and that compared to what I was living in and known.

MS. CORDOVA: And so you were at Yale in the early ‘80s, is that right?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: ‘78 TO ‘82.

MS. CORDOVA: And you joined MEChA there, right?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: After like, during the second semester. Probably more the second year, yeah, again, rejection at first because of what I had been raised – think Chicanos are bad and all that sort of stuff and then – and hanging out with more of my white – well, the people in the dormitories. It wasn’t by floor, it was by entryway, so across the entryway was a Chicana from El Paso, across the way was another Chicana from somewhere else. Downstairs was another Chicana. And they had their roommates and there was diversity.

There was the woman whose daddy and mom worked in the – for some embassy, whatever, so was exposed to people of color, and so she was very – good people. They were more sympathetic and understanding of difference, and so kind of, the African, Afro-Jewish woman, and so it was kind of fun with those sorts of people. And then, after getting to know some – getting involved with MEChA and – a little bit of the time – and they were doing theater there. And one of my, again, entryway friends was – was she from El Paso? So she said, let’s do some – all the guys were doing theater, let’s do our own stuff. And we did something like “Macho MEChA Men” from “Macho Macho Men.” [Laughter.] So all of us did drag and we did Luis – whatever his name is – Lois Valdez’s – what’s the other one that he does all the time that everybody does? I can’t think of it?

MS. CORDOVA: “The Vendidos?”

MS. SÁNCHEZ: “Los Vendidos” – and kind of playing off. And then someone like Juan Bruce-Novoa seeing that and saying, ya’ll are so passé, don’t be doing stuff that was done in the ‘70s or whatever. Kind of, not – feeling hurt because it’s like, I never even have been exposed to it and somebody kind of showed it. And again, we still played with gender and all those sorts of things, and – but I understand, like, okay, I see where he was coming from, but his critique could have been little – [laughs] – nicer.

So, kind of did that with friends like that, and by junior year I lived off campus and ended up rooming with a Chicana from Tucson and so, again, I got much more integrated in all of that – I mean but still kept my white friends too, but less and less each year.

MS. CORDOVA: Was MEChA like one of the primary organizations you were involved with or were there others that you were –

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Principally MEChA – again, I did Children’s Theater also because of some of my white friends who had seen that a lot of you were doing theatre – and I had done theater in high school and junior high school, but it was kind of nerve racking because again, that’s working with the white kids. I mean Yale has a lot of good theater – not just the graduate school, but it was at the undergraduate level, everybody just did it just it as volunteers so it was just a lot to see. There were 12 plays that popped up every you know, week and different people doing it – they were all student run, amazing kids, right – [laughs] – and so it was the place that really –

I mean I’m not one that – I would always memorize but I was always memorizing at the last moment so I was like, mm can’t do this here. So I did some of that with them but I kind of pulled away in that – in a way that I felt comfortable and I guess I wanted to see, you know – feeling safer with Chicanas, to be able to do that a little bit more. But you know I think that years later they did this thing with Chicana theater group, but not while I was there – just those are the moments that we spent entertaining ourselves and really – and the community. And it was Chicanas and Boriquas right, kind of working with the African-American and the Asian communities. So there was definitely a lot of that junior and senior year and trying to push to get a MEChA house and we ended up doing MEChA and Asians, kind of dividing up a building and so –

MS. CORDOVA: So it much more, sort of third world kind of grouping of what, Chicanos and all the Puerto Ricans along with Asians.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And not the international types actually, like so although I get – and this was the late 70’s, 80’s so we’re in a lot of exposure to all the struggles in Central America – started coming some friends that I happened to get to know from the international level, who were really active in trying to stop wars in Central America and there was all that you know, South African and Apartheid – so there were demonstrations that were happening. And you know you walked to classes and there it was. So you were just exposed to all of that and people that came and spoke were always, you know, radicals – and again this is funny, I think of where I met [Gloria] Anzaldúa was up at Yale and that had just published This Bridge Called My Back [This bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color, editors, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa; Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981], so you know, I have first edition, 1982, you know, while they were there.

But in also being kind of caught up and trying to write something about Anzaldúa and you know, people were – the Chicano, the people of color – saying Eldredge Cleaver is in town, and he’s going to speak so you all have to go, right? And it’s like who? Who’s he, right? And then the white women were saying, oh there’s this book called This Bridge Called My Back, so it was white women saying the book. So I did both and I checked out Eldredge Cleaver and felt really bad that I hadn’t gone to the other one, and that next day Anzaldúa was having a small session, whichever Chicano showed up, and there were six or seven of us and so it was just like breakfast and lunch with her, just we hung out with her.

But, you know, again, always being divided is like am I a person of color, man, woman – and I hadn’t identified as a lesbian then, but I was really – that Chicana from Tucson ended up being a lesbian. She had to take her time coming out to me and all that sort of stuff but you know, and so I don’t know that I even knew Anzaldúa was a lesbian per se, but that was just my moment with me, not that they’re because of the – I mean, again, those schools bring in a lot of big names, right. So we would go, so I don’t know, that’s what I guess in hindsight think, well those are good things, and those are the places that I kind of remember even to this day.

I can think of all the bad places of being attacked – I mean I would probably have killed myself with all the depression and you know, that happens and the abuse – that can happen to the work that we do here so we try to think of the good things. So that’s not – it’s a good thing, it’s a bad thing.

