Interview of Dolores Sanchez
UCLA Library, Center for Oral History Research, University of California, Los Angeles Interview of Dolores Sanchez

Transcript

SESSION ONE (August 9, 2013)

00:00:19

ESPINO:

This is Virginia Espino, and I’m interviewing Dolores Sanchez at the offices of Eastern Group Publications in Highland Park. I’d like to start today with what you can tell me about your family history, sort of like how we were talking the last time we met, grandparents, great-grandparents.

00:03:00

SANCHEZ:

Let’s see. My great-grandfather was born here in California. He was a Californian. He was born in San Luis Obispo. As far as we can tell, his father was Portuguese and his mother was a Mission Indian from San Luis Obispo, somewhere around there. That was in the 1850s, I guess. Well, his father came over in the 1850s. His mother, obviously, was here already. When they were young, the father went on a posse that came over and asked him to join a posse to chase some people who had robbed the—what do you call those—stagecoach. We had always thought that he had robbed the stagecoach and was shot. No, he was chasing the people that had robbed the stagecoach and he was killed. As a result, his mother was left with two young children, and at the time, they really didn’t think that an Indian—well, I guess an Indian woman could take care of her two children without a husband. A man came over from Stockton, California—there was a boys’ school there or something—and asked her if he could take my great-grandfather with him to the school. So she said, “Okay. I don’t have anything to give them, so fine.” He stayed at the school—he was about ten years old. He says, “Stayed at the school for a while. A man came from New York.” Well, my great-grandfather loved baseball. His name was Eferine Balderamas (phonetic). He loved baseball. To him, that was all he wanted to do. This man came over from New York and said, “You’re a great baseball player.” I guess my grandfather must have been sixteen, seventeen at the time. “Do you want to go with me?” He says, “I’m from New York and I am a scout for this team, this baseball team.”

He says, “As long as I can play baseball, I’m thrilled.” So he followed the man to New York, and there he met a man named Alvarado, Jesus Alvarado. They became friends. Jesus Alvarado was from Mexico. I believe these were the precursor team to the New York Yankees.

ESPINO:

Wow!

SANCHEZ:

He, of course, was very innocent. So they insisted that if they were going to play baseball, they also had to go to school. Because they were going to have money, they taught them how to keep a checkbook, how to take care of their money, how to negotiate. I don’t know what else, but in the meantime they played baseball. When the baseball season ended, they were allowed to do whatever they wanted and they spent a lot of time in Coney Island and stuff. They would get bored and so they went one time to work in a mine. They were very strong young men. My grandfather was about six-foot-four, a big man.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

My great-grandfather, I mean.

ESPINO:

Very tall.

00:04:4800:07:08

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. And so one summer, in 1903, the beginning of 1903, in the winter, Jesus Alvarado read an article in the paper that said they were looking for men to help build a spur from Phoenix, Arizona, to Nogales. He says, “You want to go try it? Let’s go see what it’s all about.”

So they came west again to Phoenix, Arizona, and there they talked to a man whose name was Jesus Amaya, who was the foreman for the crew that was going to build the spur. When he saw them in eastern clothes, he says, “I don’t know that you can do it. We’re going to be working in the desert. It’s very hot, very dangerous, a lot of snakes and scorpions and all kinds of things.” Well, this was kind of a dare that my great-grandfather could not—my great-grandfather couldn’t speak Spanish, and so Jesus Alvarado, somehow they managed to communicate. Jesus Alvarado would handle the Spanish for them because he was raised in a school where they spoke English, you know. So they said, “Well, okay.” He says, “And what I need are men to lay down the spikes on the rails.” “Oh,” he says, “That’s nothing.” And he handed them this big, I guess like a mallet, and he says, “You think you can handle this and do you think you can lay down rail?” Jesus says, “Oh, sure.” He got it in one hand, got it behind his back and threw it at his friend Alvarado, who caught it. So he says, “Oh, I guess you can.” So he says, “There’s a hotel down the block.” It was named the New York Hotel and it was owned by Martín and—ai. She was my great-aunt. I can’t remember his name. I’ll come up with the name later. Gold. “They have some rooms. You can sleep there. Be ready in the morning and come early. You’re going to have to go get some clothes.” He says, “No, we have our mining clothes. That should be good.” “Okay,” he says, “fine, fine.”

So they went and they rented a room from Luisa and Martín Gold. Luisa and Martín Gold, that wasn’t their name. They had come from Mexico when Mexico threw out all the foreigners in the early 1900s and settled in Phoenix. But when they crossed the border, their name was Pecovitch (phonetic) because they were Austrian, and the guy at the border says, “No. Nobody’s going to be able to pronounce it, much less spell it. You can’t be named Pecovitch.”

ESPINO:

Wow.

00:08:5000:10:37

SANCHEZ:

He says, “Your wife is wearing a lot of gold,” because I guess that’s how they brought their money across. He says, “From now on you’re going to be Gold.” So when they crossed the border, they were told their name was Gold and that’s what it stayed. They bought a hotel and they started adding to it, which was the New York Hotel in Phoenix. My great-grandfather went to that hotel and rented a room. They rented a room and then she says, “Do you want to eat? We feed people dinner and we’ll make you a lunch if you need a lunch.” So he says, “Yeah, because we’re going to be on the railroad.” “Oh,” he says, “yeah, I know Jesus.” “Oh, okay.” So they slept and said, “If we pay our rent, can we leave our stuff here while we’re on the spur?” She says, “Sure, sure. As long as you pay your rent, fine.”

So they did. They made them a breakfast in the morning and a lunch, and they were off to the railroad station, the Santa Fe Railroad. And Jesus says, “Well, you guys ready to work?” “Yeah.” He said, “We’re going to teach you. This morning we’re going to have a rail and we’re going to teach you how you have to lay down the spikes.” Well, they did. He says, “And tomorrow we’re going to have two cars that are going to follow us as we make our way to Nogales. We’re going to build a spur going and one coming back. We’re going to have our equipment in one and we’re going to have our own stuff in our private—we’re going to sleep in that car.” “Okay.” So they started. They worked for quite a while and then they came to a place, I guess—I can’t remember the name; I’ll ask my sister—where there was a little hill. They said, “Well, you can’t put railroad tracks up a hill like that. It has to be level even if it’s through. That’s why they go around.” He says, “Well, so what are we going to do? Are we going to go around it?” He says, “All the people here come and they go around it. They come in their stagecoaches and their horses and their stuff and they go around.” My great-grandfather says, “It’s not that big a hill.” My great-grandfather says, “It’s not that big a hill.” They called him Don Zef (phonetic). Don Zef tells Jesus Alvarado, “It’s not that big a hill. Why don’t we just get rid of it? Why don’t we level it?”

So they spent a while leveling that hill. When they got through, they said, “Gee, this would make a good town. It’s this bare space, you know, it’s all level, it’s all nice, it’s all cleared. This would make a nice little town.” And so they said, “Yeah, it would. What do we call it?” And Don Zef says, “Hmm. Surprise. We’ll call it Surprise, Arizona.” “Why Surprise?” “Well, because when the people are going to come looking for the hill, they’re going to be ready to go around, and it’s not going to be there anymore.” That’s how Surprise, Arizona, got its name.

ESPINO:

Oh, wow. That’s brilliant. What a great story.

SANCHEZ:

So they kept going. Finally, as they got closer to Nogales, they would go visit, you know, and my grandfather made friends with a woman who was named Modesta Rodriguez. She was, I guess, visiting her uncle, who was the mayor or something of Nogales. She was visiting her uncle and she had a cousin. Well, Jesus Alvarado decided that he liked the cousin, too, so they started keeping company. So then my grandfather says, “Well, I think we should get married, Modesta.” This was in 1903.

ESPINO:

Wow.

00:12:32

SANCHEZ:

And Jesus Amaya says, “I want to marry your cousin.” I don’t remember the cousin’s name. So he went and talked to the cousin’s father, whose name was also Rodriguez, and he says, “Oh,” he says, “(Spanish phrase).” “No, they say (Spanish phrase).” “Oh, no. (Spanish phrase).” “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” So he refused to let her go.

She tried to run away and sat on the edge of a well and was tying her shoelace and fell in and drowned. Well, for a long time they made up a story that she had committed suicide. She hadn’t committed suicide; she had fallen in.

ESPINO:

Oh, my goodness. How sad.

00:14:0100:16:22

SANCHEZ:

So then my great-grandfather says, “Well, Modesta, I have to go talk to (unclear).” She says, “No way. He’s not going to let us go. You just meet me here at midnight.” Oh, before that, as they got closer, they finally finished the spur and they started to get ready to come back, and Jesus Amaya says, “Well, you know I have a wife. She’s waiting for me here in Nogales. I have to go get her before we leave, because she’s going back with me to Phoenix.” “Okay.” So he went to pick her up and she was pregnant. So they crossed the border and she went into labor, and so he says, “Is there a hospital around here?” So I think they called it Phelps Dodge Hospital. I’m not sure. They said, “But you can’t go there. There’s only white people there.” He says, “I don’t care.” “They don’t allow Mexicans there.”

“What do you mean?” he says. “I work for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe. No, it wasn’t the Santa Fe. I mean the Atchison and Santa Fe. It was just the Santa Fe then. So he goes up there and they tell him, “No, you can’t. Do you have $200?” “Hell, yes, I have $200. I work for the Santa Fe.” “Oh, you work for the Santa Fe. Okay.” So she had her baby there, and the baby’s name was Jesus. Jessie (phonetic), the name, Jessie Joe Amaya. So then they had to leave in two days, so in those days I guess they spent more time in the hospital. I don’t know. So Jesus says, “I can’t leave my wife here.” “She’s going to be okay.” So they took and they put her in one of the cars, right? And she had a lady with her that Jesus had hired to help her when she was pregnant while he was gone, because he was on the railroad. Meanwhile, Don Zef tells Modesta, “We’re leaving tomorrow morning.” So she says, “You come at midnight.” I guess they had like a little road or path where they would go back and forth from Nogales, Arizona, into Nogales, Mexico or something, and everybody would cross that. They had their own way of getting in and out. She says, “And send somebody to pick up my bags.” So he did. He sent someone, and they helped and they all brought her bags and put it in that car and put Modesta in there. So then it was the baby, (unclear) Jesus, his wife Juanita, Jesus Alvarado, the helper, Modesta, and Don Zef, and I don’t know who else, I guess the other crew members, and they said, “Well, we’re going back to Phoenix.” They loaded up their stuff in the other car and they started on their way to Phoenix.

Well, Modesta says, “I’m not going any further. I need to get married.” So in 1903 they got married right outside of Surprise, Arizona, and their marriage license, they were the first couple to ever get married there. They moved back to Phoenix and to the New York Hotel.

ESPINO:

Wow. It’s a great story.

SANCHEZ:

So he settled in Phoenix with his wife Modesta and (unclear) Jesus and Jesus Alvarado and a few other people that were—I don’t even know the names. My mother does. They all bought land, lots next to each other, you know, and they settled there in Phoenix and they all worked for the Santa Fe.

ESPINO:

So Modesta would be your great-grandmother, your mother’s—

SANCHEZ:

My grandmother’s mother.

ESPINO:

—grandmother. Your grandmother’s mother on your mother’s side. Wow. What a great story. And how was this story passed down to you?

SANCHEZ:

By my mother. A lot of stuff I got from my great-grandpa. I got to meet—my grandfather was 111 when he died, my great-grandfather.

ESPINO:

Incredible.

SANCHEZ:

And I spent a lot of time with him. I was the oldest grandchild, great-grandchild, so, you know, I spent a lot of time with him.

00:17:51

ESPINO:

And he liked to tell stories?

SANCHEZ:

Well, he liked to tell about how he—he loved his wife, but they got divorced, and he always cried. He never wanted the divorce, but he got drunk one night and demanded the divorce because she kept going back to La Capital, which was in Sonora (unclear), right? She would go and spend weeks over there with her relatives, celebrating. Of course, they were very nice to her because he had money. He worked for the railroad. So he got drunk one night, and they had a maid—a housekeeper, not a maid, but a housekeeper who cooked and stuff. And she told him, I guess—I always felt that maybe she —“If you’ll marry me.” She says, “You know, she’s just going over there. How come she goes and stays so many weeks? You shouldn’t let her go. There’s something funny, as far as I’m concerned.” So he says, “If you go, don’t come back.” So she said, “Okay, I’m going and I’m not coming back.” So later on he divorced her, but he always regretted it. He loved her. They had one child, Victoria Balderamas. That was my grandmother.

ESPINO:

Do you know why they only had one child?

SANCHEZ:

Because they got divorced. She was always gone. She would go back to—

ESPINO:

Yeah. Well, you know how in those days family planning wasn’t part of—well, I’m sure it was, in their own way. The women probably had their own things that they did. So they weren’t married very long before they got divorced? Usually the kids come every year and a half.

SANCHEZ:

They weren’t married very long, and she spent a lot of time in Hermosillo, so he divorced her and he kept the daughter.

ESPINO:

She left her daughter?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

00:19:59

ESPINO:

That’s interesting too. I mean, that’s not common, either, that you—

SANCHEZ:

No, no. She came back, and he says, “Well, we’re divorced and I’m keeping my daughter.” She was kind of vain. They say that was very vain. My mother looks like her. She was extremely vain, very fair, with blue eyes, and was very vain. And she says, “Well, to hell with you.” And she didn’t want to get old.

ESPINO:

Did your mother ever keep a relationship with her?

SANCHEZ:

Not until she was an adult—well, a teenager. So my grandmother married this man, Jesus Gonzales, I guess in 1916. He was a contractor. He brought people over to do the labor in the fields. But she grew up with her grandmother. Her grandmother, her Nana Luisa, owned the New York Hotel, so she would spend time with her and she would spend time with her father, was very spoiled. My mother says—that was before my mother was born—that my great-grandfather bought a car, and my grandmother could never learn to drive and she knocked down the front porch of the house, so he sold the car. He was very upset. She always grew up—she came out looking like her grandmother, the Indian part, and was denied in front of Luisa and her mother’s family because they asked her when they came from Hermosillo, “¿Pues quién es esa niña?? And she said, “O, es una de las hijas de las sirvientas.”

00:22:04

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

She carried that with her and she always was looking for her mother, but she was a party girl. She liked to party and she was very spoiled. So she takes off with Angel Gonzales, who was a Suromato (phonetic).

ESPINO:

I don’t know what that is.

SANCHEZ:

A Suromato is—when they tried to get rid of the Spaniards in Mexico, they sent them all to the port in Veracruz. They were sending them back to Spain. Well, the ship that came to pick them up, there was only—and this is verified, you know—there was only so much room, so the older people went on the ship, and the ship sank. They never got to Spain. So the people that were left there, they became like little kind of savages, she says. You know, they had no education, no anything. They were called Suromatos. I guess a Suromato is some part of vegetation or something that’s in Veracruz.

ESPINO:

No, I didn’t know that history. So I’m getting a little confused with some of the—I’m following the family name. So your great-grandfather’s name is—

SANCHEZ:

Was Balderamas.

ESPINO:

Balderamas. This is your maternal great-grandfather.

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

And how many children did he have?

SANCHEZ:

One.

ESPINO:

He just had the one.

SANCHEZ:

One daughter.

00:23:53

ESPINO:

One daughter. And then she had how many children?

SANCHEZ:

Three daughters.

ESPINO:

She had three daughters and then—

SANCHEZ:

Well, this is what’s interesting, that my mother married Jesus Amaya.

ESPINO:

Jesus Amaya from the first—wow. He was how many years older than her?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know.

ESPINO:

Like twenty maybe? Fifteen? Twenty?

SANCHEZ:

About fifteen, I guess.

ESPINO:

Wow. Fascinating. So then your great-grandfather had the one daughter.

SANCHEZ:

My mother’s mother, my grandmother, Victoria, had three daughters.

ESPINO:

And then the grandfather who divorced his wife, that’s your grandfather or your great-grandfather?

SANCHEZ:

My great-grandfather.

ESPINO:

Okay, that’s where I got confused.

SANCHEZ:

My grandmother, unfortunately, took off with my grandfather at the age of thirteen.

ESPINO:

Oh, okay. So they all kind of stayed in that same little—

SANCHEZ:

Area, yeah.

ESPINO:

—area, and kind of intermarried with people from that same—

SANCHEZ:

Yes. They all intermarried, yeah. So then my mother married Jesus Amaya during the—they had three daughters. I have three sisters. I have two sisters, my mother remarried because my father died at fifty-seven, and she had another daughter. So we’re a family of nothing but women. My son was the first male child in four generations.

00:25:43

ESPINO:

Wow. So, yeah, your father’s—well, the male, the patriarch, his name—

SANCHEZ:

Balderamas died.

ESPINO:

Balderamas. The name died. I mean the generation died with that name after—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, yeah.

ESPINO:

Oh, that’s interesting.

SANCHEZ:

(unclear), yeah.

ESPINO:

So your grandfather is actually—

SANCHEZ:

On my father’s side.

ESPINO:

The one that tells these stories—

SANCHEZ:

My great-grandfather, yeah. I got to meet my great-grandfather. I had both my grandfathers when I was a kid and my great-grandfather.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

I knew them all. I think they all got married very young, except for my Grandfather Jesus. He was older.

ESPINO:

And did your great-grandfather tell you stories as well?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and he would cry about divorcing his wife. He would cry about divorcing his wife.

00:26:42

ESPINO:

And then who was the daughter that you said was the prieta, the one who looked more indigenous?

SANCHEZ:

Victoria, my great-grandfather’s only daughter.

ESPINO:

Okay, so her mother was the blonde, the blue-eyed, and then when she had the daughter—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. So I guess she didn’t mind leaving her. I don’t know.

ESPINO:

Yeah, I wonder. You said that they reconciled when she was older?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Victoria asked her Nana Luisa, “How come you always tell me about my mother? How come you know?” And Luisa finally confessed. She says, “She’s my sister, and right now she’s in a little town called Mayer, Arizona.” So my grandmother took her daughter and they went to Mayer and she saw her mother. And my mother stayed a while with her because she was sick. They don’t know what it was. They think it was cancer. So she died young. She didn’t want to get old anyway, so she died young. She died in Mayer. Later on, my grandmother went and forced her second husband, my Granddaddy Charlie, to buy this church that was for sale in Mayer. I guess she wanted to be close to her mother. I don’t know. My grandmother was a troubled person, very troubled. She had been through a lot.

ESPINO:

She wasn’t raised with a mother, but she was raised with a grandmother.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, Luisa.

00:28:34

ESPINO:

Luisa, who was really her aunt.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but she called her Nana Luisa. I guess when she took over taking care of her when the mother left, I don’t know, or they shared her. I don’t know.

ESPINO:

Right.

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know. But when she married Angel, they traveled around, and she came back. She loved Los Angeles. She loved L.A. Every chance she would get, she would come to Los Angeles when my mother was a little girl.

ESPINO:

Did they ride the rails free or get some sort of discount because of the—

SANCHEZ:

Yes. I rode the rails free. I had a pass. We had passes, but she didn’t ride the rails very much because she went with Angel, you know. I guess they would travel by bus. I don’t know how they would travel, but they went all over California and Arizona. I don’t know if they went into New Mexico, but anyway—

ESPINO:

Do you know what they did?

SANCHEZ:

—following the crops.

ESPINO:

Oh, following the crops.

SANCHEZ:

My grandmother was a wonderful cook. She learned from Luisa. Luisa learned all the Mexican and the Austrian from her husband, Martín, and so she taught my grandmother how to cook. My grandmother was a wonderful cook.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

Finally, she found out that Angel had married another woman in Mexico, and so she had nothing to do with him.

ESPINO:

He had two wives?

SANCHEZ:

He was a bigamist. So you can see why sometimes I don’t like to tell people too much about this. But that’s life.

00:30:29

ESPINO:

Right, and I think that’s not uncommon.

SANCHEZ:

No, it’s not. Very common. So when she found out, she wouldn’t have anything to do—because he would go back to Mexico to visit his family—

ESPINO:

His other family.

SANCHEZ:

—because that’s where he came from. And he would be gone for about a year and he would leave her money. But my grandma liked to party. The money would be gone, so she and my mother wandered around California, mostly in Los Angeles because my grandmother loved L.A. My grandmother worked for the first San Antonio Winery when they were in the South Side, but when they moved over here, she didn’t want to follow them. And every once in a while when things got hairy, she would decide to go back to Phoenix. She always had a home there. She had clothes, everything. Luisa would tell, I guess, somebody in the Gold’s Department Store—I don’t know if they had a share in it or what, but she would have a fit when my mother and my grandmother would show up, and say, “You can’t wear those old shoes. Que va decir la gente?” So she would send them to Gold’s and they’d load up on clothes and come back, but it wouldn’t last long because my grandmother would keep wanting to come back to California, to Los Angeles.

ESPINO:

She didn’t have anybody out here that she was involved with?

SANCHEZ:

No. She later met a man who needed a cook. He also worked for the railroad, but he was a foreman. He was from Missouri, and they got married. My “Daddy Charlie,” a wonderful man and he helped raise my mother. But my grandmother, when during the war my father went to school in—oh, I can’t remember where, to study engineering, and during the Second World War, he was on an aircraft carrier, and my mother came here to work in the defense plants.

ESPINO:

From—

SANCHEZ:

From Phoenix.

00:33:24

ESPINO:

So was your mom—did she go to school in Arizona? Is that where she attended school?

SANCHEZ:

In Arizona and here. My mother belonged to the original group that organized the ILGWU, International Ladies’ Garment Workers.

ESPINO:

Here in Los Angeles?

SANCHEZ:

That’s how I know Hope Mendoza, because my mother was a good friend of Hope’s.

ESPINO:

Okay, so your grandmother and your mother would migrate back and forth from Los Angeles to Nogales. And during that time, did your mother—was she able to go to school?

SANCHEZ:

Well, yeah, and then when she settled down, she was in the sixth grade, she says, when she married my Daddy Charlie. My Dad, Charlie, when they were in Ajo, I guess, or something, Arizona, the first thing he did was had a car brought in, a railroad car, and turned it into a school, and so my mother kept going to school there. It’s the first thing he did.

00:34:31

ESPINO:

Wow. So do you think she was able to finish, say, up to, what, ninth grade?

SANCHEZ:

Tenth, maybe.

ESPINO:

Tenth grade. And then how did they decide to come back? I thought she met him here in Los Angeles.

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

She met him—

SANCHEZ:

Over there, because they were all kind of—they all knew each other and they came here when my father joined the navy. My father worked in a defense plant. He didn’t have to go to war, but his two brothers and brother-in-law—no, it’s three brothers and brother-in-law went, were drafted, and he just felt that the Mexican Americans were very, very patriotic, that he wasn’t—because by then we were already grown. Remember I told you I was born in Phoenix. So they kept going back and forth, too, and he just felt he had to do his share. But he was planning (unclear) and so he joined the navy because he says, “I’m not going to be sleeping in a foxhole. I want a shower and I want clean clothes.” That’s why he joined the navy.

ESPINO:

But from what I understand, you have to take certain exams, and it’s more difficult.

SANCHEZ:

Well, he was a high school graduate and had some college education, so he—

ESPINO:

He was educated, in a sense. So he did have college education?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

00:36:16

ESPINO:

Wow. Okay. So, let me just—your grandmother, I thought she’s the one who married Charlie.

SANCHEZ:

Yes, my mother’s mother. My dad was Jesus Amaya. He was from—remember I told you about the foreman that my great-grandfather met, Jesus Amaya?

ESPINO:

Uh-huh. How old was your mom when she married him?

SANCHEZ:

Nineteen, twenty.

ESPINO:

Okay, so it was your grandmother who married at sixth grade—

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

—not your mother, and then your mother married Jesus Amaya.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and they came here. The war started in 1940, and so they came over here because my dad joined the navy and my mother started to work in a defense plant. I think beautiful women can get things that other women don’t. My mother was a very beautiful woman. She worked at the Pig and Whistle in Hollywood as a waitress. Very beautiful, red hair, camellia skin, very beautiful. So she worked there as a waitress. When they first came, they got off the bus and she saw a thing about “Waitress Wanted,” and so she applied there. She ran the—what do you call it, the ice cream bar? I don’t know what they call it.

ESPINO:

Like the soda fountain?

00:38:5400:40:26

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, the soda fountain. And my dad went to—I guess it’s called boot camp. I don’t know what they called the navy. In San Diego, he went there to boot camp. He joined the navy. But my mother was a waitress in Phoenix. She was almost twenty when she got married, and she worked in a place called the Busy Bee in Phoenix, Arizona, which is across the street from the Capitol. Well, the guy that she worked for paid them seven dollars a week, but he had a girlfriend and he used to give all the good tables, so she complained. Because my Daddy Charlie knew everybody, right? He was in the posse, the Phoenix posse, and so he knew the fire chief and he told him, “My daughter is having a hard time.”

He says, “Well, you know what? Tell her to go to the other restaurant on the other side of the City Hall. The girl’s going on vacation. I don’t know how long she’s going to be gone, but she can go work there. Ask them for a job, that I recommend her, and she can replace her while the girl’s on vacation.” So my mother says she went and they gave her the—she was a good worker. The guy was Jewish. At the end of the day, he tells her, “Okay.” Everybody lined up and he gave them each seven dollars. And she says, “But I’ve only worked today.” He says, “You get paid every day. You get paid in cash, and I pay you seven dollars a week because we’re a union.” My mother, from then on, believed in unions all her life. That’s why she joined the ILGWU. She was always in a union. She believed in unions. My dad didn’t, but my mother did. So she said, “Ah!” She says, “I was earning seven dollars a week over there and here I’m earning seven dollars a day and it’s a union.” So she joined the union, and from then on, she always believed in unions. She’s not dead. My mother’s alive. Always believed in unions, but she worked in the defense because she said they earned more money, the defense plants during the war.

When my dad came back, she went to work in Hollywood as a waitress, and then her Nana Luisa had taught her how to be a seamstress, so she went to work making belts, expensive belts—they were called Better Belts—for a man named Velasco here in Los Angeles. So she used to make fine belts. We always had real nice belts because she worked there. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

Do you know why she left the defense industry? Was she laid off after the war?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, because they needed to give the men back their jobs, and my father went to work for North American Aviation. He worked for most of the aviation companies, but he’d become an alcoholic in the navy.

ESPINO:

He became an alcoholic in the navy.

SANCHEZ:

And so he worked for a time. He was a night engineer at North American Aviation, where they made the planes, but when Eisenhower was elected and they had the Un-American Activities whatever, they decided that alcoholics, because he had clearance, were a danger to the United States, that the Russians could blackmail them, and so he was let go. After that, he went downhill and died by the time he was fifty-seven.

ESPINO:

He was depressed.

SANCHEZ:

So they were divorced. They were divorced when I was fourteen.

00:42:27

ESPINO:

When he became an alcoholic and it started to affect the family, your mother divorced him? Did she ever talk to you about how she felt being laid off by the defense industry?

SANCHEZ:

No, I think she thought it was normal. In those days, the men came first and they had to have jobs. They had to support their families.

ESPINO:

Was she ever able to use those skills pursuing other jobs, or did she have to do something completely different than what she had been doing?

SANCHEZ:

Well, she became a waitress and she used to make, she said, $100 a night tips at the Pig and Whistle.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

They opened it again. I’ve always wanted to take her, but she won’t go out anymore, to see it.

ESPINO:

The Pig and Whistle. And you said something about beautiful women get things that other women don’t.

SANCHEZ:

Like jobs. She could get a job right away.

ESPINO:

Yeah, jobs. Do you think that also because she was fair, she didn’t look Mexican—

SANCHEZ:

Probably.

ESPINO:

—that was an advantage?

SANCHEZ:

I guess. I just thought because she was very beautiful that she could—but she suffered a lot with her mother and her two sisters because she looked like her mother and her grandmother and they didn’t, and they were never very nice to her. One time my grandmother beat her so bad that she thought she’d killed her.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

But my mother’s a survivor.

00:44:09

ESPINO:

Did she grow up speaking Spanish and English?

SANCHEZ:

Mostly English. She didn’t speak really good Spanish till she was twenty-one, just because my grandmother didn’t speak Spanish. My great-grandfather spoke Spanish, finally, but not that great, but my grandmother, my father’s mother and father, they spoke Spanish. She was very close to them too. Even after she got divorced, she was very close to my aunt and my uncles, very close to them.

ESPINO:

That must have been hard to grow up—

SANCHEZ:

They understood. They understood why she divorced him, but it still was very—because my father was the oldest in his family and he was the head of the family, whenever he said something, that’s what was done. He was very, also, domineering. He was a leader and very—

ESPINO:

What are your memories of him?

SANCHEZ:

My father always wanted a son, never got him, so I had to learn things that a son would learn. I had to do things that a son—I had to learn to use a slide rule, I had to ride in a plane with him, even though he wasn’t a good pilot at all.

ESPINO:

He was flying the plane?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Oh, my god.

SANCHEZ:

He couldn’t land it. In fact, one time he came down and he says, “Look and see what that street is.” He was half-bombed all the time anyway. “So I can figure out where we’re at. Don’t tell your mother. Don’t tell your mother.”

00:46:14

ESPINO:

How did that occur? Was it his plane, or how did you—

SANCHEZ:

No, but he worked in an aviation company and there were pilots there all over. My father worked in one of the first what they called guided missiles was sent up. My father had green eyes, but was kind of dark with red hair, and he used to take me with him. But he would drink a lot, so in the morning sometimes he had a hard time getting up. So he says, “We’re going up to Santa Maria. We’re sending up a guided missile and I have to wire it.” He had to climb this high ladder. But anyway, when we got there, everybody was sitting around waiting for him, and this guy, this gringo—I don’t know, my dad said he was an Okie, I don’t know—says, “Is that what we’re waiting for, a dirty Mexican? We’re waiting for a dirty Mexican? He’s kept all these people, all these scientists, everybody waiting?” So my dad says, “Come on, mija, we’re going home.” We turned around and went home. “Jesse, where are you going? You can’t go!” He says, “Well, I want that guy off the premises. I don’t ever want to see him again. I’m not going to go up until I see him taken out by the guards.” So he went way up that ladder, up to the—I guess you’d call it a—what did they send to the moon?

ESPINO:

A satellite?

SANCHEZ:

No, the ones that propel the—

ESPINO:

Right, like a—

SANCHEZ:

I can’t think of that.

00:48:24

ESPINO:

Yeah. So you’re saying that he was actually launching the missile.

SANCHEZ:

He had to connect some wires. I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention. I didn’t really pay attention. I do remember that, though, because everybody just kind of—and my dad says, “Come on, mija, we’re going home.”

ESPINO:

How did you feel at that moment?

SANCHEZ:

I was so shocked. I’d never experienced that. My dad and my mom were very good-looking people and they went everywhere they wanted.

ESPINO:

That’s the first time you experienced racism?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Did you know about racism before that point? Did you know it existed?

SANCHEZ:

I knew that my grandmother had suffered because she was dark, and I knew that my Nana Luisa’s family used to call my great-grandfather, who was dark, you know—he came up with the Indian kind of—but he was tall like his father, that my Nana Luisa’s family called him the black gringo. “You black gringo,” because they hated him because he divorced—except my Nana Luisa. My Nana Luisa understood. But I guess I was so sheltered.

ESPINO:

Sounds like it.

SANCHEZ:

My family and stuff, you know, that—

ESPINO:

And money. It sounds like you had resources.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. I never considered money. I don’t know how to explain it to you. If I had shoes, I had shoes. If I didn’t, I didn’t. And that’s the way my sisters were. We weren’t into money. We weren’t into—

ESPINO:

But your family didn’t have property and—

SANCHEZ:

Well, they had property.

