George I. Sánchez

American educator, scholar, and activist

• Born: October 4, 1906
• Birthplace: Albuquerque, New Mexico
• Died: April 5, 1972
• Place of death: Austin, Texas

Sánchez was nationally and internationally recognized as a pioneer critic of the use of psychological assessment tools on ethnic minorities in the United States. His findings have been cited in key U.S. Supreme Court decisions addressing the improper use of intelligence assessment on children from ethnic minority populations.

Early Life

George Isidore Sánchez (SAHN-chez) was born on April 5, 1906, in the neighborhood of Barelas in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where his parents, Telésforo Sánchez and Juliana Sánchez, traced their Mexican American ancestry to early colonial times. He completed elementary school and most of his early education in the small mining town of Jerome, Arizona, and high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 1922, he gained his first teaching experience as an instructor in the small town of Yrrisarri, near Albuquerque. From 1926 to 1930, he worked as a teacher and eventually became a principal in Bernalillo County, New Mexico. These formative years of professional experience in rural schools provided him with an influential exposure to the educational practices affecting Mexican Americans.

Life’s Work

Working full time as a teacher and administrator, it took Sánchez eight years to complete his bachelor’s degree in education in 1930 at the University of New Mexico by taking courses on weekends and in the summer. A year later he obtained a master’s degree in educational psychology and Spanish at the University of Texas with a thesis titled “A Study of the Scores of Spanish-Speaking Children on Repeated Tests.” He continued to study and research education among Mexican Americans and bilingual populations. From 1931 through 1934, he was the director of the Division of Information and Statistics of the New Mexico State Department of Education. In this position of leadership he actively worked to improve the funding of public education, while concurrently completing his doctoral training in education. He earned a doctorate in education degree in 1934 at the University of California at Berkeley, and his doctoral dissertation, “The Education of Bilinguals in a State School System,” examined the academic performance of bilingual students.

Throughout Sánchez’s career, his research focused on how bilingual children learn and how they are psychologically evaluated through the use of often unfair and biased intelligence evaluation instruments. In many of his publications, Sánchez criticized the use of Intellectual Quotient (IQ) tests, maintaining they were unreliable and invalid tools to assess the intelligence and educational abilities of Mexican Americans. He questioned the psychometrics of standardized assessment tools and voiced criticism against educators who worshipped the infallibility of IQ evaluation results. He also advocated for children born in other countries who studied in American schools. In the journal articles “Bilingualism and Mental Measures: A Word of Caution,” “The Implications of a Basal Vocabulary to Measurement of the Abilities of Bilingual Children,” and “Group Differences and Spanish-Speaking Children,” Sánchez conclusively stated that bilingualism should never be considered a detriment to a child’s education. His conclusions made him an early pioneer and advocate for educational justice and equality. His activist tone is clearly visible in many of his writings not only in his advocacy for Mexicans and Mexican Americans but also for Navajos, which is articulated in his book The People: A Study of the Navajos (1948).

Sánchez’s academic and research work was not limited to ethnic minorities in the United States, and he expanded his scholarship to include Latin American countries. From 1935 through 1936, with a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, Sánchez spent several months in Mexico researching the education of the Mexican population. He focused on the educational methods used by the revolutionary “cultural missions” inspired by socialist agendas. He visited elementary schools in rural areas, normal schools, agricultural schools, regional training schools, and schools for downtrodden Mexican indigenous groups. Research findings from this project resulted in the publication of his well-known book Mexico: A Revolution by Education (1936).

With additional funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, he extended his research from Mexico to the American South, where he studied the rural educational systems serving primarily Mexican and black students. From 1937 through 1938, he served as a technical adviser for the national department of education in Venezuela. In 1940, with funding assistance by the Carnegie Foundation, he published his book Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans, which provides a study of the state’s residents, focusing on Taos County. In this comprehensive historical analysis, Sánchez maintains that New Mexicans have been economically and politically victimized and culturally and geographically forgotten. He concludes that New Mexicans lack education and that their salvation will come through literacy.

Sánchez distinguished himself as a rigorous and dedicated professor. From 1938 to 1940, he taught at the University of New Mexico, but after encountering opposition and criticism based on his outspoken approach to research and instruction, he moved to Texas and began teaching at the University of Texas, where he was a professor until his death. During his long academic tenure at this university, he held several prominent national positions in educational leadership and advocacy. From 1941 to 1942, he was the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, and from 1945 to 1950 he was the president of the Southwest Council on the Education of Spanish-Speaking People. He also served as the director of the American Council of Spanish Speaking People.

Sánchez died on April 5, 1972, in Austin, Texas. On June 16, 1972, the Texas senate adopted a concurrent resolution honoring Sánchez for being a “distinguished educator, father of Mexican American studies and intellectual leader of the Mexican American movement in Texas and the Southwest.”

Significance

Sánchez led many political and educational battles in New Mexico and Texas aimed at improving educational opportunities for Spanish-speaking children. He participated in many court cases dealing with the segregation of Spanish-speaking people. The most famous case concerned his development of the “class apart” theory used by the plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Hernandez v. Texas 347 U.S. 475 (1954) . Sánchez received recognition from Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, who appointed him to national and international commissions dealing with the problems of Latino people.

Bibliography

Blanton, Carlos. “George I. Sánchez, Ideology, and Whiteness in the Making of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, 1930-1960.” The Journal of Southern History 72 (August, 2006): 569- 604. Sánchez advocated for assimilation and integration of Mexican Americans into the U.S. culture through citizenship and language. This article explains how he approached the concept of “whiteness” in the 1930’s, a time of bigotry, eugenic movements, and pseudoscientific theories of racial superiority.

Paredes, Américo, ed. Humanidad: Essays in Honor of George I. Sánchez. Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center Publications, University of California, 1977. Includes a biography of Sánchez, as well as essays providing an overview of his work, discussing his views on testing, and examining other aspects of bilingual education and the lives of Chicanos in the Southwest.

Welsh, Michael. “A Prophet Without Honor: George I. Sánchez and Bilingualism in New Mexico.” New Mexico Historical Review 69 (January, 1994): 29-32. Details Sánchez’s perspective on bilingualism among bicultural Mexican Americans and his advocacy for bilingual education.