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughter.] So was This Bridge Called My Back immediately influential on you or was it sort of a timed process, over time.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Well, I think I probably read it right – I mean I was basically going to graduate that – I mean it was probably March, April – the spring of ‘82 when they came through, and so I probably picked it up afterwards and read it and read bits and pieces of it. I think it was pretty immediate, I mean because I always say that that’s the theory that ends the basis of the Esperanza. And again, it’s many women of color kind of putting their voices there, but – with Anzaldúa and – kind of having their ideas in – I remember certain grants you need to be able to quote any of these women saying there’s no higher gear of oppression and bah bah bah bah bam. And so because, again, I can identify that and say well this is how it has to work here at the Esperanza because what we’re dealing with – I mean deal with the men urbanizing is that it is about race and class and not the rest of the stuff like – what the white people are – same sort of thing – [laughs]. And I think Anzaldúa, especially her more recent stuff, you know, working with white people and working with men, and you know again, this was the Esperanza just because we – I mean I think of it as both exposures of our reality but was existing here and what we want it to create plus – that’s another thing writings also said.

And it was Audre Lorde, and we were trying to bring Audrey Lure and then she died and so – but again, because we knew their writings and I knew them and I mean to this day, again, there are young women that come in and they’ve never read any of their stuff, and it’s like, here’s a book, you know – here’s your present you know, read it now. And I don’t know that they’re necessarily reading it, I would like to actually have time to say, okay let’s do this and let’s do that. Some of the staff, you know, especially some of the younger staff never would know these book at all, especially if they were educated in Texas. So they went their way to California, somewhere open, and it’s supposed to be – [inaudible] – but if they stay in Texas, another loss. So you know, it’s been fun to have 16 and 17 and 18-year-old girls come back you know 10 years later saying, thank you for giving me these books, thank you for introducing me to these names. Like when I went to this college I was able to not get lost, just go right to the place of the people who I would be teaching the vision anyway.

MS. CORDOVA: And so when you graduated from Yale in what field?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Is it combining with sociology and history? And I think it was, again, it was for the classes, one that I was taking. You know, walking into a political science class, it’s bullshit and walk out of there, you know. This is what you could do, you could go for a week or so many days or two weeks and check out classes, right, and of course you’d be falling behind if you didn’t focus and take classes to classes continue, right, but at least you – got exposed at first I found myself jumping in and out of classes until I found people that I liked. And so that’s – and then it ended up being there, so no to political science, couldn’t get into economics whatsoever, you know, but the sociology classes kept on popping up and these history classes kept on popping up, and women’s study was brand new so there really wasn’t much there, you know taking class in film. These little things like that that – wanted to take the one about more ethnic studies on [inaudible] or whatever that was being done by some guy named Tom – or whatever. They always had groups from New York, you know, playing Salsa – so I’d go to the dance but I never took the class because I thought I’m not supposed to take that – that’s the easy class. [Laughs].

But that’s what people were saying about sociology, those were easy classes, you don’t come to Yale to take sociology and so I kind of had to hide that also because that was a piece of guess you weren’t finding the classes that I’m interested in. And this is explaining my life to me in a better way and nobody damned history, but definitely sociologists are kind of problematic – nobody was going to – shouldn’t have also done the teacher certification, but there was a group of them and so within that group it was okay. But still people – again, you’re going to either be a doctor or a lawyer if you went to Yale, and so those were good choices. A politician would be with a lawyer and it’s just a known fact, yeah. So I really had to hide everything else – [laughs].

MS. CORDOVA: All right, let me – this is a good point to stop this tape and put in another, so we’ll take a break here. All right, we are recording, this is Cary Cordova for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Today is June 25th, 2004 and this is session one, disc two with Graciela Sánchez. And so I guess my first question to you on this disc would be, did you come back to San Antonio immediately after Yale, or what happened? I mean I know your parents have already sort of been very clear that they wanted you to come home. Was that a tough decision at all?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: No, I wanted to come home, I had had that experience and I thought – I was coming back to teach. And I had learned all this stuff and I wanted to work with my community and so I applied to teach and didn’t get hired – [laughs] – and I went to my high school and said, “You need to hire me because I came through this school and I went to this school and you should want to hire me.” I didn’t say that, but in my head I probably was thinking that it would be that easy to get in and I applied in two different school districts. San Antonio has like 13 school districts or more.

I finally get accepted to teach but it was after I took on another job and that was work at Southwest Voter Registration Project because it was getting closer to September and I didn’t have a job, so probably at one of these Chicano, East Coast, school reunion, somebody said, “Oh, there’s Southwest looking for somebody as a paralegal.” Again, by that time I was really thinking about teaching so it was like well, maybe that’s something, I don’t know what that is. So I really –to you – [laughter] – and –

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughter.] So I mean you didn’t very much about the project, the – before you joined it.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Actually it’s interesting, in my junior year I actually took – I got accepted to the LBJ School for Public Policy, or whatever that they had you know, kids of color getting accepted to these programs so then they could maybe go on to graduate school and public policy. And four Chicanas – two from Princeton, one from Harvard and myself – got in and then maybe a couple of Chicano guys from the East Coast, but everybody else was Texas-based Chicanos going for this program. And so we all kind of hung together, and found – politically, again, found ourselves being more radical than anybody going to school from the undergraduate level in Texas.