00:50:23

ESPINO:

—economic security, as far as food always on the table and—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah, during the war, we ate very well because the waiters from the dining cars liked my grandfather a lot and they would give him cakes and give him all kinds of stuff. My grandmother, the one who lived in Phoenix, she always had a chicken coop and a pigeon coop. We had eggs. In fact, my grandmother one time paid this lady—this lady came and told her, “If you give me $20, I’m going to bring you a pound of butter once a month.” Because, you know, in those days we didn’t have butter. It all went to the troops. So my grandmother gave her the $20, and she didn’t bring the butter. After the second month, my grandmother went to the district attorney, of all people. I don’t know. My grandmother was a daring person, my father’s mother. Here was this big, heavyset woman who just ruled the household. But she went and she said, “This woman took $20 and she hasn’t brought me my butter.” And he told her, “Well, Trini, Trinidad, it’s against the law. If you file a complaint against her, you’re going to go to jail, too, because you’re buying black-market stuff.” She says, “I don’t care. I’ll go to jail.”

ESPINO:

Wow. That’s bold. (Laughter)

SANCHEZ:

So she got her butter, and I guess he was too startled, he didn’t arrest her. I don’t know.

00:52:20

ESPINO:

So it worked out for her.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but she was very—like her sons, they were married, but they would come and have breakfast with her every morning. Very domineering. My grandfather was a small man and he just kind of lived life, but my grandmother ruled.

ESPINO:

Did she sew? What kinds of other things did she do?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, she sewed, she cooked.

ESPINO:

Did she make your clothing?

SANCHEZ:

Sometimes.

ESPINO:

It’s not like everything you wore, she made?

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

You would buy some things?

SANCHEZ:

And she would force me to go into the chicken coop and get the eggs, and I was scared to death of chickens, because chickens can be mean. You know, they go like that to you, and so I was afraid, and she would have a fit. And I was forced to rake out—when it was time to rake out the chicken coop, I’d go visit my great-grandfather or I’d walk to my grandmother’s, because I hated that. To this day, I won’t eat a black bean because it reminds me of stuff that was in the chicken coop. So when people rant and rave about black beans—

ESPINO:

(unclear) negatives.

SANCHEZ:

—give me a pinto bean.

ESPINO:

Wow. So then how about—oh, go ahead. Were you going to say something?

SANCHEZ:

No, that’s fine.

00:54:07

ESPINO:

Okay. Religion. Did your parents or grandparents, great-grandparents follow any type of a practice?

SANCHEZ:

They were Catholics in name. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side, of course, he had no religion or anything, you know. He was raised like an orphan. My grandmother went to church on important occasions and then the whole family had to go. I was sent to church. It was different. I had to go. I couldn’t do what they did. And I went to school here in St. Vibiana’s, you know, the old school, the one that had no lights and no heat, and we had the bathrooms outside. They celebrated holidays. When my mother and father stayed in California, we would go to Phoenix for Christmas or we’d go up north. Some of my mother’s family lived in the town of Hanford. The house is still there, 214 Eleventh Street. It was out in the boonies when I was a little girl. Now it’s in town. (Laughs) But we would go and they would buy the fruit off the apricot trees and dry it and bring it into Los Angeles. We had cutting sheds and big, huge underground ovens that would dry the—

ESPINO:

You and your family?

SANCHEZ:

Well, my cousin, the Barbas, part of my mother’s family. And my dad’s family, they were railroad people. One of my uncles, my dad’s brothers, moved to where my mother was born, to Jerome, Arizona, and drove a truck with TNT for the mines.

ESPINO:

So your mom’s side of the family had canneries?

SANCHEZ:

No, they didn’t have canneries. We used to dry fruit. You know the dry apricots that you—

00:56:15

ESPINO:

Okay.

SANCHEZ:

And it was only in the summer. We would get a cart from my cousin who ran it, and every day that we worked, he would punch a hole in it, you know. One year my cousin and I, his son—he was an only child, so he had twelve children—we got kind of (unclear), so we had no school clothes because we didn’t earn any money. At the end of the season, after all the bills were paid and everything, the money was divided. Everybody was given money.

ESPINO:

Based on how many holes they had?

SANCHEZ:

All the adults, I guess, got a share. I don’t know what they—but the kids, based on your card and based on how many holes you had in that card. So one year, my cousin Tony, who just retired—he was a highway patrolman on the Cuolinga (phonetic) Road there—didn’t get any. My grandmother bought me clothes anyway. I’m sure his grandmother did too. But we had no money.

ESPINO:

That’s funny. So then, well, just getting back to the idea of your religious experience, you said that they celebrated holidays. How would you celebrate Christmas? What kinds of things would you do?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, they’d always have a nativity scene, we’d got to midnight Mass, Misa de Gallo, all the babies were baptized, all the marriages were in churches, but there wasn’t an overtly religious kind of atmosphere.

ESPINO:

What about as far as the values that you learned as a child?

SANCHEZ:

Work. In order to survive, you have to work. Everybody in our family worked. The biggest compliment you could give a member of my family was, “He’s a hard worker.”

00:58:51

ESPINO:

How old were you when you first started to work?

SANCHEZ:

Twelve. I worked in the cutting sheds. I used to wash my uncle’s hair and shine his shoes for money. Because my uncles were teenagers. I was the oldest grandchild. They were teenagers. So even when in school, I always worked. Everybody worked. Nobody was allowed to be lazy. I have a sister who didn’t like to work.

ESPINO:

I’m sure.

SANCHEZ:

And they were always scolding her.

ESPINO:

What would they say?

SANCHEZ:

“Floja. The girl would rather read. We hope the man she marries likes to read books because she’s not going to cook.” And you know what? She still does read a lot. (Laughs) But the rest of us, we had to work and we had to be hard workers, not just any old kind of worker. And my mother was a perfectionist, so whenever I did something, it had to be done perfect.

ESPINO:

Like for example?

SANCHEZ:

I had bad ankles, so I had to wear high-tops, which I hated.

ESPINO:

Those, like, oxford-type shoes?

SANCHEZ:

High-tops, they were like, you know, the high-top tennies, but they were leather. They were white.

ESPINO:

Orthopedic shoes.

SANCHEZ:

Browns. They were Buster Brown, I remember, and I had to shine them, and if the weren’t shined right when I was five, she would throw them out the door and get them all dirty and make me do it again.

01:00:42

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

When we’d go to a party or something, a birthday party, she would put my hair in rags. You know the rag curls?

ESPINO:

Uh-huh.

SANCHEZ:

Because everybody had to look like Shirley Temple. And I would be sat on the front porch and I couldn’t move until those curls were dry in the sun. And I would get in the car in a slip, and before we went into the party, my dress, stiffly starched, would be put on. And my shoes better be clean before I went in, because it was a reflection on her. And she was like that with my other sister too. My youngest sister got away with murder because she was the baby and my dad adored her, so we had to do for her.

ESPINO:

How much younger is she, the youngest?

SANCHEZ:

Carol is—I was eight when she was born, and Rose Marie (phonetic) was six.

ESPINO:

It’s a big difference, eight.

SANCHEZ:

Well, she was born in the forties. She was born after my dad came back.

ESPINO:

Well, do you know where your mother got those values from—

SANCHEZ:

No, I don’t.

ESPINO:

—why she worried so much about your—

SANCHEZ:

I have a feeling her grandmother was like that, because my children claim that I’m sort of like that. I’ve tried all my life not to be. My father was a perfectionist. I think that’s why he was an alcoholic. He couldn’t accept anything less than perfect. And when he got fired, it just—he wasn’t perfect anymore.

01:02:54

ESPINO:

Did your mother talk about the difference that she experienced when he came back from the navy?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

So she did notice something?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

Did she ever know or maybe come up with a theory as to how that happened?

SANCHEZ:

She said he became a drunkard and a philanderer in the navy, that all navy people were drunkards and philanderers. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

I wonder if he told her stories about things that he did or—

SANCHEZ:

Hardly ever.

ESPINO:

He never did?

SANCHEZ:

He was aboard the USS Cowpens, the “Mighty Moo,” they called it. It was the first ship, aircraft carrier to enter Tokyo Bay. And because he was on the top level, he was in radar. I think he saw a lot of things. One time he said that one of the planes crashed on the side and it was burning and the pilot was screaming, and the captain got a gun and went and shot him so he wouldn’t suffer. My father’s knee was hurt because the kamikaze came at him. He didn’t like to talk about it.

ESPINO:

So he actually experienced combat?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Yes, he did, a lot of combat.

01:04:20

ESPINO:

Did he ever pass on to you his feelings towards the Japanese? Do you recall him making any—

SANCHEZ:

He never disliked the Japanese, never. We lived on Bunker Hill and some of our neighbors were Japanese. We took care of their stuff until they came back from the camps.

ESPINO:

Do you remember when they left?

SANCHEZ:

No, I don’t. Isn’t that strange? I remember when they came back, but I don’t remember when they left. All I remember is that all of a sudden we had a school that had lights and stuff, and it was the Maryknoll School, where the Japanese students used to go, on Second and Hewitt. We left the school here and they built a new one. We were the Immaculate Heart nuns and we were sent to the school on Second and Hewitt, and the decorations and things were Japanese-y, and our neighbors disappeared. The only Japanese that was left on the Hill was the gardener for one of the women who had this big mansion on Bunker Hill. Her husband was the fire chief here in Los Angeles and she kept her gardener. All the other Japanese were gone, the ones in the stores, everywhere.

ESPINO:

Do you remember how you felt or what you thought?

SANCHEZ:

No, I don’t.

ESPINO:

It almost sounds like—I don’t know if you know that Christian philosophy about the rapture.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, like they—

ESPINO:

They just disappeared and—

SANCHEZ:

I am born again. I’m born again. My sisters are still Catholics.

ESPINO:

Okay.

SANCHEZ:

I’m not.

01:06:25

ESPINO:

So that idea that you wake up and half the people are gone, was it that kind of a sensation?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t remember, but you know what? I’ve tried to remember, because it was a dramatic event. They must have come to the Hill and gotten them. Where did they go? I don’t know.

ESPINO:

But there was not sirens or big—you know those photographs that you see of people lined up and with their luggage outside their home.

SANCHEZ:

I didn’t see that. Maybe we were protected from seeing that. I don’t know.

ESPINO:

Well, how did you come to store the—

SANCHEZ:

I didn’t; my parents did, and the adults. It was just like not talked about, I guess.

ESPINO:

Yeah. You don’t remember them coming to your house and saying, “Can you keep my things?”

SANCHEZ:

No. I don’t know whether we were in school. I don’t understand that, but I don’t remember when they took them. That’s really strange, now that I think about it.

ESPINO:

When you think about, like today, for example, if something like that would happen, everybody’d be talking about it. We’d all be talking about it.

SANCHEZ:

Don’t forget, in the generations when I grew up, there were a lot of things that weren’t talked about. One of my grandmother’s favorite signals was this (demonstrates). “Keep your mouth shut.” You didn’t talk about people being mentally retarded, mentally ill, divorced. My mom and dad weren’t divorced until after my grandmothers died. You didn’t talk about homosexuality. You didn’t talk about drugs. We didn’t hear those things. I’m sure the adults knew, but kids were expected not to—when people came to visit, we never said a word, and if my dad gave us a funny look, we’d leave. My dad didn’t have to spank us or anything; he just—my mother, on the other hand, spanked us, but my dad—so I don’t remember. I just remember when they came back.

01:08:54

ESPINO:

And what was that like?

SANCHEZ:

All of a sudden they were there and some of them were grown up—

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

—and so were we, you know. I don’t know how to explain. We were teenagers. And they gave them their houses back and the cellar. I lived in an apartment house where the whole family lived. We went to the cellar, and all the cellar was emptied out. The store on Bunker Hill, the Bunker Hill Market, became Japanese again. I don’t know. It was strange.

ESPINO:

And you never would talk about it with them either?

SANCHEZ:

No, they didn’t like to talk about it. They didn’t want to talk about it. My youngest sister, the one that was born after the war, her babysitter was Japanese, because they lived in the same apartment house that we did and they took care of her while my mother and dad worked and we were in school. My two sisters and I were in school, my sisters. My other sister was at school. It was really strange, but people didn’t talk about a lot of things.

01:10:15

ESPINO:

How would you describe that? Would you describe it as you just shoved it under the carpet, you just ignored it, you just pretended like it didn’t happen?

SANCHEZ:

We were kind of sheltered, I guess, on Bunker Hill, I don’t know. Like the Zoot Suit Riots and the things, never happened on the Hill. My grandfather Angel, who finally came back to California with a new wife, I guess, I don’t know, they opened the restaurant there on Temple Street called La Flor de Jalisco. But during the war, walking back and forth on Temple Street, and there were sailors and stuff. There was a bar—I can’t remember what it was called—on the corner of Temple and Hill, and it was always full of sailors and stuff. My aunt was nineteen at the time. She was always in that bar with the sailors, and I remember that she’d bring me in, and they had a lot of, like, prizes on top, like Humpty Dumpty’s potpies and stuff. They were made out of chalk, you know, and they were painted. And she’d say, “Oh, my niece wants that over there.” And some sailor would buy it for me. I’d walk down to La Flor de Jalisco, and nothing ever happened to me.

ESPINO:

How old were you?

SANCHEZ:

I was eight.

ESPINO:

Because it was during the war.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Because they were still in uniform. Wow.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and I’d walk around. Nobody would bother me.

ESPINO:

That’s different too.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Oh, yeah. My sisters and I would go downtown. We’d take the Angels Flight downtown and we’d walk around and we were young.

01:12:44

ESPINO:

You had a lot of independence.

SANCHEZ:

A lot of independence. We’d go to City Hall and go up to the top, to the tower.

ESPINO:

Inside?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, all the way up to the top. They had like a—what do you call it? You know, they have a room up there.

ESPINO:

I don’t know. I’ve never been up there.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, we’d take the—everybody—

ESPINO:

For the view, I would imagine.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, because we’d walk. A lot of times we’d walk. Most of the time we were bused, but sometimes we didn’t want to be on the bus. I was bused when I was here, to Second Street from Bunker Hill.

ESPINO:

There was not a school up there?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know. I went to St. Vibiana’s. I don’t know.

ESPINO:

Oh, because you were going to Catholic school.

SANCHEZ:

My grandmother had gone there, and so we went. And we’d walk home and we’d climb all the stairs all the way up to Bunker Hill next to the Angels Flight, just to walk it. I had very strong legs because of that. Yeah, but we’d walk around. We’d walk down to St. Vibiana’s when we were teenage girls, not even teenagers, we were about twelve, to the five o’clock Mass and we’d walk out around 3:30 and come to Skid Row right there, so we could practice the Christmas songs before the people came in for five o’clock Mass. And then we’d sing for about an hour before a lot of people would come in and then we’d go across the street to the arcade. There was a penny arcade. I remember that some of the boys would laugh, probably dirty things. They had these little—you would put your eyes on it, little machines and turn them, and you’d pay two cents and you’d see, like, a—

01:14:45

ESPINO:

Like a pinup girl or something?

SANCHEZ:

Well, not the ones we’d see. We’d see Abbott and Costello and stuff, but it was like little cards, you know. We’d do that and then we’d go to Little Tokyo. One of the alleys that we weren’t supposed to go to, rumors that somebody said that sometime somebody (unclear) somebody (unclear), because they had a lot of doodads, little things that you could buy for pennies, you know. And the nuns would send us to Little Tokyo to buy the groceries, and on Sundays, Little Tokyo was the only place you could shop because all the ranchers and stuff, all the Japanese would come and do their shopping on Sundays. So whenever we had a party or, say, we needed something, we’d go to Little Tokyo to buy it on Sundays because all the other stores, everything else was closed on Sunday. So we were very close to the Japanese community, very close.

ESPINO:

But would you say it would be okay to have relationships, male-female or those kinds of—like intermarry, that kind of close—

SANCHEZ:

No, but I think mainly it was the Japanese.

ESPINO:

Because of them, not because of the Mexican or the Anglo?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

01:16:32

ESPINO:

Did you get invited to their homes or, vice versa, parties?

SANCHEZ:

Well, Japanese have a culture where they rarely invite people to their homes. They don’t invite people to their homes. You meet them out. Now they do. I guess they’ve become more modern, but in those days—I spent a month with my daughter in Japan, never got invited to a home.

ESPINO:

How about your sister’s babysitter? Did you get to know their family at all?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah. Well, they were right down the hall, and my sister could speak Japanese, pray in Japanese. Of course, she’s forgotten it all.

ESPINO:

Oh, that’s fascinating.

SANCHEZ:

And we’ve always gotten along very well. One of my best friends was Yoshi Odomi (phonetic), who owned the JonSons Markets in East L.A.

ESPINO:

When did you meet her?

SANCHEZ:

Him.

ESPINO:

Him, okay. When did you meet him?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know. I felt like I’d always known him. From Bunker Hill we would go to East L.A. to buy things, to buy the chilis or special things, candles or whatever. We would go to East L.A. to buy them and then we’d bring them up the Hill. Like, I never tasted mole until I was twenty-five. We had red chili. We didn’t have mole and green chili.

ESPINO:

So the restaurant that your family opened, La Flor de Jalisco, was it a Mexican restaurant?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

Mexican food?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, Mexican food.

01:18:25

ESPINO:

Because some people make reference that Mexican wasn’t used in those days. It was, like, Spanish American.

SANCHEZ:

No, It said “La Flor de Jalisco, Mexican food.” It was like United Nations row, I guess. There was the Traveler’s Café, which was Filipinos. There was the—I wish I could remember the bar on the corner, which was owned by a Mexican guy.

ESPINO:

The one that the sailors went to?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Then there was a Chinese restaurant and there was La Flor de Jalisco. Then you walked, there was a little theater, and then there was La Sirena Market, and then across the street was the Bank of America.

ESPINO:

That’s still there, right?

SANCHEZ:

No, none of that is there. I dream it all the time, though. Isn’t it funny? I dream Temple Street and Sunset Street.

ESPINO:

What happens in your dream?

SANCHEZ:

Just that I’m there, walking around. Then there was—oh, at the end there was a Safeway, across the street was a Bank of America, next to that was a laundry, Chinese laundry, next to that—I’m trying to think. I think there was a billiard hall, and I don’t remember what the other two places were. I think they were two little hotels. Then you came to Temple and Grand again, and it was the Black Bear Bar, which was my dad’s favorite place. Then there was the bridge, you know. The bridge was here. If you go down Temple, there’s the bridge that divides Temple Street. There was the bridge. Then we’d cross the bridge, and then it was houses and apartments. We lived right where the Music Center and the Department of Water and Power are.

01:20:40

ESPINO:

What street?

SANCHEZ:

Hope and Grand, on Hope and Grand. And across the street from us was the fire station. Down the block from us was a row of Victorian houses that were owned by, I guess, hoity-toity people because they used to go to Europe. I remember the maids, black maids would come out and walk their dogs. “Oh, well, his mother’s going to Europe or something.” I don’t know. Across the street was a big—the castle, we used to call it, that was owned by that lady who was the mother of the fire chief. Then there were two flats, what we called, you know, two on top and two on the bottom, (unclear) people. Next door to us on Court there was just one house next to us, then the Victorians. On the other side were two Victorian houses that were always dark. They were owned by Jewish people. I guess they suffered a lot during the Second War, you know. I don’t know. But they would pay some kids in the neighborhood a nickel to go on Fridays and turn off the lights and to turn them on again on Sundays for them. They had no plants, nothing. It was just really stark. Then there was another house. Across the street was the Bunker Hill Market. Then you cross and there were six flats and then there were two homes. Then there was my aunt’s house. She went and paved the whole backyard. No, she didn’t. She put gravel and used to rent out parking spaces, because my grandmother, my aunt, you know, used to like to travel and we all had passes. But the men didn’t like them to go because then they had to fend for themselves, right? So she used to rent parking spaces to make money.

01:22:52

ESPINO:

To pay for somebody to take care of her husband when she was away or—

SANCHEZ:

No, so we could travel, so we could have spending money.

ESPINO:

Oh, because he wouldn’t give her any.

SANCHEZ:

No, because— (Laughs)

ESPINO:

They didn’t want her to go. Some strong women in your family.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Independent-minded.

SANCHEZ:

It was fun. My aunt and my uncle, her husband was a—he was diabetic and he would wear her stockings, I remember, and I thought nothing of it. In our apartment house, we lived there, my cousin lived on the second floor, we lived on the third floor, the Japanese family lived—I can’t even remember the names. Then downstairs, one of my uncles lived in one of the apartments. Across from him, my cousin’s family lived there, his in-laws, his first wife’s mother and her—well, (unclear), they were in the service. And then on the other side, there was a family that weren’t relatives, amazingly enough. I remember they had a black German shepherd who was mean, and every now and then they’d let him out and he wouldn’t let anybody into the building. (Laughs) There was a phone in the entry. There was a phone which everybody shared, and it was a party line. There were three people on the same line, so somebody was always hollering, “Get off the phone! I need to use the phone!”

01:24:37

ESPINO:

(unclear), yeah.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Across the street, next to the fire station was a brick building, an apartment house where all the gringos lived.

ESPINO:

How was it different from your apartment? Was it different?

SANCHEZ:

Ours was wood and theirs was brick. That was the only difference that I could see. But we’d go in there and use the phone when the party line wouldn’t get off. They had a phone in the lobby, too, and we’d go in there and use it.

ESPINO:

Do you think that the ethnic groups had to live separate from—do you think that was purposeful or just a coincidence that the gringos—

SANCHEZ:

Well, because my aunts owned the—I don’t know. I think it was because we were all family and the buildings belonged to us until they sold it to a Japanese couple.

ESPINO:

Oh, your family owned that apartment complex?

SANCHEZ:

My aunt.

ESPINO:

Your aunt owned it.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

We had an American Indian family that lived there. That was the other family on the other side. They were American Indians and they would be gone a lot of the time and then they would come back. And then we had a mixed couple on the third floor, the end of the block, I remember, the end of the hall. She was a gringa. I can’t remember their name. They played the mandolin, both of them.

ESPINO:

What was he?

SANCHEZ:

He was Mexican.

01:26:15

ESPINO:

Oh, okay, mixed, white and Mexican?

SANCHEZ:

But, I mean, nobody thought anything. My dad—we had Japanese friends, white friends, Indian friends, black friends.

ESPINO:

It sounds so diverse.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, Bunker Hill was. In the summers, we would go to South Central way over there in Compton. There was a place called the Barrel House that was an after-hours place, huge parking lot. All the black musicians would go there, and all the people, Mexicans, you name it, we’d park in the parking lot to listen to the music. Nobody fought, nobody—there weren’t any—that was old L.A. It wasn’t this way at all. It might have been different in East L.A. There were the zoot suiters and the gangs. But it was my impression that—because we would go to East L.A.—I would go to Lourdes to the dances—that if you didn’t mess with them, they didn’t mess with you. It was way different. I don’t think the drug culture—I think the drug culture has done a lot to hurt. If they did drugs, they did it to them, you know? They wouldn’t pick on people just to pick on them. If they had their fights, they had their fights between themselves.

ESPINO:

So you didn’t see a lot of violence growing up?

01:28:31

SANCHEZ:

I remember my uncle one time was complaining about this kid that the cops had killed in—was it (unclear) Pico, Ramona Gardens? He had gone in there and I guess he’d gotten into it with a cop or something, and he killed him. And I remember my uncle being very angry, saying, “What in the hell’s the matter with those people? They should have told that kid he couldn’t go in. They should have protected him.”

So there was this aura of protecting. I remember my grandmother kind of was very heavyset, so she kind of had a hard time walking, and I do remember that one time one of the guys that came from the war was driving kind of fast and nearly hit her, and she got the cane and hit the car, and everybody came out and gave him hell. You didn’t pick on the elders. You didn’t rob an old guy. You didn’t cuss in front of the older people. And I remember that the adults, they didn’t care whose kids you were. If you were up to no good, they told you, “(Spanish phrase papa). I’m going to tell your mother and dad, ‘Do you know what your son’s doing?’” Or your daughter. It was a very different atmosphere.

ESPINO:

It’s almost like you got morality from the community that you lived in, not—well, you did say you went to Catholic Church, but would you say that your values about those kinds of things came from the church?

SANCHEZ:

From the people. No, from my community, from my community. There were certain things you just did not do. There was a girl in the neighborhood whose name was Gloria, and I guess one of my cousins liked her. And on the wall—we had, like, balconies, the old building had, like, balconies. He carved out her name “Gloria.” I remember my uncle grabbing me by the arm, taking me.

ESPINO:

You?

01:30:45

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, grabbing me by the arm, “What the hell’s that?” I said, “What?” “Why did you write your name? Why did you carve your name?” I said, “I didn’t. It’s about the other Gloria.” My cousin got into trouble.

ESPINO:

Well, you know what they say about corporal—today, you know, modern parenting, that punishment, hitting and strict punishment doesn’t work. Do you think that it did in the—I mean, because obviously that’s the kind of rearing that you had.

SANCHEZ:

A lot of corporal punishment. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

Do you think that it kept you—

SANCHEZ:

And not only from my mom and dad, from my grandmother, from my uncles, from my aunts, you know, whoever was around and I did something.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

There was no one in our family—if my uncle’s son did something and my dad told him, “Hey, what the hell you—you don’t do that,” or, “(Spanish phrase). I can handle you.” I don’t remember my uncle talking the way they do now, “This is my kid and nobody corrects my kid but me.” That was unheard of, unheard of.

ESPINO:

Wow. So what about—is that how you raised your children, as well?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Or how do you feel about that? Do you think that it was helpful to have so many people—

SANCHEZ:

Yes, because you never needed a babysitter. If I was hungry and my mom wasn’t home, I could go to my aunt’s or my grandmother’s. You know, I didn’t have to call before I came over.

01:32:33

ESPINO:

So how did you leave that apartment complex?

SANCHEZ:

Well, you know, I don’t know if you heard, but the CRA redeveloped Bunker Hill. It was big. People refused to move, but we finally had to move. We had no choice.

ESPINO:

So you were part of that.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

You were part of that eviction. Basically it was—

SANCHEZ:

What did they call us? I forget. They said it was a slum. And there were slummy places. I admit there were slummy places. Some people didn’t take care of their place, but others did.

ESPINO:

It sounds like it was a mix of—

SANCHEZ:

Big mix.

ESPINO:

—of economic levels.

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

ESPINO:

You had the wealthy and then the middle and then probably the struggling.

SANCHEZ:

All on that Hill. We had our own mortuary. There was a mortuary on the Hill. There was a market at the end of the—(unclear) was another—there was an appliance store and another Safeway, and everybody went there. There wasn’t, like, you couldn’t go there. I remember when the first TVs came out. The men who owned the appliance store had a little TV like this, and there was, like, one station and, like, four programs, and everybody would take chairs and stuff and blankets and coffee and sit in front and watch the program and they’d stay there looking at the TV when it was only snow, because there wasn’t that much. (Laughs)

01:34:08

ESPINO:

So did you feel like you could pretty much go anywhere, enter anywhere, eat anywhere, that kind of thing?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

You don’t feel like you were limited by the fact that you were Mexican as to what parts of town you could visit?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

And the nuns that taught you, were they—

SANCHEZ:

They were Immaculate Hearts. Some were Mexican.

ESPINO:

Oh, some were.

SANCHEZ:

Sister Esperanza was my favorite. And they’d had that school since my grandmother was a little girl. But there were Irish. There was a lot of Irish nuns and a lot of Irish priests, a lot of them.

ESPINO:

Did they speak Spanish?

SANCHEZ:

No. When the kids came—like, we had kids come over from Mexico.

ESPINO:

I bet.

SANCHEZ:

They were put in the classroom, and it was up to us. There was never a special class. It was up to us to help them.

ESPINO:

Like translate, that kind of thing?

01:35:32

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, I never heard the word “immigrant,” “alien.” They were sat down and they were taught just the way the rest of us were. They had to stand up and pledge the flag. They had to learn whatever we learned, and when they didn’t understand, it was up to one of us to explain it.

All of the kids in my class went to high school. All of them were forced to pass. We were forced to pass. We were kept until five o’clock if we didn’t know our times tables. You know, everybody was treated equally. I don’t remember anybody saying, “Well, he’s a Mexican from Mexico.” No. We had a couple of Chinese students, we had some Japanese.

ESPINO:

Do you have photographs from that school experience?

SANCHEZ:

I have a photograph of the school with the bus in front of it. But I remember we didn’t—none of them—and sometimes people don’t like me for saying this; I’m very frank—none of them grew up with an accent, a heavy Mexican Spanish accent, none of them.

ESPINO:

Why do you think people don’t like you for saying that?

SANCHEZ:

They resent it because the bilingual teachers, including my sister, feel threatened. They say you have to stay in English or Spanish classroom for five years before you can transition. These kids transitioned immediately. They had no choice, and they transitioned and they did very well.

ESPINO:

So you’re a believer of the immersion.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

01:37:09

ESPINO:

From your experience.

SANCHEZ:

From my experience, and anyone my age that went through that would tell you the same thing. We were brought up very arrogant. Catholic people were special. Anyone who got pregnant, I mean, it was just unheard of, because your body was the temple of the Holy Ghost. You were special. And so these things, I guess, kept us safe. We didn’t have teenage pregnancies because of that, because everybody—if one happened, we never heard about it, because we were going to heaven. If we went to church nine first Fridays, we were sure to go to heaven, so nothing would happen to us. We weren’t afraid. How could we be afraid? We were going to go to heaven anyway.

ESPINO:

Yeah, it definitely sounds like there was almost like a bubble of protection in your neighborhood, which was big when you’re talking about going—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, downtown.

ESPINO:

—down to downtown from Temple and from Hope. It’s not a small area of space.

SANCHEZ:

And we were Mexican, Mexican American. We had a bazaar here. There were two missions that served St. Vibiana’s, one, Immaculate Heart, and, one, Holy Rosary, and at Holy Rosary and Immaculate Heart, (unclear). We didn’t have a bazaar. We had a jamaica, and we served Mexican food. So it wasn’t like we forsook our culture. No, we had a strong culture.

01:39:38

ESPINO:

You didn’t grow up with a sense of—like when you talk to some people from the Chicano Movement, people who went to public school talk about being ridiculed, feeling shame for speaking Spanish, feeling embarrassed about their Mexican heritage.

SANCHEZ:

Never, never. And my dad and my mother and my uncles, they went everywhere. I remember they would go and dance to Spade Cooley at the Riverside Rancho on Riverside Drive, and they would go to see Desi Arnaz at the Macambo. But they all had their black suits and their white shirts and ties and, you know, their—

ESPINO:

Right. Yeah, that’s a whole other way of looking at that time period, is that openness that you’re talking about right before the relocation. Not a relocation, or I don’t know how you—how do they describe it? What is the word that they use, the Bunker Hill —

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, relocatees. We were scattered. They were really scattered and everyone went to different—now and then we’ll meet someone, but they’re all dying out.

ESPINO:

Right. That’s true. Yeah, my grandparents lived up there, too, and that was her biggest heartbreak. They didn’t own the home, but they loved their home and they loved the neighborhood.

SANCHEZ:

It was a wonderful place to grow up.

ESPINO:

Well, I’m going to stop it right here and then next time I want to pick up on just that whole relocation, what happened and how you found out—

SANCHEZ:

It was sad.

ESPINO:

—about it and where you moved and how you decided to choose your next spot. Okay, so I’m going to stop it here. (End of August 9, 2013 interview)

SESSION TWO (September 27, 2013)

00:00:31

ESPINO:

This is Virginia Espino, and today’s September 27, 2013. I’m interviewing Mrs. Dolores Sanchez at the offices of Eastern Publication Group. Last time we talked—I don’t know if you recall; it’s been a few weeks, maybe a month now that we had our last interview, but we finished about the time that you were living in Bunker Hill. And I want to go back to that and ask you if you attended elementary school in that neighborhood.

SANCHEZ:

Yes. Well, actually, I attended first grade and then I went to St. Vibiana’s downtown.

ESPINO:

I think you did tell me that about St. Vibiana’s. And why did your parents take you out of the local school?

SANCHEZ:

I think because they just felt—they were Catholics and they felt that this was the easiest way to get all my Catholic requirements done. (Laughs) Besides, my grandmother had gone there, and my father was in the Knights of Columbus there. So it was a good place for me to go, even though it had no lights, no heat.

