SAN ANTONIO – Housing, social justice, LGBT rights, cultural awareness, climate change, voting, abortion, the list goes on of the issues Graciela Sanchez has taken on as the co-founder of the Esperance Peace and Justice Center more than 30 years ago.
“One of the things that distinguishes Esperanza from other organizations is that we work on all these issues,” Sanchez said.
Yet they are a far cry from the direction her life took years ago.
Born on the West Side and Yale-educated, Sanchez worked with Willie Velasquez, the late founder of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, before going to MALDEF, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Having worked at both civil rights organizations, which are considered institutions, Sanchez said, she wanted to be an attorney until “I didn’t like the work of being an attorney.”
Besides, those in a sense were her day jobs.
After hours, Sanchez said, “I was doing all this other work around social, economic and environmental and gender justice.”
Sanchez said she wanted to focus more on issues that weren’t necessarily “male-centered.”
Eventually, that led Sanchez and other women to create the Esperance Peace and Justice Center.
She said back then, it was one of the few organizations that addressed LGBT issues.
But as a result, Sanchez said, “We suffered for it.”
“We got pushed, kicked out of our first building. We got defunded by the city of San Antonio. We fought and won a lawsuit in Federal District Court,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez said she credits much of her fighting spirit to her family’s legacy of activism.
She said her grandmother Panchita went knocking door-to-door on the West Side with petitions in the 1920s and 1930s, “Asking for the city to give electricity to us, for the city to pave streets, for the city to put water, all those basic utilities, those basic needs.”
Sanchez said her mother, who passed away recently, had a long history of advocating on behalf of the children on the West Side.
Isabel Sanchez also was actively involved in the PTA in the schools Sanchez attended, and on the citywide and state levels, her daughter said, “holding people accountable and speaking her mind.”
Doing so herself, Sanchez said, has come at a price.
“The work at the Esperanza has caused a lot of attacks towards me personally,” Sanchez said.
Even so, she said, Sanchez said her advice to a new generation of Mexican-Americans is to do what she did by stepping into the shoes of their mothers and grandmothers.
Then, she said, “Move this world into a better place for those yet to come.”
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