And so we formed friendships around the schools, which is kind of – I mean we made friends with these other women, but these other Chicano women were looking for their husband-type sort of discussions and they, you know, young Chicanos that were coming with us from the East Coast were interested in those young Chicano women – [laughs] – all those horrors, right?

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughs].

And I don’t know if you know, but Luz Calvo, she’s now in Ohio and she said – I’m not even sure what department – but she started at UCLA in political science as a graduate student and then dropped out and maybe went to the school of History of Consciousness Program at Santa Cruz and now – [inaudible] – in Ohio. She was one of those friends who I’ve continued to be friends with – the other two became attorneys and became further centrists, and not politically. And Luz and I became friends, and we both also came out to each other, but while we were there as juniors going into senior years, they were all very straight.

[Cross talk].

MS. CORDOVA: Actually you were just telling me how you and Luz had just come out to each other and this was –

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Well, actually when we were in the program, everybody was real heterosexual and I had just had my first year living with a lesbian and got to be –

MS. CORDOVA: At Yale?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: At Yale.

MS. CORDOVA: Okay.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: My roommate was a lesbian and she had her friends, right. So I wasn’t that big, and I still hadn’t identified and that was okay – I mean if what I did with my four years – you got to study. I mean you’re going to really mess up if you get involved with anything or anybody or whatever, right, and even the – [inaudible] – can only be MEChA because of the skills that I had to build up and I just need what I had versus what everybody else had. And so, all of us are good kids and good smart kids but some would be more experienced to know how write as well as they did – whatever – it was too many 20-page papers and 30-page papers.

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughs].

MS. SÁNCHEZ: So that was my focus, not really dealing with my sexuality, but at least in my junior year, being exposed to my roommate and her friends and you know just – I mean I had been raised to be about justice so there was no way I was going to feel awkward or you know – well, awkward I was feeling – but being able to discriminate, because I was exposed into going to you know, a magazine – a woman’s magazine, but then all around me were lesbians. It was like wow I haven’t been around a whole bunch of lesbians. And kind of feeling a little awkward about it and those sorts of moments and not knowing, again, who to talk to because I wasn’t going to say anything that was going to hurt my roommate.

But so that exposure at least made me feel a little more comfortable and by my senior year, the first national like gay/lesbian days at the university’s Glad Days as I guess they would call happened, and that was 1982. And I know at that time I was the president of MEChA, you know, had to challenge the homophobia coming from the younger undergraduate students from freshmen and sophomores – you know again, not identifying as a lesbian but walking around with a pink triangle and saying, you know, we have to support other people that are different and end up being, you know, same oppressions. So kind of making those connections. And so at least I had those experiences, then coming to Texas and kind of seeing the super heterosexuality of the U.S. – supposed to get married and the dorms, the men, could go on to the women’s side after you live in a – [inaudible] – that women couldn’t go to the men’s side after 11 o’clock and would be penalized and pushed down and kicked out. You know, we were called communist – [laughs] – they just – my lower scores of any time was at the LBJ school because again, it just became a – that’s where I guess I realized the politics – [inaudible] – did here and never ever followed up with whatever grades. I don’t even know if they passing or whatever, but so that again, allowed us to be strong friends amongst the poor Chicanos.

MS. CORDOVA: And that was between your junior –

MS. SÁNCHEZ: ‘80, yeah,

MS. CORDOVA: And senior year in the summer.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the summer. And so, I don’t know where the – how I got into that. But, oh – so then I did come home – I guess you were asking about that – and during that summer program, though, one of the Chicanas, Juanita [Hernandez] and others who were at Harvard got new – Rillian was maybe doing her senior thesis on voting rights because she was from Crystal City, so for her it was a strong connection, so she was a strong Chicana from Crystal City and –

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughs.]

MS. SÁNCHEZ: And so she came to interview him and she brought me along, and so we got to meet him, and that’s kind of how I met him, and so I knew of Southwest voter registration project, but I wasn’t interested in voter registration education. When I took the job, it was just like, it’s a job, I’ll do it, and after like two or three months, I didn’t want to be there any more, and my mom said, “You gave them two years, that’s your commitment, you have to be there for two years,” and so I kind of went ahead and stayed on.

And again, all of those – and again, in hindsight, say, okay, but at least it was the experience, so I understand what it was to work in a non-profit from that point on. I understood the inequities within a Chicano, non-profit organization that’s about speaking about justice, not actually being interested in a lot of the issues that I thought were of interest because, again, I was doing work around women’s issues and Central America activism, and wanted to see why we weren’t asking – it was about polling the community about issues and how do women think? How do Latino women think? And their response was Latina women think how their husbands think, and I was like, no. [Laughs.] And what do you they think about Central America? And it’s like – it’s an international issue is not a domestic issues. But it’s like, yeah, but our domestic moneys are – so I knew all those things and kind of was frustrated and had no entry to talk to William [Willie Velasquez] or to any of the men who were the people with power.

All the women – I was the person – as a paralegal, I had more power than any of the other women because they were all secretaries or research assistants who didn’t go to an Ivy League school. And so I didn’t – I was given that respect of kind of being above them for that reason even though they had a history of being in that institution and were smart and good research assistants. But they all got paid less and they had very little insurance or they didn’t – I mean like one of the secretaries had a baby and they had no insurance for her that covered maternity leave and all that sort of stuff.