ESPINO:

At the time, I know you were small, but did it feel like it was a step up in your education or—

SANCHEZ:

I don’t think I gave it any thought, very truthfully. I did what my parents decided I was going to do, and a lot of my neighbors went there, so it didn’t bother me. You know, I had friends.

ESPINO:

Did you recall there was any perception about the public school as not being good?

SANCHEZ:

Not then, not that I remember. It was just that they thought it was the easiest way to get my first communion and my confirmation done. I’d be there and I’d learn my prayers. Because my parents were Catholic, but I can’t say they were every-week-Mass kind of people. They would go to Mass and religious things when they felt like it, but they wouldn’t be there every Sunday.

ESPINO:

And you said that your father was in the Knights of Columbus?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

00:02:25

ESPINO:

So were they active in community events?

SANCHEZ:

Not my mother. My mother was active in union events with the ILGWU, and my father was active with the Knights of Columbus.

ESPINO:

Do you recall things that they would participate in or functions?

SANCHEZ:

Well, for instance, when they had special ceremonies and stuff, the Knights of Columbus would stand outside on the stairs going up in the back of St. Vibiana’s as the—in those days it was an archbishop—Archbishop Manning came in, because he lived somewhere else. And in the church, like Easter Sundays, high Masses and things like that, they also had meetings and they would celebrate Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Blessed Mother, the Immaculate Heart, things like that, and they would have meetings and get together. They’d have breakfasts and sometimes banquets and stuff.

ESPINO:

Did your father have a leadership role in this organization or was he always just a member that you recall?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t recall. I know that a prominent man—there’s a statue of him in the county courthouse; I can’t remember his name. He’s an attorney, would come and visit, but I didn’t pay attention to what they talked about. I just wasn’t interested, I guess. I did like the uniform with all those plumes and stuff.

00:04:16

ESPINO:

Do you have pictures of him in the uniform?

SANCHEZ:

No. My mother and father were divorced when I was fourteen and the pictures separated, and I think my father, when he became an alcoholic, lost everything. So I don’t. I wish I did.

ESPINO:

So, paper documents from that period, you don’t have any of that kind of thing? It would be interesting to find out about that.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

So it was an ethnically diverse organization.

SANCHEZ:

I think there were some Filipinos there. I think that it was mostly Anglo. And since my mother and father were both English-speaking, I don’t know, I guess that’s why they felt at home there with them.

ESPINO:

And at the same time, you said your mother was involved in the ILGWU.

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

ESPINO:

Do you recall any of her activities or some of the issues?

SANCHEZ:

Well, they would have meetings. They would have strikes, and she would participate in those. I think she even once got arrested, which made my father terribly angry, terribly embarrassed, for going in and pulling the plugs on the sewing machines in a factory.

ESPINO:

Wow. That sounds rebellious. So would she come home and talk about the union to you?

SANCHEZ:

Yes. And they had events for families. Like, they had a bowling league, and we would go with her to the bowling league. And then they taught music. I remember the man’s name was Corn. I’ve never forgotten his name because it was Corn, Peter Corn, who would give us the music lessons.

00:06:20

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

So there were activities for the families, for you to take your children.

ESPINO:

And this was when you were still living in Bunker Hill?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

And so where would you go exactly?

SANCHEZ:

Downtown. I think the hall was on Twelfth Street.

ESPINO:

And it was a union hall?

SANCHEZ:

It was a union hall, the ILGWU, and the “coats and suits,” they used to call them, those were mostly men. They were tailors who did men’s clothing. The women did the women’s clothing, the dresses and shirts and tops and stuff.

ESPINO:

So when you would get the music lessons, you would get them in the union hall?

SANCHEZ:

Yes. It usually took place in the union hall. It was a big building.

ESPINO:

Anything else? Any other classes or any other functions that you recall?

SANCHEZ:

No, we listened to the speakers. They would have speakers come in from the union from New York. I remember one time when there was a “coats and suits” guy in the back of the room, and I can’t remember his name. The head of the union came from New York, and the men told him to shut up since he was wearing Italian shoes. And I remember the—but I can’t remember his name. It’s been so long ago.

00:07:55

ESPINO:

That’s great.

SANCHEZ:

He took his shoes off. He says, “Now do I still offend you?”

ESPINO:

Wow. Those were important issues at the time.

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

People really put their life on the line.

SANCHEZ:

“How dare you come here and you’re wearing Italian shoes?” I don’t know how he knew they were Italian shoes. I couldn’t tell.

ESPINO:

Right. But there probably was a specific—

SANCHEZ:

They would have dances. They would have one picnic a year and then they have what was called the City of Hope ILGWU Fair or something. They would have it at the Shrine Auditorium, and all the manufacturers, all the clothing manufacturers, would give stuff to the union, and they would raffle it off or you could buy things. You could buy a blouse for ten cents. And then they’d have prizes and stuff, and it was a fun day. They had food.

ESPINO:

It sounds like wonderful community.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, it was very different from today, or I don’t know.

ESPINO:

Well, your mom, how long did she stay working with the ILGWU?

SANCHEZ:

I guess until she switched in the fifties to belts, and I guess they didn’t have—I don’t know. I don’t know, but I noticed that she quit going.

ESPINO:

So I’m sure she’s seeing, herself, she’s seeing the change from that period, which was, what, the forties? What you’re talking about is the forties?

SANCHEZ:

Yes, the late forties, early fifties.

00:09:48

ESPINO:

Late forties, early fifties, of a strong community—

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh. On Labor Day there would be a huge parade. Broadway would be closed, and all the unions would march in the parade, all of them wearing the different outfits. The painters would be in painting clothes and, you know, all the fire—well, no, the fire fighters weren’t—but the longshoremen with their hats, their hard hats. Then they’d have a big picnic. I don’t remember where the picnic was. I think it was in Griffith Park. So Labor Day was a real Labor Day.

ESPINO:

Where the working people would come out and celebrate themselves.

SANCHEZ:

Yes, and politicians. Everybody would go because there were votes and the unions did give contributions, not in the way they do now. The biggest contribution they had was feet and hands and—

ESPINO:

Right, right. Do you remember your mom talking about representation of Latinos in the union?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

What would she say?

SANCHEZ:

She didn’t like it and she told—see, I can’t remember the names. It’ll come to me. Some of the people in the union, she was very vocal that they needed more business agents to be Mexican—Mexican Americans was what they called themselves in those days, Mexican Americans—and more of the leadership of the union had to be Mexican American. It was a big kind of sore spot. And I remember that Wolfe (phonetic)—I can’t remember his first name, wonderful man, but I can’t remember his first name—Mr. Wolfe told her, “Someday you guys are going to need to run the union. Right now you’re serving your internships, but you’re going to run this union. You’ll be running the unions because you’re going to be all the workers.”

ESPINO:

Wow. That’s fascinating he could see that even back then.

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

00:12:28

ESPINO:

Did she ever take a position of leadership within the union, as far as being a shop steward or staff?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah, yeah. She was a volunteer organizer. She was president of the local.

ESPINO:

Oh, wow. That’s incredible. Did you feel that she was not home for you, she was always out working, either working or at the union hall?

SANCHEZ:

Sometimes, sometimes, though a lot of times she would take us when they had stuff for families.

ESPINO:

So I guess if you could maybe reflect on her attitude during those years, because, you know, sometimes parents come home from work and they’re really grumpy because they hate their job and they’re always complaining, or sometimes they come home and they’re invigorated. How would you describe—

SANCHEZ:

She was very invigorated, but there were times when we missed her. Like, my mother never went to a school play, a school luncheon, anything like that. She was always very busy, either with her job or with the union. Now, my younger sisters resented a lot more than I did. Maybe because I participated a lot more, I was older.

00:13:59

ESPINO:

What was the first thing that you participated in, that you recall?

SANCHEZ:

Probably the—they used to give toys away on Christmas and I helped give the toys away, organizing stuff. I belonged to the league, the bowling league. I took the music lessons. When they decided that they were going to support Edward Roybal, I distributed leaflets for him in his first run at political office.

ESPINO:

Did you get a chance to meet him?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

Do you remember what that was like or where it was, how it happened?

SANCHEZ:

I think it was at a rally with my mother, and my mother took me up and introduced me. He was a very charismatic man. I don’t remember what we talked about, but we talked for a few minutes and he thanked me. He says, “It’s very important that I get elected.” And I met his wife, who I loved, Lucille, such a lovely woman. And from that day on, we were friends. We were friends until they both died.

ESPINO:

Wow. From that day on. Was your mom close with them, as far as in their—

SANCHEZ:

No, through her union work. Her first loyalty, her first interest was the union.

ESPINO:

So when you’re growing up, you’re going to school, how old were you when you gave out leaflets with Edward Roybal? Were you in junior high at that time?

SANCHEZ:

Was about thirteen.

00:15:53

ESPINO:

And you were still in the same Catholic school?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh, which did not always put me in a good light with the nuns. They didn’t really agree with what the unions were doing or actually with unions sometimes, though two of my favorite teachers, and I knew them, again, all my life—she used to call my children her grandchildren—Maria Esperanza and Sister Emanuel, were Mexican American. But they didn’t agree with Labor Movement. I don’t know why, but they just didn’t. But they didn’t say that much.

ESPINO:

They were kind to you—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

—except for—

SANCHEZ:

No, they were very hard on me because they felt that—on all of us—that we needed to learn, they, especially, more than the Anglo nuns. They just felt like they had more of a responsibility to make sure that we learned, so they were kind of hard. They didn’t care that we had to walk home after school. If we had to stay after school because we didn’t know our nines time’s tables or whatever, or we missed two words on our spelling list or whatever it was, we stayed until we knew whatever it was that we had missed. They just had this tremendous need to teach us.

ESPINO:

And you felt like that was a different kind of treatment than the Anglo kids or Anglo counterpart?

SANCHEZ:

Well, the nuns were all dedicated, but they were overly dedicated, overly. They wanted us to learn to play tennis, you know. All the nuns were good, but they were especially, like I said, hard on us. They demanded a lot from us.

00:18:23

ESPINO:

How would you describe that? Would you describe that as trying to acculturate you to mainstream culture?

SANCHEZ:

Well, everybody was acculturated. When you went into the classroom, there were no immigrants. Everybody said the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. Everybody knew the “Star-Spangled Banner,” you know, the national anthem. Everybody was spoken in English to. There were no bilingual classes. If so-and-so didn’t understand it, they came and didn’t speak English, it was your responsibility to teach it to them, to explain it to them. And as a result, I think that all the kids that came out of the school, no one had an accent. Everybody went to high school. I don’t remember the word “immigrant,” never, never, never, except for the Plymouth Rock, you know. They were immigrants. Nobody else was an immigrant.

ESPINO:

Interesting.

SANCHEZ:

We had Chinese and Japanese in our school, one black. There weren’t that many blacks, I think because there weren’t that many black Catholics.

ESPINO:

That’s true. Interesting. Do you have photographs from your first classes?

SANCHEZ:

I must have. I have to look for them.

ESPINO:

Wow. That’s fascinating. So did you feel like it was kind of a melting pot of diversity?

SANCHEZ:

I didn’t know what diversity was at the time, but, yes.

ESPINO:

Well, looking back?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

00:20:10

ESPINO:

Interesting. But where do you think, for example, the tennis instruction or the—so I’m assuming—was it an all-girls school?

SANCHEZ:

No. Boys and girls. It was a grammar school, junior high school together, and it was boys and girls. You didn’t get separated till you went to high school.

ESPINO:

But some schools, religious schools, like Lydia Sevez (phonetic), her mother sent her to the boarding school, Frances De Paux, and their objective was to train them, to educate them, but also to make sure that they were going to be good mothers and good housewives.

SANCHEZ:

There was the other high school. (Laughs) Isn’t that funny that we all played basketball, baseball? We had a fair. There were two—what would you call them—missions, one Immaculate Heart and the other one Holy Rosary, which was called Holy Rosary and the other one was called La Immaculada. And we had (unclear) there, but then for St. Vibiana’s there, we had a bazaar and it was called a bazaar, and the kids ran it from the school. I remember that people—they’re dead now, but the Columbos, who had the Italian Kitchen downtown on Seventh Street, would come in and cook food. We’d have a banquet. I mean people would buy food. We’d have ham and yams and salad, and I can’t remember what else, pumpkin pie, so it must have been in the fall. They would cook the food, but we’d run the dining room. We had to serve the food, clean, set the table, take care of everybody. The boys and girls, some of the girls, there was no need for them in the dining hall, would run the games, the rides. But I don’t remember them telling us, “You’re going to be a good mother,” I think by virtue of the fact that there was a lot of emphasis on the Virgin Mary, who was a good mother. But I don’t remember anyone especially saying, “You’re going to have to be a good mother and raise your children.” No, I don’t remember that being said once. So I don’t know why.

00:22:58

ESPINO:

What about goals? How would they help you set goals for the future? Would they talk to you about college, about professions, about what do you want to be when you grow up, things like that?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, what do you want to be when you grow up, but mainly it was very in the present, “This is what we have to learn this year and this is how you’re going to learn it, and you’re going to learn it thoroughly.” That was the emphasis.

ESPINO:

“We’re going to make sure you know it.”

SANCHEZ:

Right.

ESPINO:

“Or else you’re going to be here until six o’clock, until you—.”

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

So ideas about you could be a—you know how you tell kids today, very different generation, “You can be a doctor when you grow up,” things like that, messages.

SANCHEZ:

Well, they would say something like that, but it would be like, “Well, you’d better learn your science if you ever want to be a doctor.”

ESPINO:

That’s something.

SANCHEZ:

Or, “You’d better learn how to spell if you want to be a secretary,” or, “If you’re going to be a fireman, you need to exercise a lot and play the games right.” That’s the kind of inspiration, I guess you’d call, they gave us. It wasn’t like, “Do you want to grow up to be a doctor?”

00:24:22

ESPINO:

Right. But at the same time, the message wasn’t, “You’re going to go work in a factory after you’re done here,” like some kids talk about what it was like in public schools, “Well, we know Mexicans are good with their hands, so you don’t need to take chemistry.”

SANCHEZ:

Well, we were taught everything. We were taught to read and write music, we were taught to draw with charcoal, we were given Bibles or even Greek mythology books and we had to reproduce a picture out of there, and those that did a really good picture, I guess, were given extra attention, as far as that was concerned.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

We ran the rectory. The girls would go in there and the boys too. They would run the back of the church, you know. They would get everything ready for Mass and for stuff. We’d go into the rectory and make sure that the kitchen was right and everything was in place. I don’t remember—it’s funny now, I don’t know if we were blind or what—I don’t remember anything untoward towards anyone. I mean, we would walk in, and Father spilled wine on the tablecloth or something, we’d have to replace it, and Father would be scolded, “You spilled wine. Do you know that it’s very hard to get out of the tablecloth?” We did all kinds of things.

ESPINO:

It sounds like you had a lot of liberty and independence—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

00:26:08

ESPINO:

—around the strict education that you received.

SANCHEZ:

Well, the education came first and then there were responsibilities that we had to do. We would go to Little Tokyo and do the shopping for the nuns. We were warned against going into a certain alley. I don’t remember what the name was of the alley, “You do not go in there.” Of course, that’s the first place we wanted to go in there because it had a lot of, like, five-and-dime, a lot of tchotchkes, that kind of thing. But it had, I guess, a bad reputation, but they never happened to us. There was a—

ESPINO:

Brothel or bar? You never saw anything like that?

SANCHEZ:

I never saw a bar. There was a penny arcade across the street in the front of the church, and in the penny arcade there were kind of risqué—it was these things you stuck your head and you turned, you know, and the show, but it would show a woman in her—flip up and you could see her panties, something—we were told not to go in there, either, and we did. I mean, our bus would pass straight down Main Street with all the photos and stuff and all the marquees of all the burlesque. And maybe it was because it was so usual, we didn’t pay attention. I don’t remember somebody saying, “Oh, look at that woman with the (unclear).” Nothing. Again, maybe because they gave us a lot of stuff to be interested in, like we had to make our own place cards, you know, I mean our own cards, like for division and subtraction and multiplication.

00:28:05

ESPINO:

Study cards?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh. And we had to make them out of—the nuns would cut up the file things, the manila-file things, and make cards out of them and give us the cards. And they’d better be right, and then we’d bring them in and study from them.

ESPINO:

It also sounds like it wasn’t a real privileged school and that the nuns themselves had to make do and use their own imagination.

SANCHEZ:

They cooked for themselves. There was a wood stove up on the fourth floor. They cooked beans, and every now and then somebody would forget about the beans and the whole school would stink like burned beans.

ESPINO:

It’s funny. (Laughs)

SANCHEZ:

It’s true. And then they brought radiators in, gas radiators into the classrooms, and the big thing was to bring burritos and put them on the radiator to heat so that when we ate lunch they were warm.

ESPINO:

Oh, my god. I did almost the same thing at Sycamore with the heater. They had those wall heaters. Me and my friend would put a chair with our burritos to warm. (Laughs) It would stay there all morning. Yeah, by the time it was lunch, they’d be warm.

SANCHEZ:

And everybody would tease the nuns when the beans would be burned.

ESPINO:

Oh, that’s so funny.

SANCHEZ:

“Oh, you’re going to have burned beans for lunch.”

ESPINO:

Did you ever come to learn what order they were from?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, Immaculate Heart nuns.

ESPINO:

So they were Immaculate Heart, but they weren’t associated with some of the bigger church—because Immaculate Heart is a pretty well-known—

SANCHEZ:

Well, you know the college?

00:29:42

ESPINO:

Yeah.

SANCHEZ:

We’d go up to the college.

ESPINO:

But you said something about not having light and—I don’t know.

SANCHEZ:

Well, it was an old school. It was 100-year-old school. St. Vibiana’s is 120 years old or something. The bathrooms were outside. They were like—well, not out. You know, they were flush.

ESPINO:

They had plumbing.

SANCHEZ:

They were plumbing, but it was like a long rope, and the windows were always open because they didn’t want it to stink. You know how the nuns are. They’re very fussy about smells. And it was colder than heck in there, but that’s where we’d go to the bathroom. Half was for the girls and half was for the boys.

ESPINO:

Wow. But I’m saying there wasn’t money being poured into the school from outside donors and it was in a wealthy parishioner—

SANCHEZ:

Uh-uh. Considering we were there at the cathedral, right?

ESPINO:

Yes, yes. Oh, that’s interesting. But you felt like they had—you know, some of the people in the Catholic Church are known for having, like, for example, a social consciousness or different—

SANCHEZ:

I guess they gave it to the church, and they were saving money. Eventually they built a new school, and there was all hell to pay because people that went to the old school were very upset.

00:31:09

ESPINO:

Where did they put the new school?

SANCHEZ:

On the side where the outdoor bathrooms used to be. It was four stories high with the convent at the top and a small chapel. It had an elevator—

ESPINO:

Wow!

SANCHEZ:

—and we used to love to go up and down that elevator.

ESPINO:

So you were able to see that transformation happen.

SANCHEZ:

Well, no, my sister was still there. I wasn’t. I was at Sacred Heart, which I quit and went to Belmont. But we could go up. They would send us up for something or other.

ESPINO:

But did they have like a calling, something that they were trying to do with their mission work? Did they have a specific—

SANCHEZ:

Education.

ESPINO:

It was education.

SANCHEZ:

Education, that’s what they did. They didn’t do hospitals, they didn’t do—

ESPINO:

Or community service or helping the poor kind of thing.

SANCHEZ:

They did education. That was their calling.

ESPINO:

And you said something about you have the Virgin Mary idol.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, there was a statue of the Virgin Mary, Queen of—I don’t remember. She had stars and she was standing on the globe in every classroom.

00:32:33

ESPINO:

Wow. Did you have the Virgen de Guadalupe? No.

SANCHEZ:

But they’d give us stuff, like, for Lent or for—they would often give us stuff with the picture of the Virgen de Guadalupe.

ESPINO:

Oh, really? For example, in December you didn’t celebrate her birthday?

SANCHEZ:

No, because we did that at the missions, at Holy Rosary and Immaculada.

ESPINO:

What do you mean? You would go to a different church or—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, we had missions, two missions, two small churches. They were small churches, maybe half the size of this building, and from there, those were the feeder schools for St. Vibiana’s.

ESPINO:

Oh, okay.

SANCHEZ:

And there, there would be Father Garcia and Father—I don’t remember. I think they had an English name, because at St. Vibiana’s there were a lot of Irish priests. But we celebrated the Virgen de Guadalupe on December 8th at the missions, and my dad’s—his Knights of Columbus would go and spend all night. They didn’t guard it. I guess they—I don’t know what you call it. They would be there in their uniforms at La Placita, not guarding it. What is it? Honoring her or something. They would stand all night long. To me, there wasn’t that kind of animosity, meanness that I see now. There’s a real meanness and animosity.

ESPINO:

About what?

SANCHEZ:

About Latinos. I see it in a lot of people, but it could be because they’re not natives. We were a very diverse community.

ESPINO:

So even the white parishioners would celebrate the Virgen de Guadalupe?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

00:34:50

ESPINO:

She was important to—

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know that she was as important as the Immaculate Heart, but, like I said, the Knights of Columbus would come here to La Placita and they would—I can’t recall. They had a special name and they would stand around the statue all night.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

They’d stand all night.

ESPINO:

Wow. That’s impressive, because even today, when Catholic churches start to see their members change, it’s hard to get even a picture of the Virgen de Guadalupe because it’s a tension that exists among the changing demographics and all that. But back then, it seems like it was something that was incorporated into—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, she was just one of the visions of the Virgin.

ESPINO:

Do you remember any other saints they celebrated?

SANCHEZ:

The Vision and the Immaculate Heart, Saint Thomas More, who was a black, I guess. He was celebrated.

ESPINO:

I thought Saint Martin was the only African—

SANCHEZ:

Or maybe it’s St. Martin, but I remember the black—

ESPINO:

With the broom?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, the black statue being put up for—it wasn’t there all the time, but it would be put up at St. Vibiana’s, maybe because it was a cathedral too. I don’t know.

ESPINO:

That’s interesting.

SANCHEZ:

They would put it up. They would put the statue up for the celebration.

00:36:32

ESPINO:

And then they would take it down after. Very interesting.

SANCHEZ:

And then they would have another saint, you know. And I remember that we had one priest, because we had, like, three Jewish kids—they weren’t Catholics—because the Garment District, the parents owned the factories. I don’t know what. So they were there, and Father used to joke about the time—and they’d laugh, too; everybody laughed—he says, “The first time that the Ritchie’s came in, I told them, ‘You see that crucifix there? He was a Jew.’” (Laughter)

ESPINO:

Oh, no. That’s fascinating, because there’s such a great tension with some Christians towards the Jewish.

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah, the Jews killed Christ.

ESPINO:

That’s what they say.

SANCHEZ:

I mean they used to say it right out.

ESPINO:

Yes, blatantly.

SANCHEZ:

But I don’t remember that they objected to it or I don’t know what happened to them. I don’t know what happened when they went home, but they stayed there all through eighth grade.

ESPINO:

And nobody ridiculed them or teased them, or did they?

SANCHEZ:

No. But, I mean, in the classroom it was discussed during religion. “Well, you know, the Jews killed Christ.” I mean we had these little (unclear).

00:38:11

ESPINO:

Oh, my goodness.

SANCHEZ:

But I don’t remember that they’d get up or I don’t remember that the parents came and objected.

ESPINO:

Or challenged.

SANCHEZ:

Or challenged, or maybe they did.

ESPINO:

It must have been seen as a school where your kids could get a good education, and so they were willing to—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, they’re very into education.

ESPINO:

—sacrifice that other aspect.

SANCHEZ:

But I don’t know, you know, what happened later, and I would love to.

ESPINO:

Yeah, would love to know what was it like for them, why did they choose that school. Did you feel like you were in a privileged situation next to your other neighbors and your other community members? Did you feel like it was kind of a step up to go to that school?

SANCHEZ:

Nuh-uh.

ESPINO:

No? Didn’t feel like—

SANCHEZ:

Because in Bunker Hill, everybody was kind of—nobody felt poor or rich. No, we didn’t. Except for the lady whose son was the chief of the fire department who had this big mansion, everybody else kind of—“Oh, you know, they’re very poor,” or, “They’re very rich,” no, never heard that. I know that when some people’s relative died, I guess they must have been poor, because the whole Hill would collect money for them for the funeral. Or when a person that didn’t have—we had a lot of old people who’d had no relatives, the whole Hill would contribute to their funeral.

00:39:50

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

We had Jews who lived there and Japanese, and they also would contribute. The Jews were very somber. Those Jews that lived on Bunker Hill were very somber. They hardly ever came out, and somebody in the neighborhood, whoever was around, had to go in there and turn their lights on and off, you know, when the Sabbath came, when they had to—so they must have been very—what do you call them, Jews who really—

ESPINO:

Practice?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. And they’d give you a nickel. But the house was always very dark, very somber.

ESPINO:

Wow. Yeah, it’s also close to the war, to World War II and Nazis.

SANCHEZ:

We were kids. We didn’t know. But they used to say it was spooky in there.

ESPINO:

Wow. Who knows what was going on in their family life. Anyway, I have to stop here so I can make my doctor’s appointment, but we’ll pick up on this next time. I’m going to do some research on St. Vibiana’s Church and maybe find out more, ask you a few more questions. I’m going to stop it here. (End of September 27, 2013 interview)

SESSION THREE (October 11, 2013)

00:00:26

ESPINO:

This is Virginia Espino, and today is October 11 (2013). I’m interviewing Mrs. Dolores Sanchez in the offices of Eastern Group Publications in Highland Park. I wanted to start today—last time we finished off, you were describing the different students that you encountered while a student at St. Vibiana’s, and some of them also lived in your neighborhood of Bunker Hill.

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

So I was wondering if you could talk to me more about—do you remember the name of the street that you lived on in Bunker Hill?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yes. I lived right on the corner of Hope and Court.

ESPINO:

And you were there from what period to what period?

SANCHEZ:

On Hope and Court itself, we were there from probably 1944 to—now you got me—to maybe 1954. I’m not sure of the date, but it was when the redevelopment of Bunker Hill—actually, it wasn’t the redevelopment; it was the emptying out of Bunker Hill of people.

ESPINO:

Do you remember how your family found out that they needed to move?

SANCHEZ:

No, I don’t. Well, everybody was moving, but I don’t remember, like, did we get a letter or something like that. I don’t remember. I’d have to ask my mother if she can remember.

ESPINO:

Oh, that would be great. And how did she tell you? Do you remember when she told you? Did she sit you down in the living room, have a conversation?

SANCHEZ:

No, I think we were in the kitchen and she says, “Well, we’ve got to move.”

00:01:57

ESPINO:

Just like that?

SANCHEZ:

Just like that.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

But for about several months people had been moving out, and I remember that at night you could hear hammering of people stripping the Victorians of stuff. You could hear hammerings and saws of people going through the buildings and taking all the valuable—I mean, I remember in one of the buildings where we had lived prior to moving to the Victorian where we were at the time, they had Wedgewood fixtures on the wall that still had gas going through them for gas lights. So there were people stealing things. Well, I don’t know if they were stealing them. The homes were abandoned, so I’m not quite sure.

ESPINO:

Right, and they were going to destroy them. Did they know? I wonder if they knew that they were going to demolish them and so they were just—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, we knew. But we weren’t as—my mom didn’t like old things. My mom had lived with old things all her life, and by then it was my mom who was the single parent. So she didn’t value old things, so we didn’t take anything.

ESPINO:

Like I’m thinking—

SANCHEZ:

Well, fixtures, you know—

ESPINO:

—fireplace, maybe.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, the bricks from the fireplace, the mantels. The people were stealing all of that. There were probably antiques dealers, I guess. I don’t know, because we didn’t see them. We could just hear the noise of the hammering and the sawing and the trucks and the—

ESPINO:

Oh, jeez. That’s not a description I’ve ever heard before. And those houses were beautiful. I found a site—I’m going to pause it for a second because I want to show you something that I found. (Recorder turned off)

00:04:17

ESPINO:

Okay, so I showed you some photos that I found online of Bunker Hill before the evictions, the demolitions, and you were telling me that your one family lived in your home.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

How many bedrooms did you have, do you remember?

SANCHEZ:

Three. There weren’t that—

ESPINO:

So it wasn’t one of the big huge Victorians.

SANCHEZ:

No. No, no, no. They had some that were small, smaller, very compact, and then there were the big ones. And then there were two apartment buildings, one that was of brick and the other one was of wood that were called the Court Apartments. And inside, at one time, on each floor they had Persian rugs, those Wedgewood gas—I guess they lit them at night, but I think during the years the chimneys to the gas thing had been broken or taken. People used to take things, but my mother, like I said, didn’t value old things. Her idea of something great was something modern, something new, completely different.

00:05:38

ESPINO:

When your family was forced to leave, did your mother, did she confer with you about where you would go?

SANCHEZ:

My mother never conferred with us. My mother decided and we went.

ESPINO:

So where did she decide to move you?

SANCHEZ:

To Berendo. Was it Berendo? No, I’m sorry, that’s not true. She moved there after I had got married. I can’t remember. We moved to a flat, a fourth flat place, but I don’t remember the streets. It was further south.

ESPINO:

But you were still attending St. Vibiana’s. It was before eighth grade, before you graduated?

SANCHEZ:

No, it was after.

ESPINO:

So it was after eighth grade, which would probably be more like 1950, ’51?

SANCHEZ:

Later than that. Fifty-four.

ESPINO:

Fifty-four? Oh, because you’re already in high school.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Okay. So maybe we can just back up and we’ll come back to the eviction, and you can tell me about—you mentioned last time that the nuns were very hard on you and some of the other Mexican American girls. I was wondering if you ever—like, reflecting back, why do you—like, looking today backwards, why do you think they were like that with you?

SANCHEZ:

Well, the majority of us were Mexican American. We had some Chinese, a couple of Koreans, I think, a few Anglos, but the majority of us were Mexican Americans. I may remember that they were very hard on us, but they might have been hard on everybody. It’s just what I remember.

00:07:32

ESPINO:

I see.

SANCHEZ:

And why do I think that is? Two things. It was their mission. The Immaculate Heart sisters had a big mission to educate. The second thing was some of them were Mexican Americans themselves, and I think they wanted us to excel. Obviously, they must have excelled themselves. You didn’t get to know any of their backgrounds, so it’s very hard to figure out, but they were very hard. They were kind. They weren’t mean, but they insisted that we learn what we were supposed to learn.

ESPINO:

What did you learn from them? What did you get from that experience?

SANCHEZ:

That people who succeed read, that they know a variety of things. We were taught music. We had to write. We had to compose a song and read it. That we had to stay good, that, after all, we were temples of the Holy Ghost and that was what was going to save us from all the bad kids who are in public school. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

It doesn’t sound like you were being educated to go look for a husband and be a good mother.

SANCHEZ:

No, they never talked about that, and I don’t know why.

ESPINO:

Because that was the thought across the board, public and private schools.

SANCHEZ:

No, like I say, we were temples of the Holy Ghost, so we couldn’t demean ourselves to sex or cursing, doing things like that, and we had to learn and we had to be clean, clean, clean, clean. Every day we were looked up and down. We all had to have a comb. Hair had to be combed. They didn’t care if your shoes were raggedy, but they had to be clean, and if you weren’t clean, like your face or something, you were sent down to the bathroom to clean up.

00:10:18

ESPINO:

Were there kids who couldn’t meet those expectations?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, especially boys. A lot of them delivered the paper in the morning and in the evening. You know, in those days we had morning newspapers and afternoon newspapers, and they delivered, so they’d get dirty. You know, the newspaper’s dirty. So they had to—collars had to be clean, teeth had to be clean, fingernails had to be clean.

ESPINO:

Did you ever miss a day when your appearance wasn’t impeccable?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know that you can say impeccable, but clean, you know. Our hair might be a little disheveled, or if you had curly hair, it might get out of—but I don’t remember.

ESPINO:

Did your mother leave that up to you, your—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Because she was working?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, my mother never went to school for any reason.

ESPINO:

But I mean, as far as trying to keep you clean, did she—

SANCHEZ:

She washed every Saturday.

