SAN ANTONIO – Long before becoming executive director of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Institute, Dr. Sarah Zenaida Gould’s grandmothers already had planted the seed.
“I would say both of my grandmothers were incredibly committed to this idea of equality,” Gould said.
Her great-great-grandmother laid the groundwork when she fled to Texas escaping the Mexican Revolution.
Gould said her maternal grandmother, who had lived in a rural outside San Antonio, later became a leader of the League of United Latin American Citizens, which is now the nation’s largest and oldest Hispanic civil rights organization. Also the granddaughter of an Arkansas farmer’s wife, Gould said her paternal grandmother admired the ideals of Martin Luther King, Jr.
“She was a very open-minded, extremely creative person who loved me very much,” Gould said. “Under different circumstances, she would have been a Bohemian artist, I’m sure.”
Growing up near Houston, Gould said her parents would often take her to its museums.
Gould said she was so fascinated by what she’d seen. While a student at Smith College in New England, she interned at the Smithsonian Institution.
Working at its Museum of American History, Gould learned about the African-American music that served as inspiration for the civil rights movement of the 60s.
By then, because of her family’s early involvement in LULAC in the 1950′s, Gould said, “I knew that Mexican-Americans had played a role in advancing civil rights for all Americans.”
Although Gould was considering a career as a civil rights attorney, she went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in American Studies at Smith and a master’s and Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan.
After earning two more fellowships at the Smithsonian, Gould became the lead curatorial researcher at UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures.
In 2018, Gould became the founding director of the Museo del Westside, which is now under construction.
Since then, Gould has come full circle, back to her family’s ties to civil rights.
Gould said she wants the Mexican-American Civil Rights Institute “to put San Antonio on the map as a cradle of Mexican-American civil rights.”
Much like Atlanta is to the African-American civil rights movement, Gould said, San Antonio played “an extremely important role in Mexican-American civil rights.”
“We were there fighting to end school segregation. We were there fighting for our voting rights. We were there fighting for labor rights,” Gould said.
She said MACRI’s goal is to build a national center in San Antonio for locals and visitors to learn about its civil rights history.
Gould said it would house MACRI and its mission as a national project, “to collect and disseminate Mexican-American civil rights history and expand the United States’ understanding of what is civil rights and who is involved in civil rights.”