And so David – David Montejano, who worked their for a couple of years or a year – that’s how I met him – had his partner at that time, Margarita, have a baby and so he did insurance to cover so then all of the sudden they were able to cover them, right? So I saw – I was like, this is really messed up, right. And I was getting paid $16,000 as a first year in 1982, which was, again, more money than my father had ever made. But that was more than any of the secretaries were making and yet much less than the 40, 50 thousand dollars that the men were making as director of litigation, and policy, and Willie’s own position.

And you know, all the women had no names; they were all called ladies. Hey lady, hey lady, hey lady from Willie’s point of view and I – like, my office was right across his, but it was always closed. It wasn’t an office that I could just walk into. And so I didn’t like that and I didn’t – and MALDEF [Mexican American Legal Defense] was just a little bit further down and always wanting to see how MALDEF could get more involved in the local issues, or the regional issues that were affecting us.

And again, I understand non-profits a lot better, and so they have to pick and choose what issues – but their issues were education and voting rights for the most part and we were like, but there are all these other issues that we wanted to be involved in, and their excuse was always, well, California – which is the where the office headquarters are – doesn’t want to get involved. And so they just never got involved. Years later, I saw a new director there and he didn’t – he did what California said, but he also got involved locally, and I was like, wow, finally.

So they were just making it up – they didn’t want to get involved in their own ways. I mean, like, around immigration – if we want to get them involved it’s hard for us to still just call them in because they can price beat the issues, but they’re not integrated in organizing at all on the local – or even as it affects on a national level because that’s just not the policy that they have taken or, again, the local council not to be involved.

And working as a paralegal, what I was doing was on redistricting. And so it was kind of funny because I guess computers were real brand new, message machines were brand new. Nobody had computers except for the secretary, right, and they were just learning how to use them. So I mean all the calculations really to figure out districts were all by hand and – oh and that junior year, also – going to senior year – that summer – I also worked for the city planning department because somebody got me a job – I don’t know – because maybe because of the policy institute. And it was interesting because I was helping them in planning to do division of the city by the district, right. And I remember being used by the white city planning department when they took me to meet with MALDEF and Southwest Voter Registration Project to talk about the plan that the city was integrate – was interested in bringing up and running to someone named Judith Sanders-Castro, and saying they’re using you. And I said, oh, well that’s – I’m just an intern. I have no idea that I’m being used.

And then again, seven months later I’m working on the other side – not with the city. But that was just an internship and so I did a lot of calculating of that – addition, subtraction, division – and color-coding maps and being frustrated because I was bored. It was like, this is what college got me was – I had learned this in up to third grade or something like. I didn’t need a – and I see this with young people, too, because some of the work here, is like, yeah, we have to sweep, we have to mop, we have to do these things, but hopefully finding them projects that really get them excited, whereas over there was it was the same thing, but it had to be done. And I guess nobody sat with me to explain the bigger context of the work, right. It was just like, here’s what you need to do and just do it. And again, I had to learn the larger context at some point.

Again, I wasn’t supportive of the politics because Willie also talked about the power – coming from the top, and that the leadership – we had to educate the leadership. So if we’re going to get them elected, let’s select people that are going to be elected and then let’s educate them what the issues are, and then they will tell their community, and it will go back down the other way. So if you want to – okay, let’s get involved in Central America; okay, let’s teach them what’s going on in Central America, and it will set that right versus – most organizers go bottom up, right.

MS. CORDOVA: How were you learning what was happening in Central America? Like what were your sources?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Well, again, I learned, initially, the stuff in the East coast, and when I came here, I searched out for similar sort of program or any organization doing that, and there was group called Latin America Assistance. And it was a whole bunch of white activists – older than me, but they doing some of that work. I know that during the ‘82, ‘83, ‘84, there was the socialist workers party, and other folks like that were around, and they were going to these events or they would always pass out their little newspapers and then try to recruit.

So I remember some platíca [workshop/talk] somewhere, so I went to that and of course they were trying to hone in on me, and I just didn’t feel like I needed to be on anybody’s party. It’s like, I didn’t know them enough and I felt just too much pressure. But I would go to these talks, or workshops, or film screenings or whatever was around in San Antonio at that time, and that’s how I just kind found out what was going on, but feeling that there wasn’t a lot going on also. That it was limited again to a lot male-centered stuff or nothing on women, and the Chicanos were very mainstream and very domestic focused. And they had been doing it. I mean if think MALDEF and Southwest they all lived in Southwest, they think they had – [inaudible] – differently since ‘68, so it was a little less than 20 years, but – I guess Southwest was probably 10 years old at that time, so for me they seemed old. They just seemed really – so even though I probably thought they were that much older, they were just kind of – that was the energy the interest they were focusing on.

And at some point I ran into Chicana women doing organizing around Central America and another Chicana that helped set up – well all these Chicanas ended up helping to set up the Esperanza at some point. And were finding each other, but it was like year ‘83 and ‘84. It was like, God, it took us that many years to meet each other and we were in the same town. That shouldn’t be happening. There should be some place that we can all can know to come that makes it just that much quicker. [Laughs.] And that we were real frustrated with the sexism that we were seeing within our own Chicano community, and outside of that, but especially with that because we were working with these guys. And again, just their lack of global vision and so we just talked to each other.