ESPINO:

When you left in the morning, was she—

SANCHEZ:

She was gone. She was already at work, you know. She was gone to work. We had to get ourselves up. I had to get my little sisters up.

ESPINO:

Did you have to make sure that they were clean?

SANCHEZ:

I guess. I must have. No, I had to make sure and I remember one of our sisters, the middle one, did not like to clean her shoes, and my younger sister would refuse to walk with her.

00:12:25

ESPINO:

Because she had dirty shoes?

SANCHEZ:

She just would not clean her shoes, and I would get it from my mother because Rose Marie’s (phonetic) shoes weren’t clean.

ESPINO:

How would she discipline you? I mean, would she yell or would it be—

SANCHEZ:

Not yell too much, but she would hit us. We would have corporal punishment because she had been punished that way when she was young and so that’s what she knew.

ESPINO:

Yeah, that didn’t start changing until—and in some families it still exists.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

And then I can imagine as a single mom it probably was the easiest thing for her to resort to.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, tired, frustrated.

ESPINO:

What kinds of things would she—was it random or were they very specific things or was it everything? Was she very strict?

SANCHEZ:

She wasn’t that strict. It was random. Whatever she didn’t like at the time, you got swatted, head, back, wherever she could reach. And I think a lot of the reasons I didn’t have a problem in school with cleanliness was because my mother was always impeccable. My mother’s hair was always done, her makeup was always on—it didn’t matter whether she was going somewhere or not—to this day.

ESPINO:

Wow. Because she worked in a factory, correct?

SANCHEZ:

In the sewing factory.

00:14:19

ESPINO:

In a sewing factory, and she would get all—

SANCHEZ:

But then she’d been a waitress in Hollywood and stuff, and that’s just the way she was, and that’s the way we had to be, except for my sister Rose Marie.

ESPINO:

Many people talk about their parents, and even though they were going to work in a railroad or they were going to work in a factory, the men went in their suits all dressed up and came home all dressed up.

SANCHEZ:

Especially in the garment industry. They were all men, the coats and suits, you know, men’s suits and stuff. They were tailors and they all dressed impeccably, tie, everything, handkerchief in the pocket.

ESPINO:

Did your mom make her own dresses?

SANCHEZ:

Sometimes. She was a wonderful seamstress and she made stuff for us, too, now and then. But mainly, because she was in the industry, she had ways of buying clothes that most people didn’t, you know. She knew the garment industry and she knew the people in the garment factories and stuff. Some of our belts were exquisite. To this day, I will not wear a cheap belt, because that’s what she made, she made exquisite belts, like for Bullock’s and for the designers and stuff.

ESPINO:

Out of leather or out of fabric?

SANCHEZ:

Sometimes leather, sometimes fabric. It all depended on what the dress was. And when they had fabric or leather left, sometimes she would make us belts.

ESPINO:

Do you have any of that stuff leftover?

SANCHEZ:

No. I’m sorry I don’t. Now my sisters and I just regret some of the things we didn’t take care of.

00:16:27

ESPINO:

Or didn’t know you were going to care about twenty years later.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, right.

ESPINO:

My grandmother used to make us dresses for Easter. We don’t have any of those. Like when we were little, like two and three. We don’t have any of that stuff. I would love to have that.

SANCHEZ:

My mother’s clothes, now, were beautiful. Like, she would wear wool gabardine. People didn’t wear wool gabardine unless they had money, but she could buy things, as I said. And since she was very thin, she could buy the model samples. She always looked beautiful. I remember this gray suit that she had. It was buttoned here and then it had, like, a little skirt around it. It’s just gorgeous. But she always had gorgeous clothes. My father did too. My father was worse than a woman.

ESPINO:

He was an original metrosexual, what they call now men who care about their appearance, metrosexual.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. The lady at the cleaners would tell him, “Jessie, don’t have your clothes cleaned so much. You’re wearing them out. Just let us press them.” My mother never ironed his shirts; he took them to the laundry to be—so they were kind of strange, when I think about it now, the things we experienced with them because our parents were very adventurous, I guess.

00:18:21

ESPINO:

Well, what do you think you learned from seeing your father like that, worry about his appearance? What do you think that taught you growing up, and your mom caring about the kinds of belts you had and the kinds of dresses you had?

SANCHEZ:

Well, we always liked clothes. We were always clotheshorses and we always had great shoes. My sister, who was a teacher—she’s retired—is giving away her—oh, I was talking about my mother. About fifteen years ago, my mother decided that she wanted to give some of her clothes away. She had trunks, and the granddaughters all went through the stuff and took things. They were thrilled with them.

ESPINO:

I bet. I bet. She probably had things from the sixties.

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh. So maybe it wasn’t that hard for us to be clean at school, except for my sister Rose Marie did not like to clean her shoes.

ESPINO:

That was her little act of rebellion.

SANCHEZ:

She was very strong-willed. She still is. We, the two older ones, Carol was small because my dad had been away at sea during the war, so I was eight years old when she was born, and Rose Marie was six. Yeah, six. So she never had to do it, but Rose Marie and I had a day each, we each had to cook if my father didn’t cook. My father cooked most of the time, but if we didn’t cook and he wasn’t around for some reason, one day was my turn. My sister would never cook.

ESPINO:

Rose Marie.

SANCHEZ:

And then so when my mom would come home and dinner wasn’t ready, it was always my fault because I was the oldest. I should have made her, but I couldn’t make her. No one could make Rose Marie do anything she didn’t want to do.

00:20:27

ESPINO:

Wow. But she didn’t get the kind of corporal punishment that you got.

SANCHEZ:

No. I hate being the oldest because always on my fault, whatever it was. But it instilled in me a feeling that I had to take care of my sisters.

ESPINO:

A responsibility.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and I guess I still do, you know, with my half-sister.

ESPINO:

It doesn’t feel like a burden?

SANCHEZ:

No, it’s just natural, just natural. I think sometimes it frustrates Jonathan because he has to go through a lot of it with me, but that’s just the way I’ve been—

ESPINO:

Well, your parents obviously cared about many things, sounds like, civic activism, their—

SANCHEZ:

My father was a great guy. It’s just that he was an alcoholic and lost his ability to cope, the more the alcoholism took over.

ESPINO:

It must have been hard for your mom to leave him, because in those days, it must have been frowned upon, divorce.

SANCHEZ:

She didn’t file for divorce until after my grandparents died, his mother and dad, because there had never been a divorce in their family, never. And, yeah, it was traumatic. It was traumatic for my aunts and my uncles, my dad’s brothers and sister. They were still very close because my mom helped raise them. They were still very close up until the time they died.

ESPINO:

Did you still share family celebrations?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

00:22:26

ESPINO:

That’s wonderful.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. There was never a break with them. I think they understood that she couldn’t cope anymore.

ESPINO:

But it sounds like she was very beautiful. I imagine there were a lot of men trying to date her afterwards.

SANCHEZ:

She was very beautiful. I’ll see if I can find some of her pictures.

ESPINO:

Must have been hard being a single woman, as far as just the lack of boundaries that, even today, men have with women. Sometimes they feel like they’re open, open for any kind of talk.

SANCHEZ:

But my mother was very strong, so I don’t know that men got away—that’s why she was an organizer, you know. I don’t know that she let men rule her life or—she married again and she divorced him, so— (Laughs)

ESPINO:

So during her time after the separation, did she ever talk about what it was like at work, as far as sexual harassment or exploitation?

SANCHEZ:

No, she never talked about that, never, not ever, which is kind of strange.

ESPINO:

Well, I was interviewing Soledad Alatorre, and she was a bathing-suit model—

SANCHEZ:

I didn’t know that.

ESPINO:

—when she was working in the garment industry. They would make bathing suits, so then they asked her if she would model. So I’m just wondering. It’s kind of subtle, but you wonder, when you’re a beautiful woman in that role, subservient to the male management, what do you experience. She never talked about—

SANCHEZ:

No, she didn’t.

00:24:38

ESPINO:

That’s interesting.

SANCHEZ:

She worked at Goodyear during the war. She worked for Goodyear. She was a Rosie the Riveter, kind of. So, you know, I don’t know if—I don’t know. I can’t tell you why she never talked about it.

ESPINO:

Maybe she never experienced anything.

SANCHEZ:

You’d think, being so beautiful, I mean really beautiful, that she would have. Wouldn’t you?

ESPINO:

Oh, yeah.

SANCHEZ:

Maybe she didn’t know it was occurring.

ESPINO:

Maybe she didn’t tell anybody she’d gotten separated.

SANCHEZ:

Or that too.

ESPINO:

Maybe she kept that private.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, I don’t know.

ESPINO:

Did she have a ring? Did she wear a ring?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

And did she stop wearing it after—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, she gave it to me. I lent it to a cousin and the cousin refuses to return it.

ESPINO:

Oh, that’s wrong.

SANCHEZ:

Yes, it’s wrong, but she’s just one of those people.

00:26:04

ESPINO:

Wow. Sorry to hear that. So then you’re going to St. Vibiana’s and you go there till the eighth grade. And then what happens after that?

SANCHEZ:

Well, I go to Sacred Heart over here in Lincoln Heights, the East Side, where Molina just had a tantrum about east and west and—

ESPINO:

It’s interesting. I grew up here in Highland Park, and it bothers me when people call it East L.A. because it was never East L.A.

SANCHEZ:

It’s not. It isn’t. Boyle Heights is in East L.A. So she was describing what East L.A. really is on her website. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

I’m going to check that out. That’s a great discussion, a great and important discussion, and her perspective is really important, too, having grown up in—

SANCHEZ:

And also that’s her district.

ESPINO:

And then it’s her district.

SANCHEZ:

So she says Lincoln Heights isn’t East L.A., Commerce isn’t East L.A., or something. I don’t remember.

ESPINO:

And they call Echo Park sometimes East Los Angeles.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Confusing. Okay, so anyway, Sacred Heart is in Lincoln Heights.

SANCHEZ:

They were Dominicans.

ESPINO:

Dominican nuns.

SANCHEZ:

Very different from the Immaculate Heart, white as their habits, and I would say a little more worldly than the Immaculate Heart nuns were.

00:27:39

ESPINO:

As far as having experienced things or coming (unclear)?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and the things they talked about and how they viewed society.

ESPINO:

Do you have any specific examples of what you mean?

SANCHEZ:

Their skins were so perfect, their hands were always so perfect, and they talked about how people should behave in public, and very status-conscious.

ESPINO:

How did they treat you as a Mexican American?

SANCHEZ:

They treated me all right, except that I would get scolded all the time. Because my name was Amaya, I always sat in the front, Dolores Amaya, A.D. I always had to give the first in everything. I hated it. But I remember that my shoes were—we had to wear black and white or white oxfords, and because my mother had this thing about shoes, you know, I would polish them every day. And in those days, the polish was kind of chalky, and I guess when I would sit, some of the chalk would come off on the floor and spoil her floor, and she would have a fit. “Look what you did to my floor. If one of the people from somewhere important came, what are they going to think because my floor has little white spots on it?”

ESPINO:

It made you feel bad about yourself.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Was it opposite from what you had experienced at St. Vibiana’s?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

00:29:44

ESPINO:

Did the teachers there make you feel good about yourself and who you were?

SANCHEZ:

Not always, not always. Like, they were very nice to the parents who they felt had some kind of status, not at all to the others. I mean, they’d just ignore them. They didn’t have to ignore my parents—my parents had status in my eyes—because they never went to school. My mom and dad never attended anything at school, never. (unclear).

ESPINO:

I’m sorry?

SANCHEZ:

I think I have my next appointment.

ESPINO:

Oh, is it here?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

ESPINO:

Okay. You want to stop?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

ESPINO:

So we’ll stop it here? Okay. (End of October 11, 2013 interview)

SESSION FOUR (November 1, 2013)

ESPINO:

This is Virginia Espino, and today is November 1st (2013). I’m interviewing Mrs. Dolores Sanchez at the Eastern Group Publication offices. Last time we were talking a bit about your mom and her work in the union, and I was wondering if you ever thought about what impact that had on you growing up, watching her on the picket line and in meetings and that kind of thing. (Recorder turned off)

00:00:49

ESPINO:

Okay. We’re back. Do you remember—I was asking you about how you felt or how you understood your mom’s activism, what influence it might have had on you, if any.

SANCHEZ:

I think it did, in that because of her, and since she and my dad were divorced, that we had a strong feeling about workers and workers’ rights and unions and activism. Now, that worked with me one way and then I remained that way. My youngest sister didn’t want to have anything to do with it. She just thought it took up too much of her time. The middle sister, she was, but she married someone who was a union person. He was with the postal carriers, so she was in that activism. But my youngest sister just felt that maybe my mom had spent too much time there instead of with her, and I can understand that.

ESPINO:

Yeah, because you said that before in a previous interview, that you felt like—

SANCHEZ:

Well, she never went to anything at school or anything we were doing.

ESPINO:

Are there any leaders that you had contact with that you recall from that period, any of the union activists?

SANCHEZ:

A guy named Tommy Talavera, Hope Mendoza, Hank Lacayo.

ESPINO:

You knew Hank Lacayo? Or your mom knew him?

SANCHEZ:

And I knew him.

00:02:43

ESPINO:

You knew him also?

SANCHEZ:

I tell you, I’m not blessed with the best of memory. I have a very sketchy memory.

ESPINO:

But you remember those prominent people. They were pretty prominent.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, well, in the Union Movement.

ESPINO:

Would they come to your home?

SANCHEZ:

No, they didn’t. Most of the activity went on in the union hall. It wasn’t that kind of like a familial kind of relationship. It was more union relationship, organizing relationship.

ESPINO:

Do you remember the kind of reputation they had back then, like how they were viewed by other people?

SANCHEZ:

They were admired. Working people admired them because in those days, the blue-collar people couldn’t have gotten the kind of benefits they had or the working conditions if it weren’t for the unions, and so I think that’s why you see a lot of older people strongly attached to the unions, and yet the young professionals don’t because they don’t really feel that they need them. There isn’t that kind of boss ability to really keep you down, you know, or try to take advantage of—it’s mostly in the working-class areas, the seamstresses, the mechanics, people like that.

00:04:45

ESPINO:

When you were growing up and you had this influence, was your mom—it’s really interesting, because they do some research on Jewish labor activists from the thirties and forties and how they raised their children, and they don’t raise them to go into the union, they don’t raise them to go into the factory.

SANCHEZ:

No, they don’t.

ESPINO:

So what was your mom’s view of education and planning your profession?

SANCHEZ:

She believed in education, but she believed that you had a responsibility to take care of the community. It wasn’t like, “I don’t want you to be a union organizer,” not at all.

ESPINO:

Did she have any dreams for you? Did she have any goals for you as the oldest in the family?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, that I take care of my sisters. (Laughs) Because that’s what she had done, and that’s what I had to do.

ESPINO:

She didn’t imagine you becoming a doctor or a lawyer or even a teacher?

SANCHEZ:

Well, she said I should become a lawyer because she said I talked a lot and I was always arguing with people. But, no, my mother was too involved to—we were kind of raised, our relatives and ourselves, and I’m not faulting my mother for it. She just felt a strong responsibility towards the union and towards workers.

ESPINO:

So when you were in high school, when did you start shaping your goals or did you plan on going into the workforce after you graduated?

SANCHEZ:

No, I planned to go to college, but it wasn’t because of my mother; it was because of the nuns and the teachers that we had. I don’t know that any of them—I remember hearing a conversation at one of our dinners or something where the parents were saying, “Yeah, I want my son and my daughter to go get a government job,” because that’s where the security was, good benefits and a pension. I don’t remember that they said, “I want them to become a professor,” or a doctor.

00:07:20

ESPINO:

Right. Yeah, it’s interesting to think about parents’ goals back then in the fifties versus today. Like, I just recently met a student who’s graduating, and she said her mother always wanted her to be a doctor. They groomed her since—but she’s an artist. She doesn’t want to be a doctor, so she (unclear).

SANCHEZ:

That’s something, yeah.

ESPINO:

So back then, I wonder what were the key careers, and also thinking about women and what you were able to study and where you were able to study. I bet there were limitations.

SANCHEZ:

A lot of limitations.

ESPINO:

What were you looking at? Were you looking at colleges with local or—

SANCHEZ:

Probably Immaculate Heart College because I was being taught by Immaculate Heart nuns. I went to Sacred Heart right here in Lincoln Heights for a while, but I really didn’t like the Dominican ethic.

SANCHEZ:

Why not, do you remember?

ESPINO:

I thought it was too—number one, they were Belgian sisters. They were from Belgium and they were very white, and their hands were always real clean and smooth. Their white uniforms were always white, white, white. And they taught us because it was their duty, it was their duty to God, but I don’t think that they had any strong emotional attachment to their students.

00:08:42

ESPINO:

So then when you graduated, what did you end up doing?

SANCHEZ:

I got married.

ESPINO:

Right away?

SANCHEZ:

Right away.

ESPINO:

And how did you meet your husband?

SANCHEZ:

Through a friend of mine, someone I had known all my life. I guess we’d been in the same circles but didn’t pay attention to each other until then. He was a very ambitious person, and so my entire first marriage was in supporting him and all the males that I knew, their goals.

ESPINO:

So you got a job?

SANCHEZ:

No, I had a baby right away. But when MAPA first started, we got involved in that, but it was the men who led and the women who did the work, you know.

ESPINO:

Right. So when MAPA first started would be in the 19—

SANCHEZ:

Sixties.

ESPINO:

Yeah, but you graduated much earlier than that, didn’t you?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Well, I told you I got married. I had three children. I lived in El Sereno, in what they call Hillside Village. My first husband was very ambitious. He bought a business from his ex-boss. The boss had gone bankrupt, and so I started helping him.

ESPINO:

What kind of business was it?

SANCHEZ:

It was a salvage business. Salvage Groceries, they called it. I guess now they call it something else. I don’t remember what they call it.

00:10:32

ESPINO:

And what was your role in that business?

SANCHEZ:

To take care of the office.

ESPINO:

So all the paperwork, the bookkeeping, ordering supplies?

SANCHEZ:

No, I didn’t order supplies—well, yeah, office supplies, but he did all the other things.

ESPINO:

So how much time do you think you spent making this business—

SANCHEZ:

Years.

ESPINO:

—a week?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, a week? I went every day.

ESPINO:

Seven days a week?

SANCHEZ:

No, six days a week.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

I took Sundays off.

ESPINO:

And what would your hours be?

SANCHEZ:

Depending on what I had to take care of with the kids, the house, it could be eight o’clock in the morning or ten o’clock in the morning. It didn’t have set hours.

ESPINO:

Did you have responsibility for everything in the home?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Cooking, cleaning, the children? Wow. How did you manage?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know. I just had to do it, so I did it, you know.

ESPINO:

I guess you learned that early on from your mother.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

How to buck it up.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Wow. Did you get paid for your work—

SANCHEZ:

No, I didn’t have a salary.

00:11:54

ESPINO:

—like money?

SANCHEZ:

I just took whatever I needed, but, for instance, I didn’t get a check, so that’s how we ran it.

ESPINO:

What about decision-making? Were you included in the decision-making of how the business should be run?

SANCHEZ:

No. He and this friend of mine that I told you that I’d known all my life did that. They weren’t partners, but they were always great friends till the day my friend died, David. Till the day he died, they were great friends. They were almost like brothers. In fact, I think he was closer to David than to his own brothers.

ESPINO:

And how did you know David?

SANCHEZ:

We both grew up in Bunker Hill. We both went to St. Vibiana’s as first grade, so we’d known each other all our lives.

ESPINO:

Did you know his parents?

SANCHEZ:

Yes, they were neighbors. They lived on Bunker Hill, his mother. I never knew his father. He was from New Mexico, I guess. The father stayed in New Mexico. But I knew all his relatives, his sisters.

00:13:12

ESPINO:

And he didn’t have a business with your husband, they were just—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, he was a very daring person. He was an ironworker. He worked putting up the crosses on top of the churches and stuff, and buildings. That’s what he liked to do, and very handy. I remember when we bought our first house, if something went wrong in the house, he was the one that went and took care of it. Didn’t have to ask him, never paid him, he just took care of it.

ESPINO:

Did he become like a godfather to any of your kids?

SANCHEZ:

Not a godfather, because we only have four children and we had a lot of relatives, so the relatives had to be the godparents. (Laughs) And that was because my mother said, “They’ll always be around,” not that David wasn’t always around.

ESPINO:

It sounds like he was.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. But my first husband’s mother was very religious, very Catholic. She insisted that we get married by the church, so David and his wife were our sponsors, because we had gotten married in Yuma. His mother never let up and she ruled the family. She was the strong one in the family. So we got married here at St. Vibiana’s one afternoon, a priest I knew. Because I’d always hung around there, I knew everybody. And they were our padrinos, I guess, our sponsors.

ESPINO:

How long did you date before you decided to get married?

SANCHEZ:

Two years.

ESPINO:

Well, that’s a long time.

SANCHEZ:

Or was it—a year and a half, something like that.

00:15:07

ESPINO:

Did you feel like you knew him well enough, looking back?

SANCHEZ:

I think he decided we were going to get married and we got married. I don’t know how to explain it to you. This sounds like I wasn’t fond of him at the end, and maybe I wasn’t. He told my mother, “Oh, I want to marry her now while she’s still a virgin.” That’s the kind of person he was, very domineering, very—

ESPINO:

In control of everything, it sounds like.

SANCHEZ:

Kind of ruthless, you know.

ESPINO:

Where did he grow up?

SANCHEZ:

Over there by the Garment District on 18th Street, 28th Street there.

ESPINO:

Where did he go to school? Did he also have a Catholic school education?

SANCHEZ:

He went to public school all his life.

ESPINO:

Did he finish with high school?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and then he went to—what is that? Trade Tech?

ESPINO:

Uh-huh.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but it was called something else, the Poly something or other. I can’t remember. But he was just determined to succeed. He said he was born to do great things, and it was everybody’s responsibility to make sure he did great things.

ESPINO:

Well, he chose you, so— (Laughter)

SANCHEZ:

It was my responsibility, it was our children’s responsibility, it was his family’s responsibility.

ESPINO:

Did you know that at the time when you were first—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but I was—my mother worked a lot, I took care of my sisters, and it just seemed the thing to do. Everybody else was doing it. And he decided that I was going to marry him, so—

00:17:15

ESPINO:

But it seems like, when you think about your options at the time, growing up during that period, few options for women.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Do you think he was a good choice, when you think about the options and the men that were available?

SANCHEZ:

At the time, yes. Yes, he was.

ESPINO:

He didn’t have a drinking problem?

SANCHEZ:

No, he didn’t have—like my father.

ESPINO:

Yeah, like your father.

SANCHEZ:

He was extremely domineering, very ruthless. Like I said, he was born to do great things. And in a way, you know, he was the city’s first Mexican American fire commissioner. The fire commissioner was a very restricted, I guess—firemen were white.

ESPINO:

The old boys’ network?

SANCHEZ:

The firemen—that was his—and he forced through a lot of things to make sure that women and Latinos were given opportunity there, so he—

ESPINO:

So what year did he get on the commission?

SANCHEZ:

Seventy-two, ‘73. I don’t know.

ESPINO:

Oh, because you’d been married for a while.

SANCHEZ:

He was Joe Sanchez.

00:18:41

ESPINO:

Right, your first husband. So what year did you get married?

SANCHEZ:

1954, because my son was born in 1955. And I remember everybody wanted to know if I was pregnant because he decided we were going to get married, but I wasn’t.

ESPINO:

And he didn’t expect to have sexual relations with you before marriage? I mean, if he said he wanted to—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. David was always around, and my mother was formidable, and I had this Catholic education, which meant that I, too, was pure in a way that I wasn’t going to—you know, if you got pregnant before you were married, you just were not a very good person.

ESPINO:

So you held those values—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and I think he did, too, because of his mother.

ESPINO:

It’s interesting, because you meet people who are on both sides of the spectrum. Because I’ve interviewed many Catholic women who grew up Catholic, parents very Catholic, but when it came to their teenage years and then after high school, dating, it’s a little bit more malleable. They kind of had different beliefs about it, and confusing beliefs.

SANCHEZ:

Even though they went to parochial schools, a lot of them had parents that didn’t really practice, so it makes a big difference. My mother didn’t, but my dad did. I told you he was a Knights of Columbus.

00:20:31

ESPINO:

That’s right.

SANCHEZ:

So it’s a really different atmosphere. What you do, you do around the church (unclear) your friends, like I said, at either Holy Rosary or—and kids you went to grammar school with. You had this fear. Everybody talked about the girl that was loose, you know. Everybody talked about did you—somebody would disappear. They were probably pregnant and that was not thought of as a good way to be.

ESPINO:

So you were looked at, but do you think it was a reflection of both the male and the female—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

—or just the female? Just the female who got pregnant or both the man and the—

SANCHEZ:

No, the guys are never—it was never their fault. I don’t know where they were when she got pregnant, but somehow they seem to escape any judgment.

ESPINO:

So was it a combination of morality and—

SANCHEZ:

Fear. We were scared straight, like they say. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

Wow. And did you raise your children that way?

SANCHEZ:

They went to parochial schools and all. I raised them a little bit more—I was a little bit more open with them, and society was changing, you know. The drugs and stuff were around, and so I had to be very strong, because my husband never was involved.

ESPINO:

Your first husband?

SANCHEZ:

That was my responsibility. If they got a bad report card, it was my fault.

ESPINO:

It sounds like a lot of pressure.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, it was. In fact, I got so sick once, I even got a thyroid problem. It was just from the pressure, the pressure and the demands he made.

00:22:50

ESPINO:

Did that start from the very beginning?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh. Only as he acquired more and he—because he made money in those—not everybody had money, and he would support—he was a liberal in that way, that he believed in union and organized labor and things like that, except for his business. In his business—

ESPINO:

He was a capitalist?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, he’s like Bill Gates.

ESPINO:

So you’re saying that as far as just overpricing things or—

SANCHEZ:

No. He didn’t want his business unionized because he felt that the wages were going to break him because he worked on a very small margin. Maybe there was a method to his madness, you know, because on the other hand, he always supported community groups, he supported TELACU when they first started, he always supported candidates and things like that.

ESPINO:

How many employees did he have? Did he have that many that the union—

SANCHEZ:

Fifteen, twenty-five.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

Then he opened another store with his sister, so pretty soon there were fifty employees or more.

ESPINO:

That’s a lot. So in 1954 when you got married is when he bought the store?

SANCHEZ:

No. Think we’d been married, like, three years. The owner of the business died, and his family couldn’t run it and so they quickly ran it into the ground. So he bought it, what was left of the business. He was very successful.

00:25:00

ESPINO:

Sounds like it.

SANCHEZ:

Very successful.

ESPINO:

So he bought the business in—

SANCHEZ:

I can’t remember. I told you I—

ESPINO:

Like three years later. You married in ’54. Like around 1957.

SANCHEZ:

Maybe. He ran the place for a while. It must have been around 1960, ’58, ’60, around the time that MAPA started or a little before that, opened up a business right here downtown on Broadway and Ord. That’s all Chinese now, but in those days, it was some Chinese, but American Chinese, Italian, and Mexican.

ESPINO:

The generations after the first waves, sounds like.

00:27:19

SANCHEZ:

Had a lot of Italian friends, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans. And we went to Chinatown to eat because it was right there, at General Lee’s. And finally all the Chinese Americans either couldn’t afford the rent in Chinatown and so they moved out or their children became professionals and the older people died. I think a lot of it is they couldn’t afford to—Cathay Bank was a little bank in a trailer across the street from us, and everyone knew everyone there. My kids, they went to St. Vibiana’s. They were in the, I guess, fourth and fifth grade, and it was safe enough for them to walk to the business. They would go up to City Hall and go up and look around and then they would come home, and somebody would tell me, “The kids are over there.” If they saw them doing anything wrong, “You get home. Go home.” So they would come to the business and they were watched by everybody.

They had a wonderful growing-up, the two older ones, because of that. They could do things that kids today can’t do. They would go downtown shopping, they would go to the Grand Central Market and get hot dogs, they would go the Home Café and eat, and then Mama would send me the bill. We had Dario’s, a sandwich place, and even there was a Velvet Turtle on the corner, and they could go in there and everybody knew them.

ESPINO:

My mother and father loved the Velvet Turtle. That was their spot for special occasions. It was a nice place.

SANCHEZ:

It was a very nice place. I never could understand why it closed. Or they would go to Little Joe’s and have spaghetti, and in fact, everybody was so close, we had our own table at Little Joe’s in the center dining room where only the regulars went, where Dario would send over sandwiches. So they had, I think, a wonderful—and then we lived in Hillside Village, and the high school wasn’t built yet, so it was nothing but grass and little hills and stuff right behind our house. They would disappear on Saturdays in the spring when the grass was kind of damp in the mornings. They would slide down the hills. So the two older ones really had a wonderful time. The two younger ones were more restricted.

ESPINO:

Because?

SANCHEZ:

Well, success, and we had to move to Los Feliz, and things started getting a little rougher and the world started getting a little—

ESPINO:

You noticed changes?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

Well, growing up in the seventies, downtown was kind of sketchy then, as far as, well, there were a lot of homeless, alcoholic-type people, not homeless because—well maybe. Who knows? I don’t know their life story. So it didn’t seem safe—

SANCHEZ:

A lot of alcoholic—

00:29:53

ESPINO:

—for girls to walk around by themselves.

SANCHEZ:

But my older daughter—because there’s a big difference in age between Gloria and Sarah, they would take the bus downtown and they would go shopping at Bullock’s and stuff, or to Hollywood. But still by then it was becoming a little more dangerous for them to be out because of the drugs. The drug culture took over, and so we had to be a lot more careful, or I had to be a lot more careful.

ESPINO:

Did you have any incidents that you remember that stand out?

SANCHEZ:

Well, I do remember that Gloria was going to (unclear) and she had a party for—I can’t remember what, somebody’s birthday, and one of the boys was high on drugs and he just gave everybody a hard time, and we had to throw him out.

ESPINO:

At your home in—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. By then, I began to see—that’s why I got a lot stricter with my kids. I think my younger son, some of his friends were—but by then, my older son, who was like his father, the kids he hung around with were kind of afraid of him, so they—like, he ran away from home once down the block with his friends, and my older son went and got him and he says, “Yeah, Mom, some of his friends started telling him, and so I had to turn around and say, ‘Stay out of it. Just stay out of it.’” Then he brought him home. Then he ran away again, and then my son went and got him again and told him, “You’re never running away again. You have no reason to run away.” Because the kids were getting a little bit rougher, you know.

00:32:07

ESPINO:

Yeah, and he wanted more freedom, probably, than what you were—

SANCHEZ:

Than what we gave him.

ESPINO:

So it sounds like your two older kids had a similar upbringing to you, because you—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

—that was your playground, as well, that whole area.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

You knew everybody, everybody knew you. Did you keep your store there?

SANCHEZ:

No. Eventually, Mr. Quinn (phonetic), who owned the property—he owned a lot of property there—died, and his family divided the property. We tried to buy the property, but he used to tell me, “I can’t sell it, Dolores, because I would have to pay too much in taxes, because I got it for nothing.” It was family property. It was one of the big Catholics, the Quinns.

ESPINO:

And then after that, what did you—

00:33:42

SANCHEZ:

My husband moved the business to Broadway and Slauson, which was an even harder area to be in because by then it was all wholesale. There was no retail. He was doing wholesale. I remember one time when I got off on Slauson, the freeway, I always kept my doors locked, but these young kids came and tried to stop me—I was waiting for the light to change—and were jerking the door. Or at night it was kind of iffy.

And yet I grew up with—like I said, we’d go to South Central and nobody would bother us. The blacks were different in those times too. I don’t know. There wasn’t that animosity and that anger against each other. There wasn’t. You could go to a black nightclub, and they wouldn’t give you a hard time. We would go to Watts to buy music, or they had an after-hours place called the Barrelhouse and people from all over would go, and all the black musicians and singers and stuff would go there and what they called jam after two o’clock, and the parking lot would be filled with people from all over Los Angeles listening to them. Nobody bothered you, no.

ESPINO:

Who would you go there with? Your husband or—

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

Before—

SANCHEZ:

That was before, when I was a teenager. With my aunt, and David would drive. But there wasn’t that kind of animosity. I don’t understand that animosity now. Maybe because we were fewer. There’s so many people now.

ESPINO:

There wasn’t a problem with gangs and—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, there were gangs.

ESPINO:

In your neighborhood?

SANCHEZ:

There were gangs in Bunker Hill. Some of the kids were, but they gave each other a hard time. They didn’t give us a hard time. And then right after the Second World War, like my dad and all the young men who came home weren’t about to put with any of that nonsense. I remember that they would—“Hey, what are you doing? Go over there.” And the younger, the little gangbangers would respect them.

00:36:01

ESPINO:

Oh, that’s interesting. I’ve never heard that.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. I remember one night there was another girl who lived in an apartment. Remember I told you we lived in the Bunker Hill Apartments?

ESPINO:

Uh-huh.

SANCHEZ:

And there was a girl that was kind of wild. Her name was Gloria, too, and my name was Gloria. And one night there was a guy outside our door that was—I must have been about thirteen. That was before my mom and dad divorced. He kept saying, “Psst, Gloria, Gloria.” And my dad thought he was calling me, right? I was thirteen. And so I remember he went into his drawer and he got out his—what do you call them—Billy club, you know. They were made out of leather. And he went outside and then came in. He says, “Oh, it’s for that other fool.” I remember she carved her initials in one of the balconies, and my dad grabbed me by the hair. He says, “What do you mean? Kind of cheap advertising.” I said, “That’s not me. It’s Gloria downstairs.”

ESPINO:

Cheap advertising. (Laughs)

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

Clever. They were strict with you, even your dad.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and don’t forget I had all my uncles around me. I remember Saturday nights on the Hill. Everybody would have the radio on in the same place—what was it called—the Hit Parade, and I remember all the young—I guess they were young men in their early twenties, would get dressed, all their white shirts and suits—they weren’t zoot suiters, they were just nice suits—and go to the Macambo. They would go to different dance halls.

00:38:00

ESPINO:

Palladium?

SANCHEZ:

The Palladium. They would go dancing. All the women looked beautiful.

ESPINO:

Did you have a chance to enjoy that kind of socializing?

SANCHEZ:

A little bit, but I was too young, really. But then my mom and dad got divorced, and things changed. Things changed a lot. My dad slowly deteriorated with the alcohol, and my mother got busier and busier with the union. So I didn’t. But for my birthday sometimes they would take you, but it was for adults. I remember that my dad took me for my—they took me for my twelfth birthday to the Coconut Grove to see Desi Arnaz.

ESPINO:

Wow!

SANCHEZ:

And my mother was very beautiful. My dad was handsome. My dad was olive-skinned, but he had beautiful gray eyes, and my mother with this raven hair and white skin. They would go everywhere, and my uncles would go everywhere. So sometimes I feel bad because I don’t relate to—and we were very sheltered up on the Hill. Everything that happened around the bottom, we didn’t know. We heard about the Zoot Suit Riots, but nothing happened up on the Hill. And everything was up on the Hill, on Bunker Hill. So we were very, I guess, sheltered, now that I think about it. My parents were very worldly, and my uncles. They would drink a lot. Everybody drank and smoked. Everybody would have a cocktail before dinner, wine with dinner, an aperitif, or I don’t remember what they called it, after dinner. I mean, it was constant drinking. I was surprised they weren’t all complete and utter alcoholics because they were always drinking.

00:40:14

ESPINO:

Your mother too?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, everybody drank. Everybody. Grandparents drank. I mean, everybody drank all the time. I guess they were always kind of schnozzed. I don’t know. Everybody went to work. You had to work and you had to work hard, but after hours, they all had their beers. There was a neighborhood bar where everybody went, the Black Bear and the Karioka (phonetic) on Temple Street, Temple and Figueroa. They drank a lot, and we always had liquor around us. My sisters and I don’t drink. We don’t smoke. Isn’t that funny?

ESPINO:

Uh-huh. Do you think it comes from that, from witnessing so much consumption?

SANCHEZ:

Well, from my dad, from my dad. That’s why we don’t drink. It’s funny that—you’d think that we would have become alcoholics. A lot of people said, “Well, I got it from my mom and my dad. They were always drinking.” My mom and my dad always drank around us, but when my dad started deteriorating, I think we all made a decision we weren’t going to get that way. Now, my mother wouldn’t drink to excess.

00:41:41

ESPINO:

To the point where she was passed out and you had to pick her up and put her to bed, that kind of thing.

SANCHEZ:

No, no. My dad, we did, and my uncles. And my grandmother had a rolling pin and a strap that she used to hit them with if they came home drunk, so they had to act like they were straight.

ESPINO:

Jeez. Sounds so severe growing up around all of that. But you mentioned that Bunker Hill was different, being on the Hill was different than being on the lower parts of L.A.

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know. It’s just from what people tell me, I figure it had to be different.

ESPINO:

Yeah, because you didn’t have pachucos up there on Bunker Hill?

SANCHEZ:

There were two. There were two pachucos, and I don’t remember that anybody ostracized them or anything. They kind of laughed at them.

ESPINO:

They thought their clothing was funny or their hairstyle, what have you?

SANCHEZ:

They were silly. They were silly. And I remember one of my cousins had a boyfriend who was a pachuco, and he had a nickname. I don’t remember what the nickname—and her father would say, “Mire lo que se halló.” We were very bilingual, very bilingual. We spoke both. Nobody just spoke Spanish and nobody just spoke English. We’d speak both. And sometimes we mixed it, which was not good, but that’s the way we spoke.

00:43:45

ESPINO:

Right. Wow. So you said there were pachucos. Were there also pachucas? I mean would your mother—would she be offended if you wore that kind of attire? Because the girls also had their look.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, they had their—and the big (unclear). Well, my aunt, her sister, whom she brought from Phoenix, lived with us and she was kind of a Pachuca. I don’t remember that my mother ever said anything.

ESPINO:

What about like rules about makeup and how tight your skirts are, or that kind of thing? Was that part of your—

SANCHEZ:

Well, tight wasn’t in style. We had those stupid little skirts and the bobby socks and the sweaters, you know, with the Peter Pan collar. That’s how you danced. And the grownups, the women were very—even like my aunt, they would wear these beautiful dresses that were, like, draped here and high heels and those stockings that had the line and wonderful makeup and perfume and you name it. They all looked like something out of a magazine when they went out dancing.

ESPINO:

Did your mother have boyfriends after the divorce?

SANCHEZ:

Yes, she married again.

ESPINO:

She did?

SANCHEZ:

Didn’t last. My mom was too— (Interruption)

SANCHEZ:

Anyway, she married again. She married a younger man, who she outlived. (Laughter)

ESPINO:

Good for her.

SANCHEZ:

She outlived both her husbands, you know. She outlived my dad and she outlived her second husband.

00:45:28

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

And she probably is going to outlive me, if I’m not careful.

ESPINO:

How is she doing?

SANCHEZ:

Doing great.

ESPINO:

Oh, good.

SANCHEZ:

But I remember that when they had the pachuco riots that we saw in the paper, my dad hated the Times. Everybody hated the Times.

ESPINO:

What did you read?

SANCHEZ:

Well, we read that, about the riots. And my dad had been in the navy, so he was kind of torn, because he was in the navy and the navy guys attacked—because, you know, they came from San Pedro, from Long Beach, and attacked the pachucos. But my dad said, “Well, they’re not that innocent either.” He says, “I think they attacked each other.”

ESPINO:

He didn’t take a side of the navy officers or of the pachucos or the Mexicans? I don’t even know if they were all pachucos, but they were definitely—

SANCHEZ:

They attacked the ones that were in pachuco outfit. But, you know, the blacks dressed that way too. They were the zoot suiters.

ESPINO:

That’s right.

SANCHEZ:

And I don’t remember they attacked them. I don’t think they attacked them. I think the sailors were more afraid of the blacks.

ESPINO:

Maybe.

SANCHEZ:

I think so.

00:47:05

ESPINO:

Well, there’s another theory just about dating and how they would come, the sailors would come looking for a good time, and since there were a lot of young Mexican American girls available—

SANCHEZ:

Let’s face it. We have a very good-looking community, especially the Mexican Americans, as they called themselves then. They were very good-looking women and they were very stylish because they were in the garment industry. We were very close to it, so everybody dressed well. The men dressed well. So the women were very beautiful. I’m sure some of those sailors—yeah, I’ll bet they did.

ESPINO:

And so there was tension between who did these—like you’re saying about your marriage, basically you become the property of this person. So who owns these girls? The Mexican community, men, or these white sailors.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

I know you were young, but thinking about how your family—it sounds like your family was integrated with a lot of other ethnic groups.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Would it be okay for you to date a white sailor? Would that be something that—

00:49:24

SANCHEZ:

My aunt did. My aunt, my mother’s sister, was kind of a like a Pachuca. During the war, she hung around—across the street from—the Kariyoka, and there were a lot of sailors. There were sailors in there who were brown, black, and white. And I would pass to go to my grandfather’s restaurant, and then she’d go and grab me, bring me. Because they had on top of the bar, up on top, they had a lot of chalk ware, which are not expensive as all get-out, sailors, animals, and stuff. And she used to feel good about being able to get these sailors to do things, and she’d tell me, “Which one of those do you want?”

And I’d say, “Well, today I want the elephant,” or want the potpie or something. And she says, “Okay, who’s going to get my niece—?” And I’d get it and I could go home. What I regret is that I didn’t take care of them because they’d be worth a fortune. (Laughs) And they were all in there drinking and having a good time.

ESPINO:

Well, how does that work then? Because you mentioned earlier that you grew up with these values about your—

SANCHEZ:

But my aunt didn’t care.

ESPINO:

She didn’t have those values?

SANCHEZ:

My aunt was a free spirit. My aunt was a free spirit.

ESPINO:

Did people look down at her? Did they think of her as, like you said, bad, quote, unquote, “a bad woman”?

SANCHEZ:

They might have, but nobody tangled with the Amayas. Too many young men in the family, you know.

ESPINO:

So she wasn’t ostracized?

SANCHEZ:

No. No, I don’t remember that she was. She was scolded a lot.

ESPINO:

She was? By who?

SANCHEZ:

By the older people.

ESPINO:

How about by the men? Did they try to rein her in?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but they couldn’t. My aunt was a very free spirit. She won a dancing contest—

00:50:59

ESPINO:

Oh, wow.

SANCHEZ:

—there at the Million Dollar Theater. They had shows. They had what they called matinees, you know, and people would—dancing and singing. They had, like, Amateur Hour, and I remember she and my uncle won a dance contest there, a Jitterbug.

ESPINO:

Oh, fun. Is she still alive, your aunt?

SANCHEZ:

No, she died. She died about fifteen years ago.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

And she was a free spirit till the day she died.

ESPINO:

She never got married?

SANCHEZ:

Yes, she had a husband. She had two husbands and four kids, two by the first and two by the second one.

ESPINO:

Was she somebody that you looked up to like a role model or somebody you didn’t want to be like at all?

SANCHEZ:

I never gave it much thought. She lived with us, and I remember she’d like to tell scary stories and scare the daylights out of us, and my mom would get upset. And then my mom sent her to beauty school, sent her back to Phoenix, sent her to beauty school to become a beautician, and she did. She came back and she had her own beauty shop. And then my dad formed the Veterans—because there were a lot of veterans after the war that didn’t have jobs, and so he formed a company where he hired veterans to clean and he went to the all the theaters downtown and in Hollywood. He got this Jewish front for him, and they got the cleaning contracts for all—I know all the theaters in Hollywood, all the theaters in downtown.

00:52:59

ESPINO:

That’s a big business.

SANCHEZ:

But by then he was starting to drink too much and he sold the business to the Jewish guy. But in any case—oh, I forgot why I was referring to that. There was a reason. Oh, so then they started cleaning a lot of the buildings in the Garment District, and there was a company that was close to Vernon that was called U.S. Canning Company, and then they changed to U.S. Can. And when my aunt came from Phoenix after she’d graduated, the youngest of my mother’s sisters, we had a good time. We were always going to the movies. Finally my dad says, “Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute. What is this? You’ve got to get a job. You can’t be lazy.” So he sent her to the Board of Education, and she worked right there at the Central District when it was—she worked right there as a secretary. And then one day he came, he says, “No, I’ve got you another job. I’m going to take you to U.S. Canning Company because they’re going to do something new.” They used to pull cards. Remember when your account was—well, I guess you’re too young.

ESPINO:

No, but I’ve heard of that. Punch cards.

SANCHEZ:

Punch cards. And then they decided that they were going to try this new system, this computer. And I remember my dad—we all went to see it. It was, like, a big thing, a big machine, and it had to be air-conditioned. And from there she started learning about computers.

00:54:56

ESPINO:

The first computers.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, U.S. Canning Company. And from there, after she got some experience, Felix Chevrolet decided that they were going to be computerized, and she and a Japanese woman, Kyo (phonetic), decided that they were going to go work for Felix Chevrolet and she worked for Felix Chevrolet for a long time. She used to work so many hours that she would bring me her checks. I had to take them to the bank because she didn’t have time to spend them. So she was a pioneer, almost, in the computer business. From there, Felix Chevrolet closed for a while—now it’s open again, but they closed, and she went to work for the Southern Pacific, computerizing and running the computers for all their cars, you know. She kept track of their railcars, of the freight, though, not the—

ESPINO:

The passenger.

SANCHEZ:

Not the passenger, but the freight cars. She kept track of all of those.

ESPINO:

It sounds like she was considered somebody very intelligent, very capable—

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

ESPINO:

—very successful.

SANCHEZ:

But very simple. She was a very simple woman, never married.

ESPINO:

Oh, this is a different sister. This isn’t the youngest.

SANCHEZ:

No, not the free spirit. This was the—younger than her.

ESPINO:

The younger one. Oh, okay.

SANCHEZ:

There were three sisters, my mom, her middle sister, which was a free spirit, and Margarita.

00:56:44

ESPINO:

She never married.

SANCHEZ:

She never married and she never wanted to be a boss, never. She always had a job. She got a good pension when she retired, but she never wanted to be in charge of people. She would run the machines, you know, the computers and the stuff, but—I remember when she first retired that the phone calls, “How do we do this and how do we do that?” And she liked very nice things. Her favorite stores were Bullock’s and Robinson’s.

ESPINO:

And she could afford it. She didn’t have kids.

SANCHEZ:

And she spent a lot of money on her nephews and nieces. She was always very good to us, very good to us and to my kids.

ESPINO:

But the other one had a beauty salon.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

She did have her own business.

SANCHEZ:

Which my mother started for her.

ESPINO:

Your mother started it for her. By financing it or—

SANCHEZ:

Well, she sent her to school. I remember my mom sent her when she was getting too crazy here, sent her back to Arizona to her mother, to my grandmother. And then she went to visit and she says that Vera was combing somebody’s hair and she thought, “Well, you know what?” And she went to Marinelo and made a deal with a man. She says, “I have $250. This is a down payment if you’ll take my sister, and then I’ll pay you the other—.” I think it was $600. “I’ll pay you the balance in six months.” And that’s how my aunt got her license.

00:58:44

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

Then she brought her back and my mom started a beauty shop and she put her there. She had been working other places, you know, and then later on she took over the beauty shop. It was in my mother’s—my mother liked the garment industry. She liked making beautiful things, beautiful belts and stuff and working with the union. But my mother became a beautician too. She went to—

ESPINO:

Cutting hair and all that?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Actually, what she wanted to do was to be a manicurist, and in those days, in order to be a manicurist you had to have a beautician’s license. So she became a beautician because she wanted to be a manicurist. She never did either one.

ESPINO:

She just ran the shop?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

She ran other people doing it, supervised?

SANCHEZ:

Well, no, because she was still—one of her ex-bosses came back from Spain. He says, “I’m going to open another factory, but I need your help.” So she went to help him. By then she was in her sixties and she helped him for a while. And then she decided, “Well, I’m going to teach cosmetology,” so she went to school for that. Never taught it, and then she retired and then she decided to organize all the senior centers in East L.A. All the politicians, everybody knew her.

ESPINO:

Oh, wow.

SANCHEZ:

She was president of the—she got involved in that and then so she forgot all about the other stuff. She didn’t want to work anymore. She wanted to—and so she became president of the Seniors Club at the International Institute. She got a grant from a friend of mine from Pacific Bell when—remember when they were going to change over, they split up the Bell Company from ATT and people had to learn that they had to buy their own phones and stuff like that. So she got a grant and she taught in all the senior centers, Salazar Park, Highland Park Senior Center, International Institute, how to change over from ATT to Pac Bell.

01:01:32

ESPINO:

She was an activist till the very end.

SANCHEZ:

And then she decided, “Well—.” Well, she was still very busy until she had her stroke.

ESPINO:

Did she always live with you when she retired?

SANCHEZ:

No, she had her own apartment, but then they sold the building. She lived over there by Marymount, 23rd Street there, 23rd and Figueroa. She lived there for years. But then they sold the building, so then I said, “Why don’t you come and live with me.” But once she had her stroke, it was very difficult because I have a lot of stairs. There’s stairs to get up to the house, there’s stairs in the house. So she stayed there. I took care of her until she was over the emergency of the stroke, and then one of my sister’s tenants moved out. She had a little cottage, so my mother went to live there, is still there.

ESPINO:

She never had a chance to purchase her own property?

SANCHEZ:

It’s funny, she was going to buy a property, but we wouldn’t move to East L.A. (Laughs) We decided we wanted to stay in Bunker Hill, so she didn’t buy the property.

01:02:56

ESPINO:

Oh, when you were kids? Right after the divorce or when she was still married to your—

SANCHEZ:

No, after the divorce. When my grandparents died, they left my dad money, and we went to what would now be about 54th Street. In those days, it was really nice areas, and he wanted to buy a house there, and we wouldn’t leave Bunker Hill. We were just—I don’t know. Looked like we were afraid, I guess, to go anywhere else. I don’t know.

ESPINO:

Sounds like a beautiful community and you felt really safe there.

SANCHEZ:

It was. You know, when you read about how it was a slum and how it was crime-ridden—at first, when my aunt, when they were first divorced, my mom and dad, she moved to the Green Apartments on Olive and Second Street, beautiful buildings. They were Victorian buildings. A friend of mine, her mother ran the place, and so she moved there. They had a lobby the size of this building. It was beautiful, wood and gorgeous marbles floors. Her apartment was gorgeous. So I don’t understand why—I think they just—I don’t know why they called it a slum. They were beautiful Victorians that a lot of people had bought and redone.

ESPINO:

Yeah, I think it was an excuse to demolish.

SANCHEZ:

Get rid of us, to build the Civic Center, you know, the Music Center, the Hall of Records, the Department of Water and Power. And the Times had a lot to do with it.

01:05:03

ESPINO:

That’s right.

SANCHEZ:

A lot to do with it. They kept saying it was a slum. By then I was married and we moved to Hillside Village, and my mother moved over there, too, to I guess what you would call Doheny Square there. She lived there for years.

ESPINO:

How did you choose Hillside Village over all the places that you could have lived?

SANCHEZ:

We knew this guy, this real estate guy. He says, “I have a nice house. You’re going to like it,” and I liked it. It had a grammar school at the bottom, which my kids never went to, and it had the open hills outside and it was a very nice area too.

ESPINO:

Did it have a view?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah. I could see City Hall from my front window.

ESPINO:

Oh, wow.

SANCHEZ:

A clear view. Maybe that’s why, now that you tell me. Yeah, I could see downtown.

ESPINO:

Some of those hillside communities are beautiful, have beautiful views.

SANCHEZ:

And we had a house on two levels, you know, and you could really—but it wasn’t an expensive house. I think we paid 14,000 for it.

ESPINO:

But at the time it was a lot of money for you, wasn’t it?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Well, it was average. People could still buy a home in those days, in the sixties.

01:06:58

ESPINO:

Many of the people that I interview, they were working poor. It doesn’t sound like your family was really on hard times.

SANCHEZ:

I think we were resourceful.

ESPINO:

Maybe.

SANCHEZ:

And my ex-husband, first husband, was very, like I told you, very resourceful.

ESPINO:

Going out to dinner all the time and lunch—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

—and your girls shopping.

SANCHEZ:

My grandmother would cook on the weekends.

ESPINO:

That’s a lot of money you were spending.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Maybe that’s why they never bought a home either. (Laughter) We enjoyed the good life. We would go to Chinatown and eat on Sundays.

ESPINO:

You went to private school.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Your kids went to private school.

SANCHEZ:

Well, by then—

ESPINO:

You don’t consider yourself from the middle-class?

SANCHEZ:

I guess. We never made any distinction. We had friends all over and we—

ESPINO:

You mean from all the economic—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and relatives. We had relatives all over California on my mother’s side. We would go up to Hanford and we’d work in the cutting sheds in the orchards just the way everybody else did.

ESPINO:

So you knew hard work.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

01:08:22

ESPINO:

You didn’t have a lifestyle of leisure.

SANCHEZ:

No, no leisure. That was what was frowned upon. People that didn’t work were not appreciated. We didn’t care what you did, but if you worked, you were a good person. And as I got older, everybody we knew worked, and everybody, to us, was the same income level there on the Hill, so I don’t think we felt either rich or poor. When we were first married, my first husband, we lived with my sister-in-law. We lived on 39th and Normandie. We had a duplex, a two-bedroom duplex. They had one bedroom, we had the other one, and I guess we saved money. And like I told you, it wasn’t that—it didn’t take that enormous amount of your income to buy property. That’s why a lot of people that bought property in the fifties and sixties, that’s why they had resources, because their houses appreciated, the property started going up. I don’t think they were any smarter, any more hardworking than anybody else. It was the people that came afterwards that had a hard time because the property started going up and up and up and they couldn’t afford it, couldn’t afford the down payment. They could probably have afforded the payments for a while, but they couldn’t afford the down payment. Young people now, today, they can’t afford to buy property. It’s too hard. But in those days, you could buy a house. We bought that $14,000 house for 2,000 down and we had saved and saved and saved and saved and saved.

01:10:31

ESPINO:

For that 2,000. But how much were you bringing in a year with the store and those things?

SANCHEZ:

My first husband’s first job, you know what it paid him? Thirty-five dollars a week.

ESPINO:

Wow! That’s what I’m saying. So 14,000 is a lot when you’re only making $35 a week.

SANCHEZ:

Well, I forgot, we had another house on Cordova, on Normandie and Washington, right around there, which we bought for 9,000, and I think we gave 500 down. We sold that one to buy the house over there because it was too far over here and it was changing, and my family was kind of racist at times. There were a lot of blacks moving in, so my husband says, “No, we’d better sell right now while the house is worth—.” We sold it for 11,000. We went up. We bought the second house for 14 and then later on we bought this big old giant house with a huge lot in Los Feliz. You know what we paid for it? It’s now worth about 4 million. We paid $72,000 for it.

ESPINO:

Wow. But by that time, you had all this—

SANCHEZ:

Well, we sold the house—

ESPINO:

—the real estate as—yeah.

SANCHEZ:

—and we paid for that with it.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

Now we couldn’t afford to buy that house.

01:12:02

ESPINO:

No.

SANCHEZ:

No way. We couldn’t even afford to buy the house that John and I live in right now. A house down the block sold for 700,000. To me, that’s immoral. That’s immoral not to allow people to buy a home.

ESPINO:

Yeah. And they say that property’s going up in this neighborhood, Highland Park.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. We paid 95,000 for that house. We couldn’t afford to live there now.

ESPINO:

Right.

SANCHEZ:

I mean, there’s this little two-bedroom house that’s on the lot that sold for 475,000. How can people afford that? That’s not right.

ESPINO:

Was it all remodeled?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. I guess they were foreclosures, and you have to put new everything, wiring and plumbing, and maybe that’s why they cost so much. I don’t know. But I find that a lot of young people are having to move way out to the Inland Empire or to the Antelope Valley because they can’t afford to buy a place here.

ESPINO:

Yeah, it sounds like you came of age at a time when there was just more abundance.

SANCHEZ:

Things were still possible for people, for working-class people.

ESPINO:

To make it into the middle-class.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, yeah. That’s what put them into the middle-class, I think. The value of their property appreciated.

ESPINO:

In some cases I also think it was the union jobs.

SANCHEZ:

Oh, definitely, definitely.

01:13:57

ESPINO:

Yeah, in your case, your husband was an entrepreneur, it sounds like.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but my mother, my mother owned her own car, you know. She paid the rent and raised three daughters.

ESPINO:

On her own.

SANCHEZ:

And we weren’t deprived.

ESPINO:

And you went to private school all the way up to senior year.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but you know what the tuition here at Sacred Heart was?

ESPINO:

No.

SANCHEZ:

Thirty-five dollars a month.

ESPINO:

That’s cheap.

SANCHEZ:

What I hear now, I just about faint, what my kids have to pay. Because everybody sends their kids, I think, to private schools, especially Catholic high schools and grammar schools so they can get all their religious things done, their first holy communion, their confirmation, all these things.

ESPINO:

Yeah, it happens not on your own time, in school time. Yeah, I never thought of that.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, that’s why they—

ESPINO:

But then also when you look at the education, like, they’ll probably—

SANCHEZ:

The education is worth it. They’re a lot stricter than they are at the public schools. Bianca went right here to—I forgot what the name of the school is, the grammar high school, right there across the street from Sycamore Grove Park.

ESPINO:

Oh, the magnet school, the science—I hear a lot of good—it’s a charter—it’s a magnet school.

SANCHEZ:

But it wasn’t a charter then.

01:15:35

ESPINO:

Oh, no?

SANCHEZ:

But she got a darn good education. But we made her do her homework, I don’t care how tired we were, because we’d get home at, like, nine o’clock.

ESPINO:

From the store?

SANCHEZ:

Well, from the business. John and I, when we were—even before, we always eat late dinner. Everybody says, “It’s bad for you to eat at eight o’clock,” but we’ve always eaten at eight o’clock. When we first had this business, she had to go after school and do her homework, but we were there to watch her. We did the homework with her. The reading was done. And now there isn’t anything that kid can’t fix. If we have trouble with the TV or the computer or something, she’s almost getting better than John, and John’s—we don’t pay people to come and fix our computers. He does it all.

ESPINO:

Wow. This is your second husband?

SANCHEZ:

And both my second husbands were last name Sanchez. I never have to change my name. (Laughs)

01:17:00

ESPINO:

Okay, so you get married and you start a business, and it sounds like it goes really well. You don’t have any big failures.

SANCHEZ:

It did. No, actually, for a long time it went very well, to the point that he and his sister could open another store. And then all of a sudden, they had to close the stores because then you got the 99-cent stores, and a lot of big stores started buying the—Big Lots started buying the merchandise, and they couldn’t compete.

ESPINO:

Making it affordable or making it cheaper. Right.

SANCHEZ:

So they closed the stores. And because of the newspapers, they founded an organization called Mexican American Grocers Association. And through contacts, my son managed to get a failed distributorship, Miller Brands, Inc., my oldest son.

ESPINO:

Yes, I’ve heard of the Mexican American Grocers Association. They’re pretty powerful, aren’t they, as far as politically and influential?

SANCHEZ:

Well, we started the organization, my ex-husband and I.

ESPINO:

What year was that, do you remember? I know I keep asking you about—

SANCHEZ:

Middle seventies.

ESPINO:

The middle seventies?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, mid-seventies, something.

ESPINO:

When did you first start getting involved in—do you remember your first political—I mean, I know you were involved when your mom was in the union, but after you got married.

SANCHEZ:

MAPA.

01:18:41

ESPINO:

MAPA was the first thing that you started to—do you remember how that happened?

SANCHEZ:

Yes. These people came to the store to buy some things, some groceries and stuff that they were going to have a party or a fundraiser, not a party, a fundraiser, and they wanted to know if we would donate the stuff. So there was a man named Pat Sanchez, Delfino Varela—I can’t remember—

ESPINO:

Ralph Cuaron?

SANCHEZ:

He wasn’t one of the ones that came over, but they came and they said, “Why don’t you come to one of our fundraisers and get acquainted.” That’s how the whole thing started.

ESPINO:

Oh, because those names are very well known. Pat Sanchez’s daughter was active as well. His wife was very active. Patricio, right?

SANCHEZ:

Patricio Sanchez, but in those days they were Pat Sanchez, Josie Sanchez, Del Varela. And then as time went on, everybody became Delfino, Patricio, Josefa. Actually, the only one that didn’t change their name was Joe. He was always Joe Sanchez. He never changed to Jose Sanchez or—

ESPINO:

Is that his birth certificate name, José?

SANCHEZ:

No, Jose María, from New Mexico.

ESPINO:

Eddie Torres became Esteban.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Bert Corona, did he have a different name?

SANCHEZ:

No, he never changed it.

ESPINO:

He was always Bert?

SANCHEZ:

And Joe was always Joe. But everybody all of a sudden got ethnicized. I don’t know if that’s a word. (Laughs) Maybe I made it up, but what I mean is—

01:20:35

ESPINO:

It sounds good.

SANCHEZ:

—they all changed their names. Well, they didn’t change them; they just weren’t Anglicized anymore. The names were—

ESPINO:

Yeah, starting to embrace being Mexican. Even though these people were involved in the Mexican American—they weren’t hiding the fact that they were Mexican by being called Joe or—

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

—Pat. Do you remember what their political story was or what their line was or how they got you to believe that it was something you wanted to —

SANCHEZ:

Well, they wanted to organize and elect people to office. It was the Mexican American Political Association. They wanted to influence—I should say “we” because we joined them right away—legislation. We wanted to elect Ed Roybal. Here I’d been working for Ed Roybal since I was fourteen, trying to get him elected. (Laughter)

ESPINO:

Yeah, this was the congressional election that you’re talking about later on. Do you remember your first election or your first meeting with MAPA?

SANCHEZ:

Yes, I remember that we opened the campaign office for—gosh, I don’t remember. I wish I did. On Brooklyn. It was still Brooklyn. It was next to the American Music Company, and we started a newspaper called the MAPA Outlook. It was a political paper only published while we were campaigning.

ESPINO:

And that was just from the—

SANCHEZ:

But they were extremely liberal and some belonged to the Communist Party.

01:22:47

ESPINO:

Right. Like Pat Sanchez.

SANCHEZ:

No, Pat Sanchez didn’t, because he worked—Pat was an engineer, an aeronautical engineer.

ESPINO:

Oh, I didn’t know that. But I thought he was a communist.

SANCHEZ:

No, he was not a communist. He couldn’t afford to be one because he worked for the government. He worked at Northrop, I think.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

But in those days, if you were extremely liberal and hung around with a lot of the Socialists and there were some communists around, you became a communist. It wasn’t that he was a communist. We were labeled. I remember Father Moretta calling us all a bunch of communists, the biggest communists he’d ever known. I look at him now. They still believe that (unclear). Those were different times.

ESPINO:

You’re still the same person, doing the same things. (Laughs)

SANCHEZ:

So we campaigned. I forgot—we tried to elect several people to the Assembly and it wasn’t for Roybal. It was later on that we—

ESPINO:

It wasn’t Roybal. Well, I know Esteban Torres was trying to run in those early days. He was unsuccessful.

SANCHEZ:

But it wasn’t Esteban Torres either. It was somebody else.

ESPINO:

Latino?

SANCHEZ:

It was for a state office.

01:24:23

ESPINO:

Was it a Mexican American? Because I know you guys endorsed—

SANCHEZ:

For lieutenant governor. I can’t remember his name, though. I wish I had a better memory, you know. Bert Corona and some of the others had wonderful memories. They knew dates, times, what day of the week it was, and I’ve never been blessed that way. I’ve never had a very good memory. I’ll probably get Alzheimer’s, I guess.

ESPINO:

There’s a couple of people. Let’s see. Phil Soto?

SANCHEZ:

Phil Soto was running for Assembly.

ESPINO:

John Moreno, do you remember that? And then, well, Kennedy, the “Viva Kennedy” campaigns.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, we also campaigned for Kennedy.

ESPINO:

In addition to MAPA, were you also in a Democratic Club?

SANCHEZ:

No, MAPA kind of served as a Democratic Club.

ESPINO:

Oh, I didn’t know that.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

It was considered a Democratic Club?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, well, for the Fortieth.

ESPINO:

Oh, okay, for the Fortieth District?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but we had a Democratic Club here, the Northeast, and there was one in East L.A., but mainly we had our own organization. It served also as a Democratic Club.

ESPINO:

MAPA Cuarenta, that’s what they would call it, right?

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

No?

SANCHEZ:

It was MAPA Fortieth.

ESPINO:

Nobody called it MAPA Cuarenta? Someone had told me that.

SANCHEZ:

That’s not true, and I was there from the beginning, so I know. It wasn’t until we old-timers, I guess, retired, left, that the newer people started calling it MAPA Cuarenta.

ESPINO:

Okay, maybe that’s possible.

SANCHEZ:

We didn’t call it that. It was MAPA Fortieth, and we had non-Mexican Americans there in MAPA Fortieth too.

01:26:43

ESPINO:

Were they primarily Jewish?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, yeah, they were Jewish, and we had a spy, an LAPD spy, Monroy. I don’t remember what his first name was.

ESPINO:

How did you know he was a spy?

SANCHEZ:

Well, we didn’t know at first. There was a music company. Remember I told you that there—we thought he worked there. He was always in there. It was years later that we found out that he was LAPD, that he just used to go in there, and I thought he was working there.

ESPINO:

He was an informant? He was an undercover? Because it is true, like we were talking about—

SANCHEZ:

LAPD needed to know everything that we were doing.

01:27:29

ESPINO:

Yeah, and it was during the McCarthy—or after.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, I remember when HUAC came to town. Everybody disappeared.

ESPINO:

Right.

SANCHEZ:

They used to go around taking the license plates off the cars that belonged to the people who were at the headquarters. I remember that Hollenbeck (phonetic)—I can’t remember his name. Sergeant something-or-other would harass us. One time we were leaving and he took my ex-husband’s license away. He said, “Well, let’s go to the station and you can have it there.” Everybody says, “Don’t go to the station.” So finally—think it was Joe Quinn who got his license back for him.

ESPINO:

So you had to be in collaboration with non-Mexicans. Like you said, he was the front man for his business and then in this situation. Were you frightened or was that business as usual?

SANCHEZ:

No. The reason he took the license, because we were arguing with him. We didn’t want him there. (unclear), “What are you doing?” And this guy Monroy, I remember that when 16th of September, seven or eight years later we were in the parade, everybody was in the parade, and there he comes running. He was afraid he was going to be murdered because they had outed him that he was LAPD. I said, “Nobody’s going to kill you, fool. You’re just not going to have entrée,” you know. He was sure they were going to kill him.

01:29:21

ESPINO:

What was the most radical thing that you were doing? I mean, when you think about—

SANCHEZ:

The most radical thing that we were doing was probably associating with known communists in those days, you know, with Dorothy Healy and with—what’s her newspaper, Communist Party newspaper? I can’t remember the—the guy would come over and he’d write articles about what we were doing.

ESPINO:

People’s World?

SANCHEZ:

People’s World. And I can’t remember his name. Anyway, that made us communists.

ESPINO:

How did you feel about communists though, having grown up during the Cold War and the duck and cover and the nuclear threat?

SANCHEZ:

I didn’t want to be a communist. I didn’t believe in communism. I was American in my mind. We weren’t communists.

ESPINO:

Did your mom have any of those? Because during the thirties and forties, that ideology was pretty prevalent among labor people.

SANCHEZ:

No, because my father was in the navy, he and his brothers. They were die-hard Americans.

ESPINO:

But as far as looking at the political structure, the class structure, that was never an ideology that was—

SANCHEZ:

Attractive to us?

ESPINO:

Uh-huh.

SANCHEZ:

No. (Interruption)

01:31:29

ESPINO:

Most of the people that I talk to from your generation had some sort of encounter. They always seem to not be drawn to it, but for some reason they were in the same circles, they shared the same—

SANCHEZ:

Because we were activists, and they seemed to espouse and, unlike other organizations, support us when we needed support.

ESPINO:

Did you personally meet Dorothy Healy?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

ESPINO:

How did you find her? Was she really—

SANCHEZ:

I didn’t find her; she found me.

ESPINO:

—abrasive?

SANCHEZ:

She went to a meeting. Yeah, she was very abrasive.

ESPINO:

That’s what I mean. Like, how did you find her personally? What was your impression of her?

SANCHEZ:

I didn’t know her that well. I know her. I think she knew me. We’d attend meetings, and I was vocal, but we were never friends or even acquaintances in that way.

ESPINO:

Or socialize together?

SANCHEZ:

No, we didn’t socialize together. We didn’t do anything like that.

ESPINO:

What was your opinion of her?

SANCHEZ:

I agreed with a lot of the things she said, but I didn’t agree with the fact that she was a communist.

ESPINO:

Some people say that some communists would come to the organization and really try to recruit people into—

SANCHEZ:

But it didn’t work. It worked for a few. It worked for Rosalio Munoz, it worked for Delfino Varela, but it didn’t work for the Sanchezes, for Pat and Josie. In those days, they were still Pat and Josie. It was just that they were sympathetic to our movement, but it might have been for their own purposes, okay, but nobody else was sympathetic. Nobody else supported us. The Democratic Party didn’t always support us.

01:33:38

ESPINO:

What was your relationship to the Democratic Party? Did they come to you for your endorsement when—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, during elections, but otherwise they couldn’t be bothered with us. There was a large kind of working relationship between the blacks—in those days they were blacks—and the Jewish community, which were the shakers and movers in the Democratic Party. And I even think that they even looked at us as somewhat of a threat. We were very interested in education. That was the Jewish—that was what they were interested in. They didn’t want us tampering in that thing, especially when Mexican Americans talked about goals and numbers. That had gone against them, and so, as a result, they looked at us as a threat. The blacks looked at us as a threat because we wanted in on the political side of things. We wanted to elect people. They looked at that as a lessening of their political influence. We understood that. You know, we had black supporters. Tom Bradley was always around us, other guys. But we could understand how they looked at it as a lessening of their power, of their stature. So we had to wrestle with that.

01:35:36

ESPINO:

So when you’re talking about a political organization who’s interested in education, how did you focus your activism? Was it toward political officials or was it towards the Board of Education?

SANCHEZ:

The Board of Education. It’s the same battle that they’re fighting right now. The issues haven’t changed. They don’t change. It drives me nuts.

ESPINO:

Well, considering your kids didn’t go to public school, how did you—

SANCHEZ:

I still believed that a lot of our kids had to go to public school. I believed in public schooling, but I knew it wasn’t good for my kids. It wasn’t that I—I just felt they needed to be improved.

ESPINO:

What were the kinds of things that people were—because there’s a lot written about what was happening in the late sixties, as far as—

SANCHEZ:

Well, a lot of the kids being sent to shop, a lot of the kids not being encouraged to take academic classes that would get them to college. If you’re a little bit late, you were thought to be truant. A lot of hassling by the police. A lot of principals were non-Latino in those days and they really didn’t like you becoming politically involved because it was on the wrong side, they felt. And it’s almost like those issues haven’t changed. The blowouts didn’t change. I don’t know. A lot of it we need to do for ourselves, and that’s where sometimes we used to clash with the Democratic Party and used to clash with—a lot of the MAPA people would clash with other people, too, with other groups, because you couldn’t lay blame. The blame was always on the outside, and we felt that some of it was on us. We weren’t active enough, we didn’t vote enough, we didn’t—you know. We all became registrars—

ESPINO:

Wow.

01:38:04

SANCHEZ:

—to register people to vote, but it was another thing to try to get them to vote, and we took that hard. It was very hard to take.

ESPINO:

Did you believe that the Mexican American community was the sleeping giant? Did you believe that metaphor, that description? And then all of a sudden the sixties came and they were the awakened minority, the way that they were described.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

You do?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, we believed in the sleeping giant. It wasn’t until ’79, when I took over the paper, that Frank Dellomo (phonetic) came to see me and he says, “Well, Dolores, we’re active now. We’ve had the blowout.” Oh, it was because he wanted to know what I thought about incorporation, the first incorporation. And I said, “I don’t like it. I don’t support it.” He says, “Why?” I said, “Because we’re always going to be little towns looking in on the big city. I would rather that we were incorporated into Los Angeles that Los Angeles would annex us and then we’d have a chance. We only go two miles east of the river. If we were a part of L.A., we would have greater power because we’d have numbers then.” So he says, “So you don’t—.” I said, “No. You know what’s going to happen?” By then we were getting a lot of immigration and things. I said, “We’re not going to overcome, Frank. We’re going to overwhelm.” And I think I’ve lived—one day he told me, “You are a visionary, Dolores,” before he died. He said, “Because it’s true. We’re not going to overcome; we’re going to overwhelm.”

01:39:56

ESPINO:

Yeah, it’s incredible, the numbers and how things have changed.

SANCHEZ:

It’s the numbers that are changing things, and I think people have become more enlightened, too, this whole country. If you really look at—the people in this country don’t like being called certain things. Racist hits them, and though they may not like us, they don’t like us saying that they’re racist. That’s why they don’t like us. They don’t like us because we broke the law and came here, though a lot of us never did. But they don’t like the rest of the world not to like them.

ESPINO:

They don’t want to look bad in front of the eyes of the world, now that the world is watching.

SANCHEZ:

That’s why they voted for Obama. It was to get rid of that picture of them being racist against blacks. “Look what we’ve done.” Never mind that I think they sabotaged a lot of his (unclear), but—

ESPINO:

Well, it’s interesting that you say that, because the numbers are there, but like you mentioned earlier, the same problems with education that you experienced in the sixties that are still, if not—some people that I talk to actually went to those high schools, Garfield and Roosevelt, during the late sixties say it actually was better then than it is today. I don’t know if that’s true or if it’s their perception, but it’s still their perception.

01:42:36

SANCHEZ:

And I’ve been criticized a lot, a lot. People normally don’t criticize me in a very public way because of some of my attitudes. I am hard. I’m very hard. I don’t think we can blame the schools. I went to a school where there were forty-three kids in a classroom, so it isn’t that. But I always made sure my kids went to school. I used to get very upset when they got sick. I used to take it hard. They had to prove to me they were sick. Ask my children. I didn’t like them to be sick. So I believe that a lot of the absenteeism, truancy, is our fault. We still don’t understand what education can bring, all of us.

I’ve been in a school where this young girl and her boyfriend, in a middle school, I went there to deliver something and the mother was at the counter, and the girl was telling the mother what to put down so she could go out with her boyfriend. You see, my kids would never have done that. Are you kidding?

ESPINO:

So you’re saying that you don’t put fault—

SANCHEZ:

A lot of it is our fault.

ESPINO:

Yeah, you don’t put the fault on the—

SANCHEZ:

I think there are things that are wrong.

ESPINO:

—institution.

SANCHEZ:

I think that institutions can be racist in their attitudes, but I also think that we shouldn’t buy into it. Where I live, I’m real close to the high school, and if I see kids aren’t—you know, they used to hang out on my steps, and, “Hey, what are you doing here? Go to school.” “Oh, well, we’re late.” I said, “Well, let me see you walking to school or I’m going to call the school and see if you’re going in late.” See, that’s the way people were when I was a kid and when my kids were kids.

01:43:50

ESPINO:

The whole neighborhood watched out to see—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. There wasn’t that kind of—maybe neighborhoods aren’t the same. But I sometimes think some people don’t like children. They criticize them a lot.

ESPINO:

Were you opposed to the tactic of the walkouts?

SANCHEZ:

No, no. Yes and no. I wasn’t opposed to them walking out, but I thought that once they made their point, they should have gone back to school. Now, you see, people don’t agree with that, a lot of people. The activists don’t agree with that.

ESPINO:

Yeah, there were two sides, because I know that Edward Roybal wanted them to go back.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

And the activists are—

SANCHEZ:

You know, like the immigration marches, I didn’t want those kids out of school. Our best hope is for those kids to stay in school. Look how the dreamers are going to be taken care of, but if they leave school and if we think it’s okay to leave school, it’s okay to leave school because Mom has to go to the doctor or the kid—I remember the kid next door to me, that lady couldn’t control her kids. One of the kids never went to school. She finally got arrested.

ESPINO:

Oh, the mom got arrested?

01:45:52

SANCHEZ:

As soon as school was over, I mean as soon as it was past nine, that kid would come out in his pajamas and be riding up and down on his skateboard. I hate skateboards. I think skateboards deflect kids from going to school. I think they all want to be skateboards artists. I don’t like those things. I think we need to have big expectations of our kids.

ESPINO:

Did you get to know the Reverend Vahac Mardirosian at all?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

Because he had the idea of parent education, parent training.

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

Was that something that you supported?

SANCHEZ:

Yes. But Vahac and I had a big argument over the fact that when he went down south, right, and left L.A., he told me, “Oh, I don’t bother with the Chicanos. It’s the immigrant parents that are good. They send their kids to school.” I was so upset. I was so upset with him. I said, “Well, don’t you think, then, if the immigrant parents are the ones that are sending the kids to school, don’t you think you should spend your time working with the Chicano parents?” “No,” he said, “ya están quemados.” I said, “I don’t agree with that attitude. I never give up.”

ESPINO:

Right. Did you have disagreements with him prior to that? Did you agree with his tactics?

SANCHEZ:

I thought I agreed with his tactics. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

Yeah, because he is controversial.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

01:47:22

ESPINO:

When people say that he was not involved, like in the MAPA 40, he was not there and he was not—

SANCHEZ:

Well, he was a religious figure, too, you know.

ESPINO:

Yes, yes. But he wasn’t doing that grassroots work—

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

—that the Pat Sanchezes and you and your husband and the Delfino Verela’s were doing.

SANCHEZ:

But his work was just as valuable. We can’t all—I remember somebody told me, “What we need are ten Cesar Chávez’s.” And I told them, “God forbid. God forbid. We can only afford one. We have other things to do. We can’t all spend our time organizing farmworkers.” And it’s always been my feeling that—and I told Cesar, “We are an urban people. We are in the cities and we need to work to get our people educated. We need to strengthen our entrepreneurs. We can’t drain them. You can’t come all the time and tell us to support the farmworkers. We need to do other things too.”

ESPINO:

How did he respond?

SANCHEZ:

He agreed, and I raised funds for him.

ESPINO:

I know. So that was after the MAPA 40 that you started working with UFW and supporting the UFW?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

01:49:05

ESPINO:

So was that the first time, when you say—and then this will be the last question, but when you said Del Varela and Pat Sanchez came to—was that the first time you actually donated, gave money to that—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, because we didn’t know where—I guess we’d been busy building a business and—

ESPINO:

Raising kids.

SANCHEZ:

Raising kids and stuff, and we didn’t know where the activists met. And when you talk to about the Communist Party, that’s not where our interest was. Later on, we attended meetings and stuff, but that wasn’t what our interest was. Our interest was, first of all, we needed to get Roybal elected, and if people supported Roybal, we would support them. (Laughs) It was that simple, how we started, you know. We were always liberal, were always Democrats, always gave to the party, always gave to candidates, but we didn’t know real true activism till we got involved with the MAPA Fortieth. It was mainly through the unions.

ESPINO:

So would you and your ex-husband talk about these things?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

With each other?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

ESPINO:

Was that something that you had in common?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh, but I was much more liberal. I have always been, I guess, a liberal with a capital “L,” but not a patsy.

01:50:41

ESPINO:

Right, because your philosophy, like you just mentioned, it can be sometimes controversial or not the standard party line, so to speak.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. I don’t believe in excuses. I believe in circumstances and in trying to solve those circumstances.

ESPINO:

Maybe next time, hopefully, we can get to that point in the seventies, because it sounds like you took a position during the welfare-rights activism, like Francisca Flores, who was definitely pro-training, workers’ training, and she wasn’t really an advocate of welfare.

SANCHEZ:

Neither was I. I was the president of Chicana Service Action Center for five years because it was a Manpower organization. That’s when Gloria Molina and I kind of buried the hatchet for a while, and she was the one that recommended me to Carter for the commission. I have to tell you that one of the things that I didn’t like was when they wanted welfare mothers not to be sterilized after the third kid. I felt that if they were on welfare and they had more kids, they’d never get out of there. I wanted them to get out. I wanted them to be trained. So it was kind of a difference in philosophy there, but we agreed to disagree.

ESPINO:

With?

SANCHEZ:

With our philosophies. We kind of buried a lot of stuff that we didn’t agree on. We emphasized the things we did agree on.

ESPINO:

Are you talking specifically about Alicia Escalante or other activists?

SANCHEZ:

Other activists, yeah.

01:52:39

ESPINO:

Because she was the well-known Chicano welfare-rights advocate.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, even now I can’t stand to go to the housing projects and see families that have been there for four generations. It bugs me. We should have gotten those kids out. How dare they say they own the place? What did they pay for it, you know? They should have had the ability to pay for a property of their own.

ESPINO:

So you’re thinking that when that issue came up—I don’t remember that. Was that in the seventies when they were, after the third child, to be sterilized?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

ESPINO:

So you think that, like, legislating—

SANCHEZ:

I mean, that’s what I thought then.

ESPINO:

Like what they recently did in California prisons.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

They’re actually forcing them to be sterilized.

SANCHEZ:

That I don’t—but I think that we can talk them into it. It’s just like being against teenage pregnancy.

ESPINO:

Oh, I see what you’re saying. You’re not talking about an actual law that forces them. You’re saying as a policy to advocate this other path versus—

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

01:54:15

ESPINO:

I think that it’s interesting. I haven’t seen any recent studies, but with the changes that occurred under the—I think it started with Clinton, welfare reform and refusing to continue if—what was the change?

SANCHEZ:

It was five years on welfare and then you had to be in training or something. I thought that was a great thing.

ESPINO:

Yeah, my cousin got off welfare. I think she might still be on welfare if it wasn’t for that, so it’s an interesting—it might not work for everyone, but maybe in some cases it does.

SANCHEZ:

But a lot, it would work for a lot.

ESPINO:

Okay. Well, we’ll stop it here and we’ll go back to that next time.

SANCHEZ:

Okay. My unpopular views sometimes.

ESPINO:

Well, I’d like to know when you were—did you say president of the Chicana—because Lilia Aceves was the first director. And then you were a director?

SANCHEZ:

No. Francisca was the first director.

ESPINO:

Okay, Francisca was the first. And then Lilia?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and then Corrine.

ESPINO:

And then Corrine Sanchez.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and the one that’s there now.

ESPINO:

She’s been there that long?

SANCHEZ:

What is her name?

ESPINO:

I don’t know. I have to—

SANCHEZ:

I think I chose to forget her name. Sophia Esparza.

ESPINO:

Oh, Okay. Okay, I’m going to stop it now. (End of November 1, 2013 interview)

SESSION FIVE (January 3, 2014)

00:00:33

ESPINO:

This is Virginia Espino, and today’s January 3rd (2014). I’m interviewing Mrs. Dolores Sanchez at the offices of Eastern Group Publications. Today we’re going to start with a revisit of the Mexican American Political Association that you were a founding member of. I know sometimes it’s hard to remember specific people and individuals, but last time you were talking about the diversity of the original Mexican American Political Association. Can you talk a bit about that?

SANCHEZ:

There were Jewish people, there were what we called Anglos, there were several Asians, so it was extremely diverse. We had some black members who associated with us. For instance, we went and picketed Dominguez—what was it called—Rancho Dominguez, when they were building homes, because they weren’t selling to black people. I remember that’s where I first met Tom Bradley. Tom Bradley used to come around in a Jeep. I think it was pink. I think it was pink. But anyway, he would come around and bring us sandwiches and stuff because we would picket for long hours.

ESPINO:

Do you recall how that issue came to you?

SANCHEZ:

It was through CORE. I think we were just incensed by some of the deed—I don’t remember what you call it, where the deed said you could not sell to a Mexican or to a black, even an Asian, and so those codicils, I guess they were called, really incensed us. I remember that Lena Horne couldn’t buy a house off of Olympic, this big mansion, because she was black. So in Alhambra, Mexican Americans would try to buy homes, and somehow the “For Sale” signs would disappear when they showed up. So it was really a movement between all groups, activist groups, to try to do away with this kind of nonsense.

00:02:53

ESPINO:

And that was also around the Fair and Equal Housing Employment Act, around the same period?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh. Well, I think the act came about because of this reaction against these codicils and these deeds. I mean, it was very plain. You couldn’t buy there. You couldn’t sell to a person.

ESPINO:

Did you ever try to buy in an area and—

SANCHEZ:

No, not that I was aware of, because I only lived in three areas: Bunker Hill, Hillside Village next to El Sereno, and Los Feliz. By then it was money that talked. The Fair Housing Act was really effective, and you could get into serious trouble if you’re—but I don’t recall—the woman that we bought the house from was Jewish, and so she was pretty open-minded. So I don’t recall that—and then I’ve lived here in Highland Park, so I haven’t lived in that many places or tried to buy a home in that many places where I felt that they didn’t want to sell to me.

ESPINO:

Primarily those areas would be more like Alhambra, San Marino, Arcadia? And then you’re talking about—

SANCHEZ:

Even right outside of El Sereno there was a little area—I can’t remember their name—where people complained that they wouldn’t sell to them.

00:04:36

ESPINO:

So that was an issue of the Mexican American Political Association. Would you consider that a very, very important issue or something that you were—

SANCHEZ:

No, because it was a political organization. What we wanted to do was to help put people in office who could handle these things. We felt that if we could increase our voting strength, increase the number of elected officials that they would be in a position to react to these complaints. So it was highly political, and we only became sidetracked now and then when something incensed us.

ESPINO:

Do you remember some of the first candidates that you worked to elect?

SANCHEZ:

To elect? Roybal, City Council.

ESPINO:

And what role did you play specifically?

SANCHEZ:

Leafleting. We had a newspaper, the MAPA Outlook, which we would distribute. We would print it at our own expense. We’d all pitch in money and we would all do the work and we would mail it out or distribute it at different, you know, civic affairs and things like that. We weren’t always looked upon in a friendly way, because I guess when people are activists, you forget that people have feelings, people react to things, and you just can’t be so pushy at times. It’s much easier to get them to go along if you can use a little word psychology. But we were too—I guess as activists, people are very passionate. We were very passionate, very young, and not always very patient.

00:07:00

ESPINO:

Well, that’s a really good point, because do you think that there was a lot at stake? Because when you talk to people about the Chicano Movement period, they talk about how much they felt was at stake and that they were at a point where things were either going to change or they weren’t going to change, period.

SANCHEZ:

We were at a point where things needed to change and we had to start the change. Most of us had some experience in political activity, so as a result, we didn’t have that feeling that things weren’t going to change. It was kind of like the start of a movement where you just take it on and see what happens. We were determined to have people elected, and I don’t think it ever even really—even though we lost more races than we won, we still felt that with every election that we were in, there was progress.

ESPINO:

Can you explain that or define how you understood that progress?

SANCHEZ:

Well, for instance, we were heavily Democratic and we were in the Democratic Party, and I recall one convention in Fresno where we wanted to put someone up for office, for lieutenant governor. I can’t remember his name. My one really sad—my one regret is I don’t remember names. But during the convention, we were stymied in trying to get an endorsement, but that didn’t mean we were going to stop, and we maneuvered and we counted votes, we harangued Democrats, and I think eventually he got the endorsement, but didn’t win the election. But there was never that sense of things have to change. We always had the belief that things were going to change.

ESPINO:

I’m going to pause it for a second. (Recorder turned off)

SANCHEZ:

We were very hopeful, very positive.

00:10:01

ESPINO:

Well, when I spoke with—I mentioned earlier that I’ve been interviewing Ralph Arreola, and he and other people have mentioned this, too, that the Democratic Party did not take Mexican Americans seriously in the very beginning, and it was always an issue of “It’s not the right time yet.”

SANCHEZ:

Right. “It’s not your time. You haven’t earned it.” Yeah.

ESPINO:

So was that your experience?

SANCHEZ:

Yes, with the party, with the party, and even sometimes when we put forth candidates, even members of our community would come to us and say, “Look, you’re just spoiling it. We need to elect a Democrat, and your candidate isn’t going to win, but he’s going to ruin the chances of another Democrat winning.” I remember that happened with Brown. I can’t remember his first name.

ESPINO:

Pat Brown or Eugene Brown?

SANCHEZ:

I can’t remember. Brown, who was very pro-Mexican American on the surface, but he felt that people wouldn’t vote for us and so why were we trying to elect people right now, that eventually they would learn that we—and I think one of our replies was, “What, after several hundred years they’re going to learn?”

ESPINO:

Learn what? What did he mean by learn that you’re—

SANCHEZ:

That we could be good elected officials, that they would feel comfortable electing a Mexican American, that the name wouldn’t startle them so much.

ESPINO:

What was the perception that a Mexican American would—what kind of leader did people understand Mexican American—

SANCHEZ:

Maybe that we weren’t sophisticated enough to hold office, that we could be coopted, which has happened on several occasions, but it’s happened to everybody, to every group, so it’s not like it was just us. That some of us had checkered pasts by HUAC, with the House Un-American Activities, that we had associated with communists or socialists, that people were very pro-American. And they didn’t like that and they wouldn’t vote for anyone who even spoke to someone who was either a socialist, communist, or had talked about Stalin or any of those things, that had read The People’s World or admitted they’d read an article in The People’s World. It really hurt a lot of us because we were activists and we went wherever people were supportive. And since some of the party was—we would go to the more liberal parts of the party.

00:13:21

ESPINO:

Do you remember the work of the Independent People’s Party? Were you—

SANCHEZ:

No, I wasn’t involved with them. I think it was before my time. I’m not sure.

ESPINO:

I think it was, too, but just wondering maybe your mom leaned towards that because that was the alternative, you know. Then later on came La Raza Unida Party.

SANCHEZ:

Mama, my mama. My mother was strictly union activist. She was strictly a union activist and that was her whole thing. She pushed for Mexican Americans to be business agents and organizers and shop—what was it called—shop—

ESPINO:

Stewards?

SANCHEZ:

Stewards. And she would push members, especially of the ILGWU. And we were told then, too, Ziggy Horowitz, Max Wolf would tell us, “Well, someday you guys are going to run the unions, but it’s not your time yet.” I remember the first one that they managed to get as an organizer was a guy named Tommy Talavera, and he had a terrible time. I think he even became an alcoholic because it was so bad, stress.

00:14:57

ESPINO:

You mean the reaction to the rest of the membership, that was stressful, or the job itself was stressful?

SANCHEZ:

The job itself, because he was the only Mexican, so it was hard. Then along came Hope Mendoza. Things got a little bit better, and little by little, yeah, we do run the unions, but it wasn’t easy.

ESPINO:

Right, and that legacy goes way back.

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

So it took a while.

SANCHEZ:

Took a long time.

ESPINO:

Did you work in those early days with MAPA, with, say, J.J. Rodriguez?

SANCHEZ:

Yes. We all kind of knew each other. We may have had a different focus of what I would call the movement, un movimiento, like they say now, but we all knew each other, maybe not personally, but I think you could have taken ten of us and put us into a room, who had never spoken to each other, knew of each other, and if somebody said something, we would all react in the same way. We understood each other. All it took was a look. I remember that J.J. once came to our table. I think at the time I was in the Women’s Commission on Civic Government or something under Bradley, and J.J. came to the table because at the time we were struggling with the fire department, and he tells me, “You know, I’ve been told to talk to you, Dolores. So I talked to you. Hi. How are you?” (Laughs) To take it a little easy, don’t push so much, but he didn’t even have to say that. I knew.

00:17:20

ESPINO:

So that’s when you were pushing for women’s inclusion, not necessarily only Mexican Americans, but (unclear).

SANCHEZ:

No, but I figured, you know, that was the way to get in, because even the Mexican Americans that were in the fire department didn’t want women, didn’t appreciate Latinas going over there. There was a reception right at the top of City Hall, and there was this little elevator, this dinky little elevator that takes you up, and I got caught in the elevator with several of the firemen’s wives, Chicanas. “How dare you? How dare you put a woman into the firehouse? You know what happens. Our husbands are going to wind up getting involved with the women.” So it wasn’t only the majority in the fire department.

ESPINO:

It sounds like, when you looked at an issue, it was the big picture.

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

ESPINO:

So you’re looking at the big picture of what it meant for women in general, not just—

00:20:15

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and our women to be able to go into the fire department and get these great jobs, it’s still pretty hard, and I wonder if the reaction is the same way. I don’t know. But, oh, yeah, to me it was the fact that you needed to have some of the Latinos—well they weren’t Latinos; they were Mexicans—in the fire department become captains, become commanders. So I had a double focus. I remember having this talk with Frank Del Olmo. Now and then we would visit each other or something, or we’d sit next to each other, and I remember his saying, “Dolores, sometimes I don’t understand you.” I think at the time it was when East L.A. wanted to incorporate, and I supported it, but very reticent about it. I just felt that we would be a little tiny city looking in on the big one. I wanted Los Angeles. I want to be included in the big one. That was my idea of progress, because I didn’t think that East L.A. could support itself. And he says, “Well, do you think we’ll ever have a chance in Los Angeles?” He says, “Why are you criticizing?” He said, “I know you’re supporting it, but you kind of don’t always talk like you support it.”

And I told him, “Frank, you have to understand someday our people are not going to overcome; our people are going to overwhelm. We’re going to have tremendous numbers, and if we could have East L.A. incorporated, think about it. Think about what we’re really going to have, the voting power.” Having been in MAPA, I really felt that that’s where it was. Then he says, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if you’re going to be right.” But that was when we were very young.

ESPINO:

So what do you think now, looking back?

SANCHEZ:

I wish we had been annexed into Los Angeles. Think about it. Now we’re two miles, just two miles east of the river. We go to Indiana. That’s where East L.A. is. Think about what it had been if the city of Los Angeles went that far. Think of things we could really do. I’m not putting Gloria Molina down at all. I just felt that that’s where the greater promise was. Imagine we would have a City Council that we could really control. But no one’s ever agreed with me. (Laughs)

00:21:46

ESPINO:

No one?

SANCHEZ:

Well, a lot of people have, that’s true, but I mean I’ve kind of always felt like they think I’m kind of full of pipe dreams.

ESPINO:

It seems like, just from my interviews, that most people supported the idea in spirit but, like you’re saying, not in practicality. Very few people thought it was actually going to work, but people felt obligated (unclear).

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, that’s how I felt. Sometimes we don’t handle confrontation very well. It hurts us because we’ve handle confrontation from the majority group for so long, that to confront each other is painful, very painful.

ESPINO:

Because in that effort you had Esteban Torres, who was very much supporting it with TELACU.

SANCHEZ:

And you saw what happened. And also it was a kind of—I was going to say stupid, and I’m not going to say that. We got lost in the fact that we wanted to elect these people to City Council and mayor and blah, blah, blah, and the candidates won, but the effort lost, which meant what? It was that the activists went out to vote, but the people in the community weren’t happy about it either. I think in East L.A. people always wanted to remain East L.A.

ESPINO:

Right, and there was the fear that’s always used, even as recent as—

SANCHEZ:

The last one.

00:24:05

ESPINO:

Yeah, but I’m thinking of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in his first mayoral election. They brought out that hit. Wasn’t that part of the propaganda against incorporation, was that communists and these leftists were going to take over?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but mostly the ultra-liberal union. The unions rule Los Angeles as it is. Here we’re electing a guy who is a union guy.

ESPINO:

So it was more anti-union than anti-red.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. He’s very charismatic, and I think people thought it might be time, but not with him because he was a union guy and the unions rule Los Angeles. And anyway, I’ve seen that. Usually they’ll elect someone who’s kind of in the middle, not ultra-right, not ultra-left. People shy away from the real activists and from the real conservatives. They’re going to try to get somebody that’s in the middle. So it was really interesting that Antonio won.

ESPINO:

The second time around, you mean?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Maybe by then he had put people’s fears about union activity and about the unions ruling, that he wasn’t going to be that type of candidate.

ESPINO:

Oh, okay. I thought we were talking about the East L.A. elections, because there was that fear, you know, because they did—

SANCHEZ:

No, I think the East L.A. people love East L.A. and always have that fear of gentrification, of taxation, about somebody making you take your car off—not do your mechanics work on the street, bring your house up to code, because they’re old houses. So there is that fear about would a city, all of a sudden with all these new people elected, would they start doing things that the people in East L.A. don’t appreciate, especially the taxes.

00:26:28

ESPINO:

Yeah, those are really important bread-and-butter, grassroots (unclear).

SANCHEZ:

Right, and that’s what I think really—plus re-gentrification. I mean, I had somebody, when I was talking about the Incorporation Movement, tell me, “Dolores, you don’t understand. They’re going to take our property.” I said, “Who? I don’t see people killing each other to get into East L.A.” “Oh, no. There’s this yuppie couple, Latino couple, who bought this house and redid it and they even put a sauna in there. So you know what’s going to happen. They’re going to come after all our property.” I mean, they were upset about a sauna. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

Well, yeah. But I can see, after observing what’s happened here in this neighborhood, in Highland Park, those kinds of fears and how they kind of go a little extreme because you do see places you’ve walked by for years disappear.

SANCHEZ:

Right.

ESPINO:

Like Elsa’s Bakery.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

You talk to locals, and they’re upset because they can’t get their (Spanish word) for fifty cents anymore, but you talk to the hipsters that moved in, and they’re so happy they’ve got this great hip place to get their (Spanish word).

SANCHEZ:

Right here, right in Highland Park here, Pablo had been there for forty years.

00:27:56

ESPINO:

It’s gone? I didn’t even notice that.

SANCHEZ:

Overnight. They didn’t tell anyone. All of a sudden they were gone, and Metro PCS moved in. And everybody, not only the Mexican Americans, not only the Latinos here, everybody would go and had their coffee there in the morning and their pan dulce. I didn’t know, and I’m right here one block away.

ESPINO:

One block away.

SANCHEZ:

I went to get my hair done and I told the lady, “It’s cold.” It was one of those rainy days. I said, “As soon as I’m through, I’ll go get (Spanish word).” It’s gone.

ESPINO:

I wonder why, because it wasn’t—

SANCHEZ:

The owner of the building has these big dreams that he’s going to get thousands of dollars more in rent. The lady that does my hair had her beauty shop right across the street, he raised her rent $4,000. So she says, “The heck with you. I’m moving.” So she moved down two blocks and is now paying $2,000 less than she was paying him, and he hasn’t been able to rent—but he did rent to Metro because I guess the Metro was there, and Metro PCS seems to be all over the place.

ESPINO:

Four thousand dollars a month for a beauty salon space?

SANCHEZ:

He wanted her out of there. We had the 99 Cent Store. It’s gone. So, yeah, I guess gentrification does—well, I think more than in anywhere else, Highland Park is re-gentrification.

ESPINO:

How long have you lived in this neighborhood?

SANCHEZ:

Thirty-five years.

00:30:02

ESPINO:

So it was different thirty-five years ago. It was a lot more white, more of a suburban neighborhood.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and then it changed and now it’s going back. I think the Metro has changed things. I don’t know.

ESPINO:

I don’t know.

SANCHEZ:

The Times did an article on how you could buy a really nice home here for 400,000. You could. You can’t now, but I mean—so a lot of people said, “Well, the Metro is coming in. York is kind of picking up. At one time there were a lot of antique places on York and then they all disappeared and now they’re coming back, you know, and all the restaurants.

ESPINO:

Yes. There’s also a—what else is there that’s new? A doughnut shop I haven’t been to, but I think they’re close to three dollars, two dollars for a doughnut, but they’re really—

SANCHEZ:

Big.

ESPINO:

—elaborate. I don’t know how big they are, but they have different kinds of toppings, not your traditional glazed, chocolate doughnut.

SANCHEZ:

You can really see the change by, for instance, La C_____, they had never participated in the Christmas parade. This year they did. They’ve got to compete, all these restaurants opening up.

ESPINO:

Well, those prices have gone up tremendously.

SANCHEZ:

I know, and the food has gone down. John says, “Don’t tell them. Let somebody else tell them.” It hurts me. They’ve been there forever, you know, and it hurts me to see that they don’t see it. Maybe they’re seeing it now. Once Jesse, the son, decided to do his own thing, they went back to the old ways (unclear) and raised their prices. Jesse insisted on quality, and, I mean, they were jammed every day. You don’t see that much. On Fridays, yes—

ESPINO:

Yeah, on the weekends.

SANCHEZ:

—maybe on Saturday night, but Sundays and the rest of the week, it’s not that way.

00:32:19

ESPINO:

Where do you go now? Do you have a new place that you like?

SANCHEZ:

We’ll still go back now and then, but there’s a new place that opened on York—can’t remember the name—that everybody’s raving about, Mexican food, so I’m going to go see what—and they have huarache, which is real good. Yeah, but it’s a lot of other restaurants and a lot of—now they’re spreading over here on Figueroa.

ESPINO:

They are, yeah.

SANCHEZ:

You know that place that was Salvadoran—Pupusas? That’s no longer there. It’s this other restaurant coming in.

ESPINO:

We saw a crepe place, French crepe place down the street. Yeah, it’s incredible. It’s incredible to witness it when you’ve—I’ve studied it and I’m sure you’ve studied it, but to actually live through it is very—

SANCHEZ:

Right. Well, I lived through it once before on Bunker Hill.

ESPINO:

Yeah, but did it change like that? Did it have that same kind of feel where stores were turning over, like mom-and-pops were turning over to—

SANCHEZ:

No. No, they just disappeared, and the buildings were razed, and at the time they was talking about how great it was. We were going to have this magnificent Civic Center. So in a way I have witnessed it, but it had a different feel to it. The Mexican Americans were just thrown out.

00:33:58

ESPINO:

Right. Expelled, pushed out, forced out.

SANCHEZ:

And were told, by the way—I remember my mother, she says, “Well, we’ll come back when they build new buildings and stuff.” They had beautiful Victorians, and there was a process of re-gentrification going on. There were a lot of non-Mexicans who were taking over some of these Victorians and fixing them up, and they were beautiful, but there wasn’t enough time, I guess. They wanted to expand the (unclear), pushed by the Los Angeles Times, “We’re going to have these beautiful pink marble buildings that the sun’s going to radiate off of.” And in Chavez Ravine, the Wymans said, “Oh, no, we have to have a topnotch baseball stadium.” I’ve never, ever forgiven Rosalind Wyman for that and I never will, which is probably very unchristian of me, but I can’t help it. When people talk about her, I just make a face. Everybody says, “She’s so good. She’s brought so—.” Well, I won’t talk about it unless it’s somebody that’s family or something. I said, “Oh, that traitor. She was responsible—.” She and her husband were the main shakers and movers for Dodger Stadium.

ESPINO:

Do you remember it at the time or later, like, looking back, studying it?

SANCHEZ:

No, I was living on Bunker Hill. I remembered it. I remember she threw the first ball.

ESPINO:

You watched it on TV, or how did you know she threw—

SANCHEZ:

No, we probably read about it.

ESPINO:

In the newspaper?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

00:36:10

ESPINO:

Yeah, my uncle refuses—he’s never been at Dodger Stadium. Our family’s huge Dodger fans.

SANCHEZ:

I’ve never been in Dodger Stadium either, never. Oh, no, I’m lying. Once, and it had to do with business, but that’s the one and only time. I did not stay for the game. I went to the restaurant, the, I don’t know, Sports Club, or whatever they call it, took care of business, and left.

ESPINO:

Yeah, it’s still a definite sore spot for a lot of people.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, my generation.

ESPINO:

I don’t know how many anymore.

SANCHEZ:

No, they love the Dodgers, and I’m kind of a Dodgers fan too. Couldn’t blame them. It was the people that were behind this whole movement, like they are about—it was the developers. Wyman was the developer. Her husband was a developer. That’s how she got on the City Council, you know, and that’s what they’ve done now with L.A. Live and are trying to do even more, you know, to build a big stadium. I don’t know where in the hell they’re going to put the cars on the freeway, but—

ESPINO:

Did you ever have a chance to meet her later on?

SANCHEZ:

I’ve been in the buildings. I’ve been in some—

ESPINO:

Meetings?

SANCHEZ:

—and receptions and things, but I’ve never shaken hands with that woman, never.

00:37:41

ESPINO:

What would you tell her if you had the opportunity?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know. I have always been afraid of what I would say, so I figured that let things alone, Dolores. It’s done. Give it up. (Laughs) My sister tells me that, “Give it up, Dolores. It’s gone. Life has moved on. Give it up.” I can’t. I don’t know why. I learned to drive in Chavez Ravine, for gosh sakes.

ESPINO:

Did you have family or friends that you knew that were evicted?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah. We had a distant cousin who raised chickens there and he was evicted, and all my family was evicted from Bunker Hill.

ESPINO:

Well, what would you tell her if you could?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s just the problem. I don’t know if venom will come out of my mouth or what. I don’t know.

ESPINO:

What would be your argument for her to stop the—if you had a chance to stop her, what would you say? What would be your argument?

SANCHEZ:

How can you take one of the only big green spaces in Los Angeles away? How can you take people’s homes for a baseball team? We have land here in Los Angeles. There’s places where you can put a stadium. Why do you have to take part of Elysian Park and people’s homes, a grand old community? What is in your brain? I don’t understand that kind of thinking. I don’t. It wasn’t only Chavez Ravine. It was the fact that they were taking some of Elysian Park, too, and would like to take more if they could.

ESPINO:

They weren’t able to get the full—

00:40:17

SANCHEZ:

No. But they probably now—remember they wanted to enlarge Dodger Stadium and wanted to put—what was it—a shopping center or something? So instead they went to L.A. Live there, because there are too many of our people on the City Council and too many of our people’s allies and too many people who want support in the future. That’s a sore spot. They couldn’t do it. Maybe when we’re all dead, I don’t know.

ESPINO:

Yeah, yeah. (Laughs) It’s interesting because there are a lot of Dodger fans. But I think that that history has been told so well. There’s a documentary about it, there’s books. People keep talking about it, mentioning it, writing about it. So hopefully it doesn’t go away as an untold story or a forgotten story.

SANCHEZ:

One of the things that always startles me, though, is like people talk about Palo Verde, but I don’t remember my family or anybody that I knew calling it Palo Verde. We always called it Chavez Ravine. So I don’t know. Maybe the people that lived there—I don’t even remember my cousin saying Palo Verde. I don’t know where the breakdown came, why some of us called it Chavez Ravine and some of us called it Palo Verde.

ESPINO:

Yeah, I don’t know either because, yeah, I’ve heard it mentioned both ways by people who lived close. My family was from Bunker Hill. They were part of the people evicted.

SANCHEZ:

Where did they live?

ESPINO:

I don’t remember the name of the street right now. I’ll get it from my dad. And then they had friends that lived in Chavez Ravine because it was so close.

SANCHEZ:

Right.

00:41:42

ESPINO:

I think the common high school or junior high school?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, Central, Central High School. Everybody went to Central High School.

ESPINO:

And they call it both interchangeably. I’m not sure where that breakdown is either.

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know. But there are a lot of things that as Mexican American on Bunker Hill we didn’t—it was later, because we’d been there for generations, people who came later who brought new ways and even new food with us. We never had mole, never. We didn’t know what mole was. I didn’t know what mole was until I was married. We had red chili. We had m_____. We would go to La Sirena on Temple Street and buy—and everybody else. Later, people move in, too, and they might have called it Palo—I don’t know. I always wondered about that.

ESPINO:

Yeah, that’s a really good question. Yeah, I’m going to ask a few people that are coming up in my interviews who—do you know Carol Jaques? I think that’s how you pronounce her name?

SANCHEZ:

Jaques?

ESPINO:

Jaques? Is it Jaques?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Spelled J-a—

SANCHEZ:

Q-u-e-s, Jaques.

ESPINO:

(unclear) interview, and she, I think, was a little girl in Chavez Ravine. She’s featured in the documentary. Have you seen it, the documentary?

00:43:22

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

I haven’t watched the full thing. But, yeah, that’s a really good question. But I was going to say, because you mentioned that the recent L.A. Live, which is a mega complex of shopping and entertainment that is now downtown, went downtown because of the Mexican Americans and the Latinos who are on City Council who refused—

SANCHEZ:

To go along with their taking any bigger part of, actually, Elysian Park.

ESPINO:

So do you see that as a fruit of your labor at the MAPA organization?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. I smiled. I smiled and I said, “Great.” That’s what my activism had always been about. I wanted people to go into business so we could have a good economic base to be able to support campaigns and not have to go out of the community to be able to elect our people. I wanted our people to have a voice, which is the reason for the newspaper, and in a way I wanted to preserve some of the things that we treasure. Those were my main motivations, my main reason for participating in anything. The newspaper’s been very dear to me because I’ve always wanted to be able to answer some of the criticisms against us. It started way back with the MAPA Outlook in the sixties.

ESPINO:

What role did you play in the MAPA Outlook?

SANCHEZ:

I was treasurer during one of the elections and I tried to get money. I wasn’t one of the writers, but I was one of the people who put it together, you know, who did the paste-up, the layout, and who didn’t clean house for a week. I remember my ex-husband getting upset because I was preparing the mailers, wrapping them up, rolling them up to send them out right before the election. I had a lot to do with it and I loved it.

00:45:49

ESPINO:

So the production happened from your home?

SANCHEZ:

No. No, we had a headquarters. We had a headquarters right next to the music company—can’t remember his name again—on Brooklyn. It was Brooklyn, on Brooklyn Avenue. We rented a building. We had a headquarters. We were quite active and quite daring, MAPA 40th.

ESPINO:

How did you get that much money for rent, or was the rent just so cheap that—

SANCHEZ:

The rent was cheap, and we had fundraisers where maybe twenty or thirty people showed up if we were lucky. And we sold tickets. We harangued everybody. We harangued our business owners to give us money. We sold pins. I remember we sold pins, pins to the other MAPAs and to the Democratic Clubs.

ESPINO:

That’s a lot of little tasks. I can’t imagine that happening on a daily basis, because you would have to come up with rent every single month, or would you have (unclear)?

SANCHEZ:

Well, no, we weren’t there more than a couple of months.

ESPINO:

You only rented the building for two months?

SANCHEZ:

During the campaign. After that, MAPA worked out of whoever was president’s home. In fact, I remember that Northeast (unclear) had an office and stuff (unclear). I remember Ralph Ochoa saying, “Oh, well, we all get together in a phone booth and that’s where we have our meetings.” (Laughs)

ESPINO:

Okay, so operations occurred in the home of the president, and then during an election cycle, you’d rent a space and that’s when you would do your (unclear)?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh, because that’s what we were organized for, to do campaigning.

00:48:16

ESPINO:

The MAPA Outlook, was that for the campaign or just general—

SANCHEZ:

No, it was just for the campaign. We would produce flyers. I remember that it was a big giant building like this, empty, you know. Inid Fisher (phonetic), Del Verela’s—they lived together, but I don’t know if they were married or not. But anyway, she was very active and she was very talented. She was a teacher. I remember that we would produce our own signs. We would do the silk-screening. She’d teach us how to do it. She’d give us a task, and we’d all be there silk-screening signs, so we had signs. That’s how we got things done. So there was so much activity that people liked to belong to MAPA 40th. One time we had this big argument at one of our conventions at the Alexandria Hotel as to changing MAPA’s name from Mexican American Political Association to Hispanic American—oh, there was a big—no, Latino American. And oh, my gosh, we had a free-for-all there. Then everybody decided that in order to strengthen the other chapters, that if you lived in the 38th, you had to belong to 38th MAPA. If you lived in the 43rd, you had to belong to 43rd, which incensed—because we had people in 40th, we were the original organizers. We came from all over L.A. and from all the districts, and it incensed us that they were telling us that we couldn’t do that, so there was a big walkout.

ESPINO:

Who was initiating these changes? Do you remember the people (unclear)?

SANCHEZ:

No, I don’t remember.

ESPINO:

Do you remember the year?

SANCHEZ:

I remember those who reacted against it.

00:50:35

ESPINO:

What did they say?

SANCHEZ:

“No. Absolutely not. We are the Mexican American Political Association and that’s what we’re going to stay.” And finally, I think—I don’t think there was ever a vote taken. I think there was so much commotion that I don’t think we ever took a vote, so we stayed MAPA.

ESPINO:

Would this be later on in the eighties?

SANCHEZ:

No, it was in the—

ESPINO:

Late seventies, possibly?

SANCHEZ:

No, the mid-seventies, early seventies. That was quite early.

ESPINO:

So the original MAPA 40, if your focus was on the district, why did you have people coming from many different districts into that one?

SANCHEZ:

Well, originally there wasn’t anything, so in order to form a district, where most of the activists lived was in the 40th. We all decided—I mean, we all just came to it. It wasn’t planned. That’s where the activists lived, that’s where the activity was, and so this is where everybody wanted. And this was in East L.A. and Boyle Heights, and we felt that that was our best chance. So that’s why the 40th started MAPA.

ESPINO:

Were you or your husband ever a president of the organization, or your ex-husband, your first husband?

SANCHEZ:

Never wanted to be.

ESPINO:

No?

SANCHEZ:

We were involved in business, and didn’t have the time. Supported it with money, and I worked a lot. I worked hard.

00:52:25

ESPINO:

Sounds like it, a lot of the grunt work. It’s so important (unclear).

SANCHEZ:

Which most of the women did. Not the men; the women. Well, I’m being unkind, because they worked. They had jobs, a lot of them.

ESPINO:

So would you say most of the women that you knew in MAPA were housewives?

SANCHEZ:

No, Inid Fisher was a teacher, Grace Davis was a housewife. What’s her name, Lacayo?

ESPINO:

I don’t know her name. Hank Lacayo’s wife?

SANCHEZ:

No, his sister.

ESPINO:

His sister. Oh, I didn’t know that. She was involved?

SANCHEZ:

She was active for a while. Some would come and go.

ESPINO:

Is she still alive, do you know?

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

She’s dead?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Francisca, Francisca was an active member. Let me see. Who else was an active member? There was the Medinas, there was a family, they were all very active. Josie Sanchez, who later became Josefa Sanchez, Josie and Pat, but Pat had a job. He was an aeronautical engineer.

ESPINO:

She was a housewife?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. What else was—who are some of the women? I think Lilia Aceves, but not until maybe the mid to late seventies.

00:54:06

ESPINO:

Do you remember Arce Torres, Mrs.—did she come around those meetings?

SANCHEZ:

Not that much, because Esteban kept her active with his political activities, you know, but she would come when she had a chance, you know. She would be supportive. Who else? The same with Lucille Roybal. She would be supportive, but her husband’s—you know, Ed’s constant political activity just kept her busy with that. Who else was there? I’m trying to think. Romo, Sandy Romo was one of them. She later married the guy that owned the deli there, the Jewish deli. She was Jewish. Her husband was Mexican American. Let me see. Who else?

ESPINO:

Henry Lozano, was he involved in those early—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, he was. He was, but again he had a job. I’m trying to picture—Lucy, Lucy—can’t remember her name. And then a lot of the women would come, like from the CSO, from other groups, and join us while we were in campaigns. MAPA would grow during campaigns, and then we’d have our meetings and maybe there were twenty-five of us, or twenty.

ESPINO:

So generally what was the structure of the organization? You met regularly when you weren’t in an election cycle?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

ESPINO:

And then you met more frequently when there was a—so how did that work as far as—like, how did the organization survive month to month, week to week?

SANCHEZ:

With the activists, the core group. There was a core group. A guy named Raul was an attorney. He was there on Brooklyn. There was this Jewish guy—I can’t remember his name—he and his wife were very active, the Romos. We met once a month or something and we would also socialize together. We would have little fundraisers to raise money for our little activities for Halloween or—you know, we socialized. That was our social activity.

00:57:34

ESPINO:

What would the kids do during your—

SANCHEZ:

They would come with us or they would stay home, depending, you know. They used to get bored. They didn’t like it until we had—if we had the parties and stuff like that, they would join in, but during the—I’m afraid a lot of them didn’t like politics because of that. We were so active.

ESPINO:

Yeah, it sounds like it. And it’s interesting because you talk about how your mom sometimes would put aside her family responsibilities for the union responsibilities.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. I guess we did too.

ESPINO:

Was that hard for you to make that choice? Were you thinking about it at the time?

SANCHEZ:

No. I think that I thought I was taking care of my kids. I mean, they didn’t miss meals, they had clean clothes, they had a bed to sleep on, you know, I went to their schools. But it was usually in the evenings, except for during campaigns, and then they were in school and I would go pick them up, take them home, feed them. I remember we would watch Dark Shadows together on TV and make sure their homework was done. And then someone would come in and take care of them, or my neighbor, and I would go to the meeting or to help out in—but a lot of my activity was during the day when they were in school.

00:59:15

ESPINO:

Was that intentional? Did you try to work around their schedule?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, I guess, but I don’t think it—I don’t know. That’s just the way we did then. Grace Davis was the same way, you know, those of us who had children, Lilia Aceves. Vahac Mardirosian used to come to our meetings now and then. We would get into big battles because we didn’t always agree with him, but we were very argumentative. Few people stayed around us very long.

ESPINO:

So it sounds like you had strong beliefs on how you wanted things to—

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh.

ESPINO:

Do you remember the point of contention with the reverend?

SANCHEZ:

We were too radical. He was a smoother person. He was a reverend, so he wanted to do things a lot more quietly and slowly.

ESPINO:

So things, for example, like the picket, the picket that you mentioned earlier when we first started the interview, would that be considered radical, a radical thing at the time?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yes.

ESPINO:

So it’s common today and people just kind of ignore it. It was something very—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

So did your husband support you in being on the picket line?

SANCHEZ:

He was very political, yes. It wasn’t a bone of contention between us.

01:01:08

ESPINO:

What about your mom? Did she have a perspective, considering her union activism?

SANCHEZ:

She thought it was great. She didn’t criticize us for it at all. I think she kind of bragged about it in the union, at the union meetings.

ESPINO:

What would some of the other radical things—

SANCHEZ:

Things that we would do?

ESPINO:

Yeah, or that people would consider as radical. Maybe in your mind they weren’t radical, you know, like picketing.

SANCHEZ:

Well, associating with socialists and communists, having them sometimes take part in some of our activities. I think it was Father Muretta (phonetic) who once, in a 16th of September parade, called us all a bunch of communists. We’re friends now, but—

ESPINO:

At a meeting or—

SANCHEZ:

In the parade. He was in the parade.

ESPINO:

From the parade? Where were you?

SANCHEZ:

We were in the parade too.

ESPINO:

You were in also. So what did you have, a car or—

SANCHEZ:

I don’t remember. I think we had a car. I remember we had a car because there was this man named Monroy and his girlfriend, little woman. They were very active in MAPA 40th too. What was her name? Dixie, something like that. And they were a couple. So they were very active. And then I remember that same—by then things were changing a great deal. We had been able to win a few elections. By then it was the early seventies and it was 16th of September parade. And, oh, the Muñozes, Frank Muñoz and—

01:03:40

ESPINO:

Connie?

SANCHEZ:

—Connie Muñoz. Well, Connie, not so much, but Frank. I think Connie got stuck doing the legal work. She ran the office. But Frank Muñoz was a member of MAPA 40th. Little by little, they’re coming.

ESPINO:

Yeah, that’s great.

SANCHEZ:

I’m beginning to remember. And this guy Monroy, I remember, helped us a lot when we had a campaign headquarters on Brooklyn, and he was always—there was a music store next door, the American Music Store or something, and they sold instruments and music and stuff. He was always in there. We thought he worked there. We always thought he worked there because he acted like he worked there and the people who owned the company acted like he worked there. For some reason or other, somebody outed him or somebody saw him in an LAPD uniform. I remember in that same parade, we had a car, the reason I remember we had a car, and we were riding in it. I don’t remember which ones of us. I remember that I was in it, because he came out in civilian dress, out of the music store on Brooklyn, ran after our car and said, “They’re going to kill me! They’re going to kill me! You’ve got to help me! I really wasn’t spying. I had to do that as part of my work,” or something. And we were all shocked.

ESPINO:

At the parade?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. We were all shocked. He was a spy. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

Oh, my goodness.

SANCHEZ:

He was spying on us for the LAPD, but, you know, I don’t remember any of us being afraid.

01:05:43

ESPINO:

And you don’t remember who had threatened to kill him?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t think anybody did.

ESPINO:

He was just paranoid?

SANCHEZ:

He was paranoid.

ESPINO:

Oh, jeez.

SANCHEZ:

His girlfriend kicked him out because she was a member of MAPA.

ESPINO:

Not even his girlfriend knew he was a—

SANCHEZ:

I guess not. I don’t know. I don’t remember who saw him in a police uniform somewhere.

ESPINO:

And he didn’t deny it?

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

He never denied it. And then after that you never saw him again?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, he disappeared because nobody—he couldn’t come to the meetings. And we were even more shocked to know that he didn’t work at the music store. He just hung around there. I guess they let him. They must have known, I don’t know, but we were all so shocked. He didn’t even work there.

ESPINO:

Were you surprised or was that something that you expected?

SANCHEZ:

We were shocked. No, we were—well, we expected to be spied on since HUAC came to town. We knew we were spied on. Some of the cops would tell us, the cops from Hollenbeck would tell us, you know, “We’re keeping our eye on you guys,” and they would hassle us, like they’d hang around the room. Don’t forget, it was heavily Anglo, the cops. There weren’t that many Latinos.

01:07:14

ESPINO:

That’s right.

SANCHEZ:

And the ones that were, I don’t know, I guess tried to stay in there. But they would hassle us and give us tickets if we were parked one second longer than we were supposed to. So we weren’t surprised that he was even a spy. We were surprised that he didn’t work at the music company. That was our big shock. Everybody went around like, “Can you believe it? This guy didn’t work there.”

ESPINO:

And did you know the owners of the music company?

SANCHEZ:

I didn’t personally.

ESPINO:

No one ever asked them how this happened?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know. Maybe Delfino Varela did because he knew them. (unclear). I can’t remember his last name. Pierre, I mean. Pierre something or other and his wife, they were members of the 40th and he was very active. He and the Romos were very close. But that was a complete shock to us that he was a spy. We were accustomed to it.

ESPINO:

Did he walk around with a camera? Was he taking pictures all the time?

SANCHEZ:

No, or if he was, we thought he was taking pictures for us, I don’t know, for the MAPA Outlook. I don’t remember him, though, I don’t remember him taking pictures at all. Who used to take pictures? I don’t remember anybody taking pictures.

01:09:15

ESPINO:

There are some pictures. I don’t know if you’ve been in touch with or he’s contacted you. His name is Kenneth Bert (phonetic). He writes about that period and he’s interviewed several people. He has a lot of photographs from Roybal’s campaign and the CSO. I’m not sure how much he has on MAPA.

SANCHEZ:

Because, don’t forget, we were very paranoid because we knew we were being spied on. Nobody ever signed anything and nobody gave out their phone numbers, Social Security, anything, you know.

ESPINO:

That makes sense.

SANCHEZ:

We didn’t write things down except through the Outlook or some of our meeting agendas. But we weren’t that open.

ESPINO:

Did you worry that you could be arrested?

SANCHEZ:

Sometimes, because they would arrest you. Because one day we were all talking, we didn’t pay attention and we would jaywalk, and the cops would be right on top of us. Don’t forget, Hollenbeck wasn’t too far.

ESPINO:

But that didn’t stop you from activism.

SANCHEZ:

Not at all.

ESPINO:

What about anything more severe, like death threats, that kind of thing, did that worry you?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t remember being worried. I think a lot of people would threaten us. One of the threats was that we would be excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

01:11:03

ESPINO:

That sounds serious. I mean, being excommunicated is one thing, but just the whole community against you, you know, when you have the police department and the political officials and the newspaper. You were fighting a huge—

SANCHEZ:

And also a lot of the residents. At that time, a lot of the veterans from the Second World War were still alive and they felt that we were being un-American. I remember that Frank Muñoz didn’t sleep for about a month when HUAC, when the House Un-American Activities Committee came. He thought he was going to be subpoenaed. He wasn’t, but he thought he was going to be. We felt that maybe our jobs could be in—I didn’t and Joe didn’t because we had our own business, you know, but a lot of them—eventually Pat did lose his job, Pat Sanchez, Patricio. We called him Pat.

ESPINO:

He lost his job from when the HUAC came?

SANCHEZ:

No, after that, but eventually he lost—

ESPINO:

Because of his activism?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. He was considered a security threat. But, hey, that happened to my dad because he was an alcoholic. And a lot of the members of MAPA 40th—Romo (phonetic) had a job, but I don’t remember what he did. I think his name was Tony Romo or maybe I’m thinking of Tony Romas (phonetic). I don’t remember his first name. I do remember his wife’s name. They were married. They had two little boys. His wife’s name was Sandy. She eventually married Sy (phonetic), who owned the deli there on Brooklyn and—

ESPINO:

Sy Villa?

SANCHEZ:

No, he was Jewish.

01:13:07

ESPINO:

There’s a Sy Villa. Does that name sound familiar to you?

SANCHEZ:

No, but I told you that I have a very bad memory. It’s really sad.

ESPINO:

Well, you’re giving me a lot of great details and a lot of great insight into those—

SANCHEZ:

But they were great days, actually, because we had a very active social life together. We partied together. When we went to conferences or to conventions, we stuck around together. We hung around the bar together. When one of us made a motion on the floor, we would all second it. And the politicians would come, but they were never really—George Brown was very helpful to us. He was a good guy. In those days, he was here in Los Angeles. His district was here and had moved up.

ESPINO:

Is he the one you were referring to earlier?

SANCHEZ:

Uh-huh, George Brown.

ESPINO:

George Brown, not (unclear).

SANCHEZ:

So we had fun.

ESPINO:

Was he criticized for aligning himself with you?

SANCHEZ:

Yes. He was criticized in the legislature for being too liberal. Good guy, a really good guy. I was sorry to hear when he died, even though we’d lost contact with each other.

ESPINO:

But it sounds like it was frightening as well.

SANCHEZ:

Maybe we clung together. You kind of worried about getting a ticket because you worried about being hauled off to jail just because you’d run a light or something. Those were worries, but I don’t think they were paramount in our mind. We were determined. I remember a lot of people wouldn’t associate with us because they looked at us as troublemakers. We were going to create the revolution. They expected to inherit it.

01:15:53

ESPINO:

Did you see your activism in those terms during those days, or is that you looking back?

SANCHEZ:

It’s me looking back. It’s me looking back. We were so close also that maybe, except for campaigns, we didn’t need other people. We trusted each other—well, we trusted each other, we knew each other, but one of us had been a spy, and we didn’t know he was.

ESPINO:

How did that change your activism afterwards or how did that change your relationships?

SANCHEZ:

It didn’t, because it wasn’t anything we were surprised—a little later on, Richard Calderon (phonetic) joined the group, but he really wasn’t one of the founders. Who else? Well, a lot of people joined the group later on.

ESPINO:

How long did that perception last, that perception of you being sort of untouchable, your organization? When did it stop being viewed that way? When did it start to be viewed more as a legitimate group that politicians went to, to get their endorsement?

SANCHEZ:

Probably in the seventies. Then they wanted our votes, our participation, because we had skills, you know, we had skills. We could put out a newspaper. We could silk-screen signs. We weren’t afraid to carry out voter registrations. We all became voter registrars in the early seventies. I registered voters. I was a voter registrar at the Grand Central Market in front.

01:17:49

ESPINO:

What was the process to become a voter registrar?

SANCHEZ:

You had to take a class, you had to be a registered voter, and I don’t remember if there was much more that you had to do. I guess you had to give your Social Security number, which we never did.

ESPINO:

Really?

SANCHEZ:

We were of the generation that knew that Social Security numbers were just supposed to be to report wages. The law says you’re not supposed to use a Social Security number for anything else. It was only to report wages. So I don’t think any of us really had a record. We didn’t have a police record, but we were threatened all the time. We didn’t have one. I think they would always back off because Roybal or George Brown or somebody would start haranguing and then they’d back off. They wouldn’t arrest us. So we all took the classes and then we were given an assignment of where to go. I was given the Grand Central Market on Broadway, the Broadway side. I don’t remember who was on the backside. I think we got a quarter for a registration or something.

ESPINO:

Oh, you even got paid.

SANCHEZ:

Everything went to MAPA. Everything was collected for MAPA. But our main thing was to register people in the Democratic Party, especially our people.

01:19:47

ESPINO:

So what would you say? Do you remember what you would tell people?

SANCHEZ:

I didn’t have time to say anything because in the Grand Central Market there was so much traffic that I could hardly keep up. I used to have a line.

ESPINO:

Should I pause it? (Recorder turned off)

ESPINO:

Okay, we’re back. We were talking about when it became more legitimate to get MAPA endorsement in the mid-seventies.

SANCHEZ:

Then we were courted. MAPA was courted. Every political candidate wanted to come to us because, as I said, especially local candidates, because we had the skills, we had campaign skills, we were active, we would carry on registration drives, and we would also telephone. We’d do their telephone work for them. And because of that, also our endorsement became something that people respected. I don’t know when we became respectable, but somewhere in the seventies, the transition was made that we were a respectable political organization.

ESPINO:

Do you think it was because there were more Mexican Americans, more Chicanos, Latinos, running for office in the seventies?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but also even from the greater group, black candidates, Anglo candidates, Chinese candidates. I mean, if they needed the Mexican American vote, we were a valuable endorsement. And MAPA grew. We had other chapters. We had a chapter in Northeast, we had a chapter in Southeast, and then we had conventions where actually two hundred people might show up as our activism spread, younger people.

ESPINO:

When you were registering people to vote, would you also talk to them about MAPA or would you just talk to them about the Democratic—

SANCHEZ:

We weren’t allowed to.

01:22:52

ESPINO:

You’re not allowed to. So how would you mobilize people on Election Day?

SANCHEZ:

We would telephone them. We would man the precincts, make sure that everything was on the up-and-up. We would keep track of who had voted and hadn’t, and then we’d go and try to convince them to go to vote. We would man campaign headquarters. So I think we were an asset. MAPA was an asset.

ESPINO:

How would you measure your impact? How would you prove to a politician that you could bring out the numbers? Did you have data? Did you do that kind of paperwork?

SANCHEZ:

Not really, but the numbers came out when the voting results came out. If the precincts we were working had a high turnout, the Times had no choice but to publish it. But I think it just became well known that MAPA was an important endorsement, because we didn’t just only endorse, we also supported. Like I said, we would silk-screen signs, we would leaflet, we would go door-to-door leafleting. And I don’t think that races, political races were as sophisticated as they are now. There wasn’t the kind of daily polling, the kind of money spent, the kind of statistical goings-on that there is now. (Interruption)

ESPINO:

I think it probably captured it, but anyway—

SANCHEZ:

So, like I said, MAPA became legit. I don’t know. I think it was much more fun when it wasn’t, but that’s my own perspective, because we were a really close group.

ESPINO:

Yeah, in the late sixties, mid-sixties, well, throughout the sixties you were heavily involved. It was that first original—

SANCHEZ:

Group, yeah, the core group.

01:25:52

ESPINO:

So then the Chicano Movement happens. Maybe we could talk about this next time, how that changed how MAPA evolved and what (unclear).

SANCHEZ:

And the reaction of the Mexican American Association to the word “Chicano.”

ESPINO:

Right. Right. Okay, we’ll stop it here. (End of January 3, 2014 interview)

SESSION SIX (January 17, 2014)

00:00:47

ESPINO:

This is Virginia Espino, and today is January 17th (2014). I’m interviewing Dolores Sanchez in the offices of Eastern Group Publication. Last time we talked a lot about MAPA, the Mexican American Political Association. I just want to ask you a few specific questions about your involvement. I was wondering if later on—you talked about the seventies and your advocacy for women being allowed to work for the fire department, to become firefighters. But in those early days of the Mexican American Political Association, did you advocate for specifically women’s role in politics or women’s leadership within the organization?

SANCHEZ:

No, because I think, like a lot of women, we were kind of foolish. We did the work, but it didn’t dawn on us at first that, yes, we did all the work and got none of the glory. So it wasn’t until the mid-seventies, I guess, that the women in MAPA started to react.

ESPINO:

So you didn’t have a critique of being relegated to—

SANCHEZ:

No, I think because we were activists, so as a result, we were always active and didn’t give much thought to who led, know that it was a male that was leading. We didn’t really look at it that way. We felt we needed a leader, somebody to be the front person. So I think what was bad about it was that we were accustomed to everybody kind of being quiet, not that the men were, but, you know, following—we’d discuss and we’d decide, and then the leader, the front person would take over.

ESPINO:

So in the some of the meetings, did you feel like the women and the men had equal voices in the decision-making, where the organization would go?

SANCHEZ:

Yes, I thought so.

00:02:35

ESPINO:

Because the names that you listed last time, all very strong, opinionated, verbal. Lillian Aceves, Francisca Flores, Hope Mendoza, all of those people, I can’t imagine them just sitting back and cooking.

SANCHEZ:

No. No, no, no. I think we voiced our opinions, but somehow we always expected a male would be the front leader, you know, would be the stand-up person. And I think also our generation had seen our men be so marginalized by society at times that we didn’t always see power. Power was kind of something that we felt uncomfortable with because people that used power, power in society to keep us, you know, in our place. It isn’t until now, actually in the nineties, that women started to be comfortable talking about power, powerful woman.

ESPINO:

So you think that in, say, the late fifties, early sixties—

SANCHEZ:

Even the seventies, the mid-seventies. Up until about the mid-seventies.

ESPINO:

—a powerful woman wasn’t someone who would be respected?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know that it was that—yeah, sometimes they would look on as being bitchy. I don’t know that it’s still not true.

ESPINO:

Right, that’s the big critique of Gloria Molina, that she says, “If a man says what I say, he’s being assertive and aggressive, but me, I’m that.”

00:05:24

SANCHEZ:

I guess she’s right. Even though she was of that generation that followed us, the older women, which were more accustomed—you know, in the mid-seventies, they started putting together organizations, they started to be forceful in their opinion, they started to take the lead on things, the Gloria Molina’s and Yolanda Nava’s of that generation. Corinne Sanchez. All these younger women were much more forceful than we had been. I don’t know that they did what we liked to see done at times.

I remember the argument as far as abortion was in Commisión Femenil, and I think we finally decided not to argue about it because we were never going to come to a meeting of the minds. So we would rather do things that we agreed with each other than to take on these issues. We believed what we believed. Because we had a lot of women who were beginning to be active in churches and wanting to take leadership roles in churches, but there was this thing about abortion that really didn’t sit well with them. There were a lot of nuns who left the convent who were also talented, well educated, but they had a certain belief. I can’t remember her name; she was executive director of Plaza de la Raza for a while.

ESPINO:

I don’t think it would be Lupe Anguiano.

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

She was a nun that left the order.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but she wasn’t—ai, what was her name? It’ll come to me eventually, I guess. So we had two different types of leadership. Gloria and Yolanda and they took the lead as far as sterilization was concerned at the general hospital. I think that wasn’t an easy kind of fight because costs for welfare were rising and people just felt that these women had no right to keep making babies. But they should have at least told them, “Do you want to be sterilized?”

00:07:37

ESPINO:

Did you remember hearing the discussion within Commisión Femenil? Because I think even within Commisión, there were people who, like what you’re saying regarding abortion, there were those who were—

SANCHEZ:

Not comfortable with it.

ESPINO:

—opposed to making it legal and accessible. And then I think there were some Commisión Femenil members who felt like they were doing the women a favor by providing the sterilization surgery.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Oh, yes. That’s what I meant. I think that after a while we would back off, you know, and we’d work on the things that we agreed with. None of us agreed on sterilization, so that was something they could take the lead in.

ESPINO:

What was your position, if you’re comfortable talking about it, on abortion back in those early days when Roe v. Wade and all those laws were being passed?

SANCHEZ:

You know, I am against killing of any kind. I don’t believe in capital punishment. I don’t believe in euthanizing dogs and cats, much less children. I have four children and have raised more children. Actually, I’ve had six kids that I’m raising. But I figured that to stand there and argue about something that I wasn’t going to change, that these women were adamant about, abortion, that it would be better just to work on the things that I could help change. But it hurt me. It hurt me. I didn’t like calling a child a fetus. To me it was a child and still is, so I still have that problem. But I finally figured leave it to God. We all have to answer anyway. We all have to live with our own conscience. Who am I to judge them in any way? I didn’t judge the women. I just was uncomfortable with the whole thing.

00:09:58

ESPINO:

Were you uncomfortable with the Commisión taking a position or were you uncomfortable with it being available in general, even without your activism?

SANCHEZ:

It being available. But it’s like the Marijuana Movement today. It was snowballing, and there was nothing anybody could do to change it. And I felt that we were judged as not being compassionate.

ESPINO:

I’m just thinking it was two different generations.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, well, it was very different.

ESPINO:

Were they looking at you as being old-fashioned or—

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm.

ESPINO:

And did the debate fall on those two lines, people who were from the older generation and people who were younger, or was it mixed?

SANCHEZ:

No, not at all. As I said, a lot of nuns began to leave the convent, so they still carried that anti-abortion feeling with them. So it was more generational, probably, because women, I think, also were made to feel that they had been kind of naïve and stupid in having more than one or two children. It felt like, well, we were kind of sold a bill of goods, and I think that a lot of women felt that way and they fought it be being anti-abortion, adamantly anti-abortion.

ESPINO:

Did you feel that way about your marriage and about your life—

SANCHEZ:

No.

00:11:51

ESPINO:

—at that time when everybody was questioning the role of women, when feminism was emerging?

SANCHEZ:

Well, I had a difficult time because, as I told you, I come from a family of nothing but women. In my family, if a woman didn’t do it, it wasn’t going to get done. So I felt that I was kind of different. I never felt like a slave to marriage. I had never felt like my father insisted I do certain things. My father had no daughters (sic), and I was the oldest, so I had to fill the role of a son. I had to learn the slide rule, you know, because he had no son. My problem has always been that I think too much about things. I didn’t relate to a lot of the things that the young women were saying.

ESPINO:

From your own family history.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and so I felt like, well, I guess I shouldn’t criticize because I don’t know what I’m talking about.

ESPINO:

But within your marriage, you didn’t feel like—because you did talk before about your ex-husband was—he had certain values about what the woman’s role is and whether or not she should be—what kind of woman you should marry.

SANCHEZ:

But in a way, when I married him, it was kind of too late. A lot of my nature, a lot of my personality was already formed and it may be one of the things that we would clash on. I would try to keep peace because of the children, but a lot of the things that I felt—and if we ever had arguments about things, it was mostly about that, well, I didn’t have time to vacuum today because I was helping put out the MAPA Outlook. And then I thought he had very little to criticize, even though he would, because if the kids got a bad report card, it was because I wasn’t home helping them with their homework, not him, but me. But I just—I don’t know, I always made sure my kids ate dinner. We had dinner, full-course meal, you know, dessert and everything, and I made it. But I think that was an example—I was going to say my mother, but, no, my mother didn’t cook. My dad used to do the cooking or I did the cooking, so it didn’t come from my mother. I don’t know where it came from.

00:15:06

ESPINO:

Yes, because you didn’t grow up with a traditional mother.

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

Absolutely not, a single parent, essentially.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

So how did you raise your daughters?

SANCHEZ:

And not a single—how did I raise my daughters?

ESPINO:

Did you raise them to seek marriage?

SANCHEZ:

No, I didn’t want them marrying young. I didn’t even want my sons to marry young. I always told them, “Don’t get married until you’ve done everything, every single thing you want to do in life, because once you get married, you are a slave and to your children, and that doesn’t ever end.” And I’m here to say it doesn’t ever end. So I used to tell them, “Don’t—.” My oldest son didn’t listen, but the other three did.

ESPINO:

Yeah, you told me about your oldest son last time and what a success he’s made of himself and all the children he’s had. It’s incredible. So then were you advocating for your kids, for your daughters, the same exact things for your son?

SANCHEZ:

Yes, yes. I taught my sons how to cook, how to iron their clothes, how to do a lot of things because I felt that—I said, “You might have a wife who’s lazy, you might have a wife who’s sick, you might get divorced, you might stay a bachelor, and you need to take care of your needs.” And it didn’t occur to me to tell my daughters, because we’d never done it, tell my daughters, “Iron for your brother,” or, “Serve your brother.”

00:16:54

ESPINO:

You never told your daughters to serve their brother?

SANCHEZ:

My sons didn’t grow up saying, “Oh, Gloria, get me something from the store,” or something. Gloria would turn around and kick them. In fact, I always thought they were kind of afraid of her. They wouldn’t wake her up in the morning because she’s a grouch in the morning when she gets up. And so (unclear) says, “Go wake Gloria up.” “Not me. Nuh-uh.”

ESPINO:

That’s funny. That’s an interesting contrast to some of the other people I’ve interviewed, because they did grow up in traditional homes where the daughter had these expectations to get married, even when they were being raised in the sixties, the expectations to not go to college but to get married, marry well and be someone else’s responsibility.

SANCHEZ:

I have to admit I did want them to marry well because I got tired of supporting them.

ESPINO:

Yeah, I can imagine.

SANCHEZ:

My son says, “Remember the time you told me, ‘Well, it’s as easy to love a rich woman as it is a poor one’”?

ESPINO:

What were your expectations for them, your children, when they were facing—like your daughter now, who’s facing college in the next few years?

SANCHEZ:

My expectations were that they would excel, that they would be educated and be socially educated too. I didn’t like some of their friends. They were completely morons. My children were taught when somebody came into the room, an adult or someone, they got up and they shook hands. I don’t care if it was their grandma, whoever it was, they always—and I used to see some of their friends, they just didn’t even acknowledge you when you came into the room. And so I did want them to be able to be good in public because I said, “They don’t tell you, but they can’t stand your kids if they’re either slobs or rude or temperamental. I want you to be liked. I want you to be a pleasure to be around.” So I did. I did. “And I want you to be educated. I want you to be well read.”

00:20:07

ESPINO:

Those are all very evolved and forward-thinking values, and modern. How do you negotiate—because I know that you’re a very religious person—the whole sexuality aspect of it when you have—you have a very open mind, but then what if they start dating and want to live together and are dating? I mean, is that (unclear)?

SANCHEZ:

Okay that I have to admit. My kids did not live together with anybody. They left home, the boys and the girls, to get married.

ESPINO:

Were those your values—

SANCHEZ:

I think so. I think so.

ESPINO:

—or it just happened to be that way?

SANCHEZ:

I didn’t think it was fair to children to have children without parents being married, because even then, in the seventies, there was still that thing about illegitimacy. People still kind of judged, and I guess I did too. I hadn’t lost all the—you know, I still have to remember that I was of a certain generation.

00:20:59

ESPINO:

Do you think that came from your religious background or just culturally or generationally?

SANCHEZ:

I think it was a combination. My mother was strict about us going to the library every Friday afternoon. We went to the Central Library and we checked out books and we read. We’re all voracious readers, my sisters and I, voracious readers, I mean. We gobble up books like nothing. So my children grew up with that. I love books, I love them. I hate to lend them. They’re like my children. I hate it when somebody asks, “Can I borrow this book?” “You’d better bring them back.” I give them all kinds of lectures. And then because we were a family, even my mother was an activist, at the table when we were eating, we would discuss things. We would read three newspapers a day or something. My daughters hated to bring boys home and my sons hated to bring girls home because we were too—if you said something that was funny, different, or you left yourself open with something, we’d jump on it. And she’d say, “You scare everybody away. You scare them away.” It wasn’t intentional. If you did something, like I said, and left yourself open at the dinner table—and then we would laugh, have a grand old time, and to us that was enjoyable. You know, it wasn’t mean, really, because we did it to each other too. So our dinner table was like a debate, I guess.

ESPINO:

What kind of issues would come up? Political—

SANCHEZ:

Political.

00:23:19

ESPINO:

—day-to-day?

SANCHEZ:

Day-to-day things. And I guess that’s why I’ve stayed married to John so long. When we went to buy a car, this young man, this Iranian young man who’s more Chicano than we are, he was raised in Sylmar, so he was saying something about (unclear). He’s a thin little guy. And so he says, “When they (unclear), I pump up my chest.” And Jonathan turns around, “What chest?” And that’s the kind of things that would go on. And even now, in-laws and sometimes grandchildren’s boyfriends and girlfriends have a hard time.

ESPINO:

No one escapes your wit or your husband’s wit.

SANCHEZ:

No one.

ESPINO:

So it’s not vindictive or mean.

SANCHEZ:

No, it’s fun to us.

ESPINO:

It’s razzing. Or what’s another word for it?

SANCHEZ:

You have to be quick. That’s what Gloria says. Oh, she used to get so mad, “I’m not bringing so-and-so home.” “Why?” “You’re going to scare him away.” So my children grew up with that. And they were very modern, but there were certain things that I still demanded.

00:25:13

ESPINO:

One person I interviewed, she told me a really interesting story, because she grew up very Catholic. Her family was very Catholic and her family wanted her to stay a virgin before she got married, and she wound up never getting married. She had a lot of boyfriends, and she said, “I still feel guilty to this day that I didn’t live up to those values.” So they stay with you for a long time, even if you don’t really believe them. I mean, in your case you do believe them, but some people—

SANCHEZ:

But, you know, you’re raised in Catholic schools, and one of the things is you go to confession. And I would hear some of the girls say, “Well, I didn’t tell the priest everything I did,” and I couldn’t understand that. I would say everything, and the priest usually knew who I was, would tell me, “Well, Dolores—.” Because I had a terrible temper when I was young.

ESPINO:

So that’s what you would confess, how you became angry with people?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. And since I had been raised around the cathedral, I knew all the priests and all the priests knew my voice. I remember one of them, he’s dead now, but he says, “Okay, so now you’re going to go out there and you’re going to say a thousand Hail Marys. You’re going to kneel in the church and you’re going to say a thousand Hail Marys because you could have killed that boy.” Because I got mad—he became my dear friend. We knew each other from the time we were in third grade until he died, and I got so upset with him, I threw a trash can at him.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

So I remember I had to say a thousand Hail Marys. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

But you were a child, though, right?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, I was about eleven. And little by little, though, I got to—no, when we first joined MAPA, I would lose my temper at certain things.

ESPINO:

But would you throw things?

SANCHEZ:

No. I don’t like people who throw things. That was the only time I threw something. I can’t stand people who kick doors or slam doors or throw things. It irritates me. I don’t mind if you lose your temper.

00:27:24

ESPINO:

But I’m sure you’ve witnessed that in your political life and working here.

SANCHEZ:

Delfino Varela and Larry, Larry Romo (phonetic), would get into these terrible arguments. And the first time that I saw them get into this argument, they went into Delfino’s—we were having a Halloween party, I still remember. It was, oh, early seventies, maybe, 1970s. They went into the bedroom and closed the door, and I could hear banging. Oh, and I was so upset, and then finally, I think it was Frank Muñoz, he says, “Oh, don’t worry. They’re just kicking the door. They’re just acting like they’re hitting things.” But it just made me nervous. And they came out. Sure, they were unscathed. It was just this big political argument that they would get into.

ESPINO:

They wouldn’t hit each other, they would just hit, like, the table or the wall?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

How fascinating. And they knew enough to go into a room and do it in private too.

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm. Well, you could hear everything they were saying.

ESPINO:

You don’t remember what it was about, though?

SANCHEZ:

Don’t have the slightest idea. And there might have been, like, thirty of us. Larry Ramirez was there.

ESPINO:

And this was a Halloween party for MAPA?

SANCHEZ:

MAPA 40th. We were raising funds. I don’t know how much we raised in funds because there might have been fifty of us and we charged a dollar or something. (Laughs)

00:29:07

ESPINO:

Was it at your house?

SANCHEZ:

No, it was at Delfino Varela’s house. We’d have them at my house too.

ESPINO:

Did he have a big house?

SANCHEZ:

Three-bedroom house. I don’t even remember where it was, somewhere in East L.A., but I don’t remember where.

ESPINO:

Boyle Heights or—

SANCHEZ:

Boyle Heights somewhere.

ESPINO:

And that’s when he was living with Inid Fisher? And that was in the seventies.

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm.

ESPINO:

And that’s when he had One Stop Immigration?

SANCHEZ:

I guess it was. Yeah, he had an office on Soto and—

ESPINO:

Boyle?

SANCHEZ:

No. It was on Soto and—

ESPINO:

Near the International Institute?

SANCHEZ:

Right on Soto and Brooklyn.

ESPINO:

Lilia Aceves worked for him for many years.

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm.

ESPINO:

It’s unfortunate no one ever interviewed him before he passed.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, he was a remarkable guy.

ESPINO:

I’ll bet.

SANCHEZ:

He was.

ESPINO:

Controversial.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but remarkable. He had terrible eyesight.

00:30:26

ESPINO:

Oh, I didn’t know that.

SANCHEZ:

No, he couldn’t see and so he used to wear these thick, thick lenses and had to read with things like this.

ESPINO:

Oh, wow.

SANCHEZ:

So the fact that he got things done was really remarkable.

ESPINO:

And he was really on the forefront of immigrant rights.

SANCHEZ:

Yes, he was.

ESPINO:

He’s one of the pioneers for immigrant rights.

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm.

ESPINO:

Did MAPA deal with immigrant rights in that period, in the seventies? Was that one of the issues that they wanted to put forth?

SANCHEZ:

No, because I don’t think there was the anti-immigrant—I was going to say feeling, but it wasn’t that public. People were a little more careful about what they said. I remember we had a terrible argument over the word “Chicano.”

ESPINO:

Yeah, you told me a little bit about that last time, and I was going to ask you about it, if you had any more details about—because I was wondering if it was a generational thing, if it was the younger generation—

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

Excuse me. You said that people wanted to change the name to (unclear).

SANCHEZ:

MAPA.

00:31:56

ESPINO:

MAPA. So you’re talking about something different, an argument over the word “Chicano.”

SANCHEZ:

But when the word “Chicano” started to be used frequently, Delfino was one of them. He didn’t like that word. They said it came from “chicanery,” but my mother claimed that it came from the word “Mexica” or “Mexicano”. Because I remembered whenever there was a wedding or something and they sent a letter, like from Arizona over here, they would use it in Spanish. They wouldn’t use it in English when they were writing. (Spanish phrase). So it wasn’t a word that I hadn’t heard, but they take great offense at it.

ESPINO:

You don’t remember growing up with that term being offensive? Because you did come from Arizona, but people who—it’s interesting because there are so many different stories about that word. Some people grew up with it being used all the time, and other people said, “Oh, no, we never called—my mother refused to call us that.”

SANCHEZ:

Well, like I said, we only used it when we were speaking in Spanish.

ESPINO:

But it didn’t have a derogatory—

SANCHEZ:

No, not as far as we were concerned.

ESPINO:

So where did you stand on the use of that term?

00:34:27

SANCHEZ:

It wasn’t offensive to me at all. I remember saying, “Well, what’s the big deal?” I mean, they would have arguments about it. Especially, like I told you, we socialized with each other. We were very close. That was our social life. We didn’t have an outside life unless, you know, with our families, but we really didn’t socialize anywhere else but with each other. We’d go to conventions together. We would do everything together. But some of them started to take great offense. I don’t remember exactly when, but there really was a reaction against it. I didn’t care. I said, “It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t find it offensive. I don’t find it offensive at all.”

ESPINO:

When I interviewed Julian Nava, he said, “I didn’t like it, didn’t like the word. I didn’t want to use it. But the students, the numbers overwhelmed me, and I had to change. I had to embrace it.” And I think even Rudy Acuña said he wasn’t a huge fan.

SANCHEZ:

No, he didn’t like it.

ESPINO:

You remember?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. But the young people were using it. I’d heard it all my life. It didn’t matter to me. I felt that if they were comfortable with—it’s like the word “Hispanic” and “Latino,” when it first—I don’t care.

ESPINO:

That doesn’t bother you either?

SANCHEZ:

That doesn’t bother me either.

ESPINO:

What do you use in the paper?

SANCHEZ:

We use “Latino” now because we got tired of—it was a battle we lost. “Hispanic” wasn’t offensive to us, but it was offensive to our readers and stuff too. So, rather than argue, and as I told you, I guess I would have been a good politician because I know how to pick my battles, and it was a battle we lost. I didn’t like “Latino” because the three Franks at the Times were pushing it, and the Times was not my favorite entity. So I just felt that the Times was forcing us to use the word “Latino,” that they were brainwashing us. To me it was like a word that was used in the forties, like Desi Arnaz was a Latin bandleader, Fernando Lamas was a Latin lover. So to me, Latino wasn’t any better, maybe a little bit worse. “Hispanic,” to me, was a new word. But because the Times and their people held a lot of sway over—even if we didn’t like to admit it.

00:36:50

ESPINO:

When did you first develop your critique of the Los Angeles Times?

SANCHEZ:

I was a teenager during the fights, during the Sleepy Lagoon—don’t forget, I was alive in those days, during the Sleepy Lagoon trial and the way the Times talked about us, the degrading or the way they tried to degrade the people on Bunker Hill. We were all “slum dwellers.” So I’ve never, never liked the L.A. Times. They’re a lot better now, but, I mean, they were—it was just not something I would—

ESPINO:

Did you read it?

SANCHEZ:

I told you we read everything. My dad and my mom were readers. We read the Mirror, the Examiner, we read the L.A. Times.

ESPINO:

I know they weren’t hugely expensive, but that’s a lot of money to put out for a working-class family to buy all those papers on a regular basis. A lot of people I interview, they say, “We didn’t read the Times.” The Examiner was the paper of choice.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Probably for the reasons that you’re saying. But you had the L.A. Times in your home. Wow. And last time you talked about their support of the Dodger Stadium and then their support of Bunker Hill.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, I just—

00:38:37

ESPINO:

So when Ruben Salazar came on the scene, did that strike you as something new and different?

SANCHEZ:

It struck me as a way to try to coopt. I thought Ruben Salazar was a good guy, and so was Frank Del Olmo through all the years. I just felt that they wanted to be the opinion-makers in Los Angeles, and whatever it took, they would do. If they’re all of a sudden a large, like they said, Latino population, well, they were going to decide what we were going to think. They were going to hire these guys. These guys—come on. We all know that a newspaper owner has a lot of power over his or her employees.

ESPINO:

So even then you saw that they had very little influence over what they really reported?

SANCHEZ:

That’s what I thought. I don’t know.

ESPINO:

Did you ever write letters to the L.A. Times?

SANCHEZ:

No, because I refused to give them another reader. I refused to acknowledge that they had any influence over our community.

ESPINO:

Do you think they did?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. I think they made a lot of their headlines and stuff. For instance, in the Sleepy Lagoon, in the Zoot Suit Riots during the—I think they had a lot of influence on the people that read them. I think that a lot of our people were embarrassed. A couple of my uncles were.

ESPINO:

Embarrassed?

SANCHEZ:

And so I just felt that they had influence, a lot of influence, because they painted a picture of Mexicans and Mexican Americans that wasn’t flattering, and so you would do everything not to be like that. And it would embarrass you.

00:41:25

ESPINO:

Did you have a chance to meet Ruben Salazar?

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

You never did?

SANCHEZ:

I never did.

ESPINO:

Did you read his stories?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

So you did read them.

SANCHEZ:

Because I can’t help myself. I’ll read everything.

ESPINO:

You’re a news junkie.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Well, no, I’m a—I will read all the billboards, everything. It’s just one of those things that—that’s me. And maybe my opinions have been formed, too, influenced by things that I’ve read. I don’t know. Probably have.

ESPINO:

So when he came on the scene, you didn’t feel like, wow, here’s somebody who understands our community? Here’s somebody who could—

SANCHEZ:

As I said, I thought he was a good guy and I understood his writing, but I knew or maybe I talked myself into believing, because it was the Times, that even what he was saying was something that had to be approved by them, that he would be edited if he wrote something that they didn’t like.

ESPINO:

Did you ever try to get their attention—

SANCHEZ:

No, because I didn’t want to—

00:42:49

ESPINO:

(unclear) or, you know, for MAPA or for your activism or—

SANCHEZ:

Because I just did not want to legitimize them. The first thing I did after I had my own home, I never gave the Times another subscriber. It used to drive me nuts. I would read them, but I’d read them off the stand or something. I didn’t want them to have a subscriber.

ESPINO:

How about the other dailies, like the Examiner?

SANCHEZ:

I liked the Examiner.

ESPINO:

You were a fan of the Examiner?

SANCHEZ:

I remember it. I even, like I said, read the Mirror, but I didn’t subscribe to them. I subscribed to the Examiner. But the others, no.

ESPINO:

What about the Eastside Sun? Would you get that to your home?

SANCHEZ:

No, it wasn’t home-delivered, but you could buy it in the stands in Boyle Heights only, really, and Joe Cubner (phonetic) would go around leaving copies everywhere.

ESPINO:

He would hand-deliver? Wow. When did you first meet him? Do you remember when you first met him?

SANCHEZ:

Gosh, I don’t. Maybe when they moved from the Civic Center to Boyle Heights because originally the paper started in the Civic Center downtown.

ESPINO:

But did you meet him through your activist work?

SANCHEZ:

Yes, yes, yes.

ESPINO:

What was your impression of him?

SANCHEZ:

I liked him. I think he meant well. I think he really tried to cover community news. I think he fought a losing battle because the people here in Highland Park, the Northeast Newspapers were too strong, and I felt that the Northeast papers were racist. The Highland Park Journal was extremely racist.

00:45:10

ESPINO:

Even more so than the L.A. Times?

SANCHEZ:

About the same. Al Diaz was a good guy, but I felt he worked for the wrong company. And we were friends. Al Diaz and I were friends.

ESPINO:

From back in the early days?

SANCHEZ:

Well, from when he was working for the—what was it—the Eastside Journal, I even had dinner with Orin (phonetic) (unclear), the guy that owns Northeast Newspapers because he calmed down quite a bit later on. But he was one of the people that was among some Chicanas and Chicanos who were determined that the paper was not going to be a success, that we were not going to be a success because they were so enamored of Al Diaz.

ESPINO:

What was it about him? Was he just very charming or—

SANCHEZ:

He had covered community news somewhat and covered them, and also it led to the divorce of a couple who had—they looked on it as a community asset. I don’t think they ever looked at us as human beings. And also a lot of—because they felt that my ex-husband had kept a lot of our assets, that he became the asset, not me, and the newspapers. So it was tough when we first started here.

ESPINO:

I bet.

SANCHEZ:

1979 was a really tough (unclear).

00:47:32

ESPINO:

Well, I was going to ask you before we go into that, because—well, I guess that’s not really appropriate yet because we were talking about your values and religion. And then I was going to ask you about how you reconciled divorce within those Catholic values, if that was even an issue. But that happened after 1979, so maybe we’ll—

SANCHEZ:

And then my mother was divorced. My father was an alcoholic, and she just couldn’t handle it anymore.

ESPINO:

So it was an acceptable thing that you—you didn’t grow up with—most people from your generation grew up with no divorce.

SANCHEZ:

Oh, in my father’s family, there were no divorces. My mom and dad weren’t divorced until after my grandparents died, his father and mother.

ESPINO:

Wow. They couldn’t tell him?

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

And mind you, they weren’t that religious. Well, my dad was. My dad was.

ESPINO:

Yeah, well, he was in the Knights of Columbus, you said.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, my dad was. My dad was, yeah.

ESPINO:

So then you grew up with a whole different way of looking at that because of your mom’s divorce. Well, before we go into 1979 when you start at the paper—I’m going to write that down.

SANCHEZ:

Well, actually, I didn’t start the paper until after I had been—I was kind of a member of Commisión, