"This Work Should Also Be Jubilant": Graciela Sánchez on Organizing in San Antonio
Portrait of Graciela Sánchez. Photo courtesy of Al Rendon o Rendon Photography and Fine Art
In junior high, Graciela I. Sánchez and her classmates organized to protest the cafeteria food. After complaining to her parents about the quality of lunch meals, they told her: “Well, then do something about it.”
In the next few years, that’s exactly what she and her peers did, fighting for incremental changes to the menu—enough that they eventually felt the food was adequate. While this was Sánchez’s first taste of activism, she was already acutely aware of the power of coming together to advocate for each other.
With two parents who looked out, fought, and supported others, she learned why community mattered. And through her maternal side, she saw the important role the women in her family played in the history of San Antonio’s Westside.
Following in their footsteps, Sánchez started working at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project early in her career to help San Antonians. But understanding the interconnectedness of many issues—for example, how the United States’s policies affected people in other parts of the world—she picked up a camera before she knew how to make a film and produced Testimonios de Nicaragua, a documentary about the Sandinista revolution. In 1987, as she helped cofound the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center, a community- and arts-based cultural organization, she got the opportunity to go to Cuba for film school. There, she made No porque lo diga Fidel Castro, a documentary on queer rights on the Caribbean island.
Despite wherever life has taken her, Sánchez always returns to San Antonio, continuing and expanding on the work her family started several generations before. To say that Sánchez, the director of the Esperanza, is a bastion of her community is an understatement, but to have the impact she’s had would be impossible without other San Antonians.
To learn more about her inspiration and philosophy around organizing, Intervenxions spoke to Sánchez. Here’s what she had to say.
Intervenxions staff edited this interview for clarity and concision.
Your parents, your grandmother, and your maternal family were all very involved in community and organizing. What kind of effect did that have on you?
I heard the stories of the activism of the women in my family. My mom told the stories of my grandmother and my great-grandmother and what they did in and for the community. From an early age, Mom told stories, describing how the larger community kept seeing our historic Mexican-American Westside as the bad side of town. And she would say, “No, that's not true.”
We would stand in front of our porch—with her watering the plants and me and my sister playing, splashing water on her, on our faces—and she would say, “Look at it. Feel it. See it. Do we see the violence? Do we see the crime? Is it present?” That’s just a kind of story that's been said about our community, and our community is a good community. And then she would tell the stories. When my Abuelita Panchita was young, there were no paved streets, no water or electrical utilities, so my grandmother walked up and down the streets with the next-door neighbor, Don Alfredo, and they collected signatures to change that.
As a young kid, of course, that's amazing, right? I heard those stories and that centered me.
“From an early age, Mom told stories, describing how the larger community kept seeing our historic Mexican-American Westside as the bad side of town. And she would say, ‘No, that’s not true.’ ”
And you were also seeing your parents do the same first-hand. How did that affect how you approached organizing and community-building?
Yes, when I was growing up, I went with them to PTA meetings. I was learning early on how those meetings took place, what the different roles were. I didn't go to things like Model Cities meetings, which were discussions on how to improve our community but were really about demolishing a lot of the neighborhood. But as a maybe 7-year-old at the dinner table, I overheard conversations about what was happening at the community level. Those dinner table conversations were definitely influences growing up.
Or one Christmas, my dad had a crew of four or five people painting cars and he wanted a raise. He got a raise, but he said, “No, I need a raise for all my crew or I’m walking.” Mr. Cavender, who was a big name in town, said “no.” He called my daddy a communist. It was a story my dad liked to tell, and I loved to hear. Those sorts of stories definitely influenced us.
But we also got involved. We had this principal, Mr. Mendez. He would come into our classes and say, “Look, there’s no calculus class. I need to make one. I need some of you to volunteer, to sign up for the class.”
Going into my senior year, Mendez gets kicked out because he’s challenging other school board members, so they get rid of him. So we spoke out. We learned about how to do our own press conference and speak in front of the school board. We weren’t organized by anyone, except ourselves. My parents were a source of support for that. In some documents, my mom is quoted as saying, “The superintendent of the board is a dictator.”
But students spoke and protested. They said we didn’t write our own speeches—that someone must have done it for us. They seemed to think we weren’t smart enough to write our own speeches.
But we cared about this issue. We even went to then city councilman Henry Cisneros—it was the first time I went to city hall—but he basically said, “Well, with city policies, we don’t get involved in school stuff at all.” My mom, on the other hand, was an advocate for other kids from kindergarten to 12th grade, and that’s what we saw growing up.
In my family, we believed, “This is what you do for society. This is how you support. This is why you do it. It’s not personal needs. It’s always for and with the community.”
“In my family, we believed, ‘This is what you do for society. This is how you support. This is why you do it. It’s not personal needs. It’s always for and with the community.’”
How does your organizing differ from your families’?
One of the reasons my parents didn't like Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) was they would come to meetings and be disruptive. In college, I learned how to hiss, so you could make a noise to say you disagreed with the speaker, but you didn't necessarily know where that hissing came from. I was a hisser, and my mom would say “Graciela!” She didn’t want me to disrespect anyone. But I did hiss or respond to elected officials who lied about policies they were going to enact that would harm our community.
And for my parents, they understood how to support the community, but they weren't necessarily organizing other parents. They didn't know how to do that, except to advocate for the students as the problems came up. My work in organizing is all about getting more people involved. How do we talk to them? How do we educate them about the issues? How do we get five people to become 50 people, that becomes 500 people? And how do you get those voices then to act on a policy, create policy, or change policy at the local, national, or international level?
Graciela Sánchez on the way to filming an action. Photo courtesy of Graciela Sánchez.
Speaking of an international level, you also dedicated time to bringing awareness to issues outside of San Antonio. Why was it so important to you to look beyond your own community?
A lot of my initial organizing in San Antonio was around the wars in Central America, which I kind of picked up in college because that was a key issue at the time. LGBT issues were also pressing. Apartheid in South Africa. So I understood them as quite important issues, and when I came back home, nobody was talking about any of those international issues. It just blew me away that San Antonio had five military bases.
Even though there was no war—official war—the U.S. was training young, mainly Latinos who spoke Spanish, to go and train the contras in Nicaragua, to teach the right wing of El Salvador to create wars amongst other Latinos. In trying to expand our work around international issues, none of the local civil rights leadership was involved at all.
I worked at MALDEF. I worked at Southwest Voter Registration Project. And they would say, “No, our work is at the national level.”
And I believed we needed to be involved. So I went to Nicaragua in ‘84 when the Sandinistas celebrated their fifth anniversary of overthrowing the Somoza dynasty. I went with a camera to say, “As Latinos, let's videotape our community. Let's create some documentary.” I had never picked up a camera or edited anything. I didn't know how to make a film, but I came back after six weeks. It took me about a year or two to make the documentary, but it was good enough to be able to take it around town, to East Texas, to Southwest Texas. The documentary was moving around because I wanted other Latinos to get involved.
A group of activists from San Antonio and New Orleans in New Orleans (Graciela Sánchez is in the front row, on the left) as they challenge the City of San Antonio at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. 2010. Photo courtesy of Graciela Sánchez.
In addition to Nicaragua, you also spent time in other Latin American countries. What lessons did you learn from these visits?
Back in 2009, I went to Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador on a climate justice tour with a small committee. The young people in Nicaragua had their shit together. They understood climate justice. They had programs that were already present, and they're just doing amazing work, whereas El Salvador, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) had just come into power and the activists wanted to do stuff, but they were years behind where the Nicaraguans were because of circumstance.
But I went to other places, like Cuba, and there is so much enthusiasm there. I thought Mexicans, like in the U.S., were a little more docile because the institutions make us docile. And it made me think “What’s the U.S’s role? What is our government’s role in keeping that country down?”
Despite looking at how there’s so much intersectionality, you remain in San Antonio as your home base. Why have you remained there?
There’s the stereotype that Latina mothers don't let their kids go away. My mom said, “Go wherever you want, but at some point, you need to come back home because we can't lose everybody.” I think she succeeded because of the six kids, five of us stuck around.
I find myself saying that to young kids of color, young Latinos of San Antonio and South Texas. It might be easier to organize in other cities, but how will you ever make a difference in your community if you're not here doing that struggle?
With the creation of the Esperanza, the goal was to allow people to find a place they could call home, find like-minded people, go out there, but still try to do it in San Antonio.
“There are too many other people who don’t want us to succeed and who are trying to keep us down and make our lives more miserable.”
Looking back, 37 years later, do you feel like you've done what you set out to accomplish with the Esperanza?
One of the main goals of the Esperanza was to find a space we could share with other social justice and cultural groups. When I came back to San Antonio, there wasn't that space. It took me two years to find the other person that helped cofound the Esperanza with me.
We wanted to encourage people to congregate in a space so they didn’t feel alone in this very conservative yet very progressive community. We were all scattered, so people didn't know how to find each other. We've accomplished a lot of that. We've gone from a very small space—a 100-square-foot room––to a larger 10,000-square-foot building. And now we’ve got several spaces in San Antonio that we own, and we continue to build our vision.
Our desire to do more work collaboratively has been harder because more organizations exist, and everybody finds themselves having to raise their own money. It can get competitive and sometimes people work in silos. COVID undermined organizing, especially in-person organizing. We tried organizing during COVID but then people got tired of Zoom, and they don’t organize as much through Zoom. But as Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa said, it’s intersectional and siloing yourself can work against that.
Graciela I. Sánchez (pictured in the first row, third from left) with staff, parents, annd four of her siblings at Rinconcito de Esperanza. Photo courtesy of Graciela I. Sánchez.
Graciela I. Sánchez (right) with partner at an action. Photo courtesy of Graciela I. Sánchez.
Is there anything that you would want a reader to know?
For me, the work has been connected to my family. My family is part of the struggle, part of working for justice. It’s funny, Mom would say, “Well, I'm gonna go to this event because I want to make sure you have people at your event.” But at some point, she realized, “That's what I used to say, but then I realized it was my organization, too.” Then she invited her family and friends into the space because she also believed in it.
It wasn’t just my mom. My dad and my siblings also have come to support the work. My partner or partners have also been part of the Esperanza. Amy and I connected after she did the pro-bono work for the lawsuit against the city of San Antonio. That's how we really got to know each other and then became best friends and then partners, and we've been together 26 or 27 years now.
So I hope people also recognize that the work is not just “Graciela's work.” We have to bring the whole community—all our neighbors, our family, and our friends to this work, so we don't have to have separate spaces necessarily.
This work should also be jubilant, so let’s bring everyone along. There are too many other people who don’t want us to succeed and who are trying to keep us down and make our lives more miserable.
Yara Simón is a Miami-born Nicaraguan-Cuban-American editor and writer.