And then I kept on saying, why don’t we do it, why don’t we do it? We can do it; they did, they did, and they who just did in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. And again, not really knowing the history about like how in ‘60s and the ‘70s, there was more money from D.C. that was coming through and they were looking for these sorts of projects to be able to underwrite and to support, and that’s how a lot of these groups got started where we were in the midst of the Reagan years – [laughs] – and yet it was so bad that we were present and we were organizing off the street, but it was like we were still so isolated, and it’s still a big, spread out city. So we just moved around and had everything in the backs of our cars, and what else?

And then, I did get involved in my first relationship when I came back.

MS. CORDOVA: While you were with the Southwest Voters?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Yeah, yeah. And I guess from – for about a year, I lived with my parents and that – and all my high school friends – my closest high school friends – we all became – we all came out to each other. So we didn’t know that when we were in high school and when we were away, they kept – they started going to the gay bars, but they didn’t tell me. And then when I came back home, they all little by little came out, and one of our friends went to Michigan, and she came back and she was a lesbian, too. [Laughs.] And there was a – so all the women became lesbians and we had one gay friend, male friend. He was doing drag – [laughs] – and all that sort of stuff.

And it was like, why did you keep all this from – but I think again, in hindsight, we figured out and said, well we hung with each other because we could seek these things. We talked about having crushes on that teacher and that was a woman teacher, and though we didn’t trash each other or make fun each other, we just thought that was cool and you’re going to give her flowers, that’s cool. [Laughs.] And you open up your locker you have all these women in images of Hollywood inside. I was like, that’s cool – we didn’t know, right, and in the – what was it – when I graduated, Anita Bryant in ‘78 and high school was a big anti-gay person and I remember standing in band formation and having to fight one of my Chicana Baptist friends who just was totally anti-gay, and just – again, just that sense of justice and what was right and what was wrong. I just could be firm about it without having any identify towards being gay just knowing that was wrong to just be attacking gay people.

So that was what I knew – and San Antonio is just closeted anyway that everybody comes out in their own way but just hides it from everybody else, but at some point, when I came back, then I found out that they were all going to bars, and I said, well, let me go. So then I just kind of went with my friends and it was – and mom was like, well, why are you going out? Where are you going? [Laughter.] And then I got involved with this woman, and then it was an abusive relationship, so that wasn’t any good.

MS. CORDOVA: And that was about 1982, ‘83, or somewhere in there.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: ‘83 to like early – till ‘85 – sometime in ‘85.

MS. CORDOVA: Well, that’s a long time to be in that relationship.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: It was a year-and-a-half. And that for me – it was like a year-in-a-half – that was really horrible. And when I think – and the only thing that – at that point, it was just the worst thing because I had wasted such a long time in a relationship and – I mean the time that – I lived with her probably a year and I lived with her because of the pressures of you need to come live with me.

I hadn’t been involved in any relationship. So again, I didn’t know boundaries and I hadn’t had those experiences, so it was kind of the worst sort of situation – [laughs] – to be in your first relations, and be abusive, and not know – like where I would have said to a man, you don’t abuse me, you don’t hit me, you don’t scream at me, and all that stuff – I knew that I could say that to a man, but it’s like, well, here’s a woman. She’s telling me her story, and her story was that she was abused, and she was hurt, and so I feel empathy, sympathy, or whatever, and want to take care, which is again that whole we’ve been raised to take of.

So that is what I found myself ending up doing and then when I tried to talk to people about the abusive relationship, nobody wanted to listen. I mean I didn’t tell my parents, I didn’t tell my sister – my sister was in college. So maybe if she had been home I would have been able to talk to her. But when I told some of my high school friends who were queer, they didn’t want to hear it. So it was – so I was a little confused about, like, where to go, what to do.

MS. CORDOVA: Why didn’t they want to hear it – your friends?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Well, because I found out that the one when I did tell very directly was also in an abusive relationship. And so I think there’s just a lot of abuse going on – straight and gay. So maybe that was part of it.

MS. CORDOVA: So what was – that must have been a huge moment for you or a very important time to finally come out and admit – or were you admitting that you were a lesbian, or was this sort of an experiment, or how were you dealing with this experience?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Well, when I came out, I finally came out and I placed all the blame on my being gay to the theory I was reading. So I had just read – [laughter] – Compulsory Heterosexuality [London: Onlywomen Press, 1981] by what’s her name – a real famous, white feminist. I can’t think of her name. Adrienne Rich.

MS. CORDOVA: Oh, right, okay.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: And it was within a book called Compulsory Heterosexuality and – [inaudible] – fantastic – [inaudible] – because – [inaudible] – what it was that I was reading. And I think it was in the book – I think I bought it in one of the bookstores. Again, I came back and I wanted the same – it was just really active in college and just what – everything I had there and over here it was like there was so much missing. And so I went to those – I was getting paid, so I actually didn’t have to go to a library, I could actually buy books and that’s the place, that moment, I probably bought more books than ever in my life.

And then when I stopped working and I just hated going to bookstores because I couldn’t buy a book anymore, but at that point – so I just thought, I didn’t know – just felt like, let me read it and I was able to read that it was like, it justified. It was like well, of course, if men are this way and it’s just horrible world with the men, and I’ve never really gotten along with these men because of these same situations – they don’t listen to me when I speak, they kind of do this, and this, and this – And then later on well, maybe I did have a crush on – I think I was doing that in college, too – my junior, senior year – kind of really questioning that. But then here it was just kind like more politically I can totally acknowledge that this is the place that I should go, and okay, then, it’s all right – so kind of going there in that direction.

So that was my rationalizing, but then it was okay because all my friends were gay also, but again, we didn’t talk. It was just about going out and dancing. [Laughs.]

[End of tape one.]

And I – my girlfriend kind of said, you know, you need to move out of the house, and you should tell your mom you’re going out, you’re leaving. And so in a very bad way, you know, it’s like I ended up coming out to my mom because, you know, my friend at that time was driving me, and my mom was sitting up front with my friend at that time and I was in the back and we were having this conversation that was really a hard conversation. And my mom starts crying and then I come out to her and she’s not wanting to hear it. And it was really ugly. And I think, again, I wasn’t having – I don’t think I had any problems telling her, but maybe the way I was, you know, pushed to do that that didn’t work well. And so my mom just said, “Don’t tell your father; that would be the worst thing. Just promise me that.” So I did. And I just never told him for a long time even though, you know, when I started doing the work at the Esperanza years later it was just all over the place, so – and I ended up telling him as well.

So I was pressured, you know, to do a lot of stuff, you know, I was – like when I quit my job at Southwest Voter Registration, one of the things I had wanted to do was go to Nicaragua and I had saved money and, the reason I wanted to go was because everybody that was organizing here was very white and I was really working hard to get the Chicano community or all the Latino community to be more engaged in what was going on in international level – especially in Central America, but just in general. And again, it’s just who had the privilege to go over there and what everybody that was going there was just really excited about, you know, going to exotic lands – [inaudible] – and learning. Yeah, they were really committed to the struggle there, but it just didn’t feel right. But everybody that went, you know, had the money to do that. So I wanted to – and they all came back with slides, slide shows, and I wanted to come back with something that was more – you know, that you could see those people talk to themselves rather than me being the person that spoke for them.

So I was planning to go and my partner and friend at that time, Betty, you know, wasn’t going to go. She was ROTC – a scholarship to go into college, so she was studying to be a nurse. She is a nurse and she ended up joining the military. She went to Nicaragua with me even though I didn’t want her to go because it was like, okay, good, I can be away from her for this moment, and she said she didn’t want to go but then she ended up going because she was – and, I mean, on some level it was good to have another person there to help with the filming because one of us had to carry all the stuff and the other one would do the camera; one had to interview while the other one did the camera. And it’s just, you know – it is just easier to travel with another person, but the abuse continued over there, too. I mean, and I was always just more, like, shamed all the time, like from this apartment that we lived in, in San Antonio to places we stayed in Nicaragua. I mean, it’s like, there was – like, the apartment here was a duplex and I was, like, these people next door can hear this. [Laughs.] It’s like, you know, it was like – I was ashamed, you know.

And yet, you know, also it was, “Can’t you hear and why aren’t you calling?” I didn’t have a phone in that place either because there was – I just never did and I didn’t know about living really, and I somehow didn’t need the phone. But then, in those moments of crisis it was like, why don’t I have a phone here? And maybe that was a conscious effort on this other person’s part not to let me – not to think about the phone or whatever. And we were very isolated, and yet I did continue to work on Central America stuff, so that was kind of finally out, besides work, you know. And what was good for her was I was making money, right? So economically I could provide for whatever.

MS. CORDOVA: Was she physically hurting you?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Yes. Yes. And then – but in hindsight, it’s like all the emotional and psychological stuff was just crazier for me, right? But, yeah, I mean – and I could defend myself but I never, hit back. And I was, again, in that moment was like, where is there help for this person? I need to get help for this person. This person needs to get counseling – you know, talking to a lot of people but not finding the hope. There was no community to reach out to. And the saving grace was just friendships with other – and again, I kept on organizing.

So I finally, in ‘84, met one of the women, Susan Guerra, who ended up helping to – you know, dream with me the Esperanza. And she was a straight woman, married with two kids, and – or one kid at that time. And so we just clicked, you know. She had gone to Norway and she was coming back, and so she had an experience of going away, of coming back, of being radical, of looking for a place. And she had been looking for me. They called me once. I didn’t return that call. [Laughs.] And then she didn’t call me back for another year because she was organizing around the International Women’s Day. And so when I did talk to her, we just clicked and we became really good friends.

And so she’s the person that I was able to confide in about the abuse, the relationship I was in, little by little. And then I was also getting a crush on her, she was getting a crush on me, but that never went anywhere. [Laughter.] Because I think, you know, that was like, okay, this is my limit; I’m not going to do that. But I mean – but someone that, you know – I mean, she was seven years older than me but was really able to just kind of pull me away from that, just to be able to say, “This is wrong; you don’t have to be involved.” And then, again, it just happens that, you know, if I probably hadn’t had a crush on her I wouldn’t have been able to pull up on another level, you know. But the – you know – What happened?

I mean, I know that – at some point I just ran off, you know, and she helped to take me out of the house. And she had set it up for me to stay with some friend of hers for a week and stuff like that. And my brother – my second-oldest brother is gay, and so – I hadn’t, again, told him, and he and I weren’t really out to each other. And because of your – when you’re in an abusive relationship you’re still not talking to anybody; you see your family less and all your friends, right? So she was able to talk to him and let him know what was going on, so he kind of got involved. And again, all hidden from my family because it’s not the best way to come out or to – you know, it’s like, I’ve come out and now I’ve been beat up.

MS. CORDOVA: Around this time did you also start taking film classes? I mean, I know you took some equipment down to Nicaragua. Were you studying film?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: No. I think it was – no, I was just – video was also just coming out as something new, and so that’s why, when I went to Nicaragua, I just knew I was going buy video equipment and a camera and just go and do it. So it was just in the weeks before when I purchased the equipment and went to Nicaragua that I practiced and that sort of thing and just took that down there. And then when I came back and did the – you know, made the documentary, it was kind of dorky and all that stuff. But –

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughs.] What was it like? What was that documentary like?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Well, it was called Testimonios de Nicaragua and so it was really stories of men and women, young and old and everywhere in between, telling their stories of what the struggles were down there, and kind of just trying to take as many interviews. So I mean, I think the stories were fun. I just – you know, I didn’t know the technique of the edit in the same way I knew what the language was that I wanted to do, but I didn’t know the technology of what you could do. And so when I – you know, when I see it it’s like, it would be nice to have done this and this and this, but I didn’t know that.

And I worked with a film editor in Houston later on. I mean, so I came back having made that film – I mean, so I had all this footage. And it’s like, oh, now it costs money. You know, so I had money to buy it but I didn’t have money to edit it. Well, being, again, in the community, it’s like, “Will you edit, or, can you edit and how cheaply can you edit, or, can you edit for free?” There was cable access, but cable access was so hard. You know, you only had four hours a week to be able to go in. And so it was like, no, I have to do better than that.

So with footage of, you know, interviews that I liked, I was able to at least start going and showing people that had been organizing with some of the films. And at one point I was in – [inaudible] – one of these places and some people from El Paso saw some of the stuff, and they were like, “Oh, you need to get a grant for this and let’s help you write a grant.” And so they were able to help me write a grant. That got $5,000, and so we ended up being able – then we had to find the editor, who ended up being with Southwest Alternative Media Project in Houston, and they helped edit. So they just, you know, did the basic stuff. You know, throughout the year that I was looking to edit it, people were helping to transcribe hours and hours of, you know, stuff.

But – so different people in the community also participated, because I think everybody was excited about this idea. And then – so it got done and it turned out to be like about 55 minutes or something, because I think that editor at least knew that it had to be about that long or shorter.

And then I took that video – and the idea, again, was to use it to educate, not to keep it and become a star, whatever, but just to take it around. And so I went from, you know, Nacogdoches, Texas, to the NAACS Conference in El Paso and, you know, just different places that they would – you know, in the community.

MS. CORDOVA: And so from – what year was your trip and then what year were you touring the film?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: So this film – like the trip was ‘84. The film was either – you know, it was about a year later, like ‘85 or ‘86 or something like that, you know. For me it seemed ages, but for like other filmmakers, you know, one of them, a local friend here, said, you know, it’s because you didn’t know how hard it was that you did it. Otherwise, you would have never done it, you know. [Laughs.] And I was like, okay, whatever.

MS. CORDOVA: [Laughs.]

MS. SÁNCHEZ: But I had to do it. I had gone and I had done all this – so I just toured around and then I also learned about criticism and stuff like that – too many talking heads, you know. That was the NAACS Conference. It was like all these people older than me making, you know, criticism. But that’s where I met up with Luz Calvo, at that NAACS Conference, and that’s where we came out to each other. And we danced together at the NAACS Conference. And it was like, who are all these people? Why don’t they dance – I mean, just like women dancing together, isn’t it cool? In ‘84 – I guess that was ‘85 or ‘86, whenever that was, in El Paso. But in ‘84 they had it in Austin and there was just like one or two – probably just one workshop on queer identities. And I was real quiet, and I know that I went and probably met some people that, you know, I can’t remember, you know, years later that probably I met there for the first time.

And Sandra Cisneros also presented that time, and she had just moved to San Antonio. So we became friends there and continue to this day. I mean, not real super-close friends because she’s so busy and I’m always busy, but with those places that like her relationship was – she was known in ‘84, but not – she became more famous. And so, you know, to be able to support her as she was kind of needing to be supported – that’s the reason I think she continues to be friends because, you know, nobody was – again, women’s voices, right? And that was constantly something that was important to the Esperanza and continues to be important.

MS. CORDOVA: And so after – let’s see. So you left Southwest Voter Education Project in –

MS. SÁNCHEZ: In ‘84.

MS. CORDOVA: – ‘84.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Yeah.

MS. CORDOVA: You went to Nicaragua –

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Eighty-four. So I probably took like May, June and went away for two months.

MS. CORDOVA: Right. And then you came back, and what kind of work did you start doing?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Anything.

MS. CORDOVA: Anything? [Laughs.]

MS. SÁNCHEZ: It was so much fun. It was like I didn’t have a job. I didn’t want a job. I just wanted to, you know – what I was hoping to do was just to, like, work at H.E.B. or something like that and have, you know, enough money just to get me around but not – but I guess I wanted to do the film and I guess I wanted to do some other stuff.

Oh, and between – no, Southwest – I quit – oh, and I came back – oh, no. I went to MALDEF afterwards, because MALDEF –

MS. CORDOVA: Okay. After Nicaragua.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: I think so, yes.

MS. CORDOVA: Okay.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: And I was there for a while and then I quit because of the abuse.

MS. CORDOVA: How long were you there in –

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Like three months.

MS. CORDOVA: Yeah.

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Yeah. Because I was – and I came out to my boss and it was like, this is just what’s happening in my life and I can’t stay here. You know, like I did things that I’d think nobody else is going to do that. I could have just said I have to leave; I have some problems at home, you know. But it was like, I’m in an abusive relationship; this person is beating me up; this is happening. And I was like – and I’m not being a good worker, you know. And that was what it was. And I just wasn’t able to keep up with the work.

And it was interesting because, you know, I don’t know, like, while I was in me desk, you know, which again I was there three months so there wasn’t too much stuff, but I remember opening one of these drawers and there was a book about abuse. And I was like – and I just thought it was coincidental because I wasn’t telling anybody about anything. And so either the person who had been in that place before was in an abusive relationship, too – it was like that was so perfect because I was able to read that this was, you know, something going on all the places, you know, and these were the exact sort of, you know – what was the word? I’m tired. [Laughs.] You know, practices, you know, whatever, you know – I mean, jealousy to this and to this and that. And so I was like okay.

So then I quit there and then I actually went to Nicaragua. Or no – no, that’s when I had already come back. And then I left that relationship, and then when I just – I guess I was just trying to – I moved from there. I mean, even though I escaped I had to come back and pick up stuff, and like I had all my films from Nicaragua, right? They were at the house and I had all these things I just wanted to take. And so I snuck into the house one day and got caught, you know – [laughs] – and got beat up really bad, like the worst beating I got was, you know – I slammed accidentally, probably, against one of the doors and couldn’t hear, and all that sort of stuff. So it was pretty bad.

And then she took me from there to – she was going to take an exam at the nursing program so she took me, and I went with her and basically stayed and then when she was taking the exam then I ran away. So I was able to run to the local restaurant and then call my friend Susan, and then she came and picked me up. And you know, my fear was like she’s going to find me; she was going to find me. It’s like I was so far away, I could have gone in any direction; there was no way – but I – she was definitely searching, you know, around neighborhoods and stuff like that.

And so then what happened was Sandra Cisneros was moving away from her house and Susan knew about that, so she said, you should rent this place, you know. So it was further away and in a different side of town, which is the side of town I still live in. So I kind of connected to that neighborhood.

MS. CORDOVA: Which side of town?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: It’s in lower King William, and now I live in La Vaca, which is a little bit close by to it. But I liked it a lot because there were a lot of Chicanos in the community, more middle class, but there was a sense of neighbors and the community, people around you. And so I think it was just kind of low-key there for a while.

And so I would take a job, you know. I guess I like probably worked with Lalo Valdez. He was doing some research. I think he was looking at stuff in the west side and he needed somebody for a month or two, and so I would get paid like $500 to do that. And then I would live off of that for another month or so. And then I got to travel. So I – a brother of mine, Hernando, got married so I went over there.

And I was doing research – I think I was getting ready for the Esperanza and so I was looking for similar institutions. I was looking to see just what cultural programming was happening in these other places and, you know, picking up literature at every bookstore I could to see what sort of way people programmed their groups or individuals, or what was out there.

So, you know, so I would get myself to a town like San Francisco or New York or D.C. and knock on doors, you know, okay, LAMBDA Legal Defense, okay – you know, without any, you know, setting up appointments or anything like that I’d just show up. And then they met with me – they would meet with me or they’d – sometimes I’d just sit in on this meeting. And I just – like the whole thing about gay marriage; I’m totally against it but I remember being at one of those early meetings 20 years ago where people – where it was the men versus women; the gay men wanted to push this marriage thing and all the lesbian lawyers are like, no, you know, it’s just really dumb. And I kind of still stayed firm to being anti-marriage – a marriage abolitionist or something like that.

MS. CARDOVA: Maybe as a marriage abolitionist but not commitment? I mean, you went through a commitment ceremony of some kind, right?

MS. SÁNCHEZ: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that was more because friends asked me to do that. [Laughs.] Yeah, sometimes I don’t think these things through, because that was in Austin and there was sort of the Texas push to try to – recognizing sex partners through – I don’t even know what it was called. And I got a call from I guess the lesbian and gay rights lobby and they needed people to go to Austin. And it was one of those last-minute things; I was like, I don’t want to go – I don’t – you know, but I’ll just show up. And I was in Austin – that’s what it was. My partner at that time was from Austin, so we would go every once in a while. So we were there and it was like, okay, get up – got up late, went over there, and then the camera shot and there we were on TV. And I think we were on the “700 Club” also. [Laughs.] And so people locally saw it on the “700 Club” and wrote about it in the paper, and somebody else said they caught it in Ms. Magazine, or something like that.

So – yeah, but it was more to just kind of support of what was being said at that time. And now that the marriage issue has really become, you know, just a big push, I’ve really kind of questioned it and challenged it and kind of – and I just see a lot of organizing going around, especially by young people who just think it’s – well, this is the issue. I go, why is it the issue? It’s not anything that’s passionate for me. I’m not – you know, you have to be strategic when you think of what issue you’re going to go after. And, I mean, I think there are a lot of people that are definitely interested, but it’s not like the stuff that’s causing people, you know, to march up and down the streets, you know. I mean – and the issues are, oh, because you get healthcare benefits and you get all the benefits, you know, of having a spouse. But, again, most people – especially when you think of Texas, who has insurance, you know? There should be insurance for everybody, not just because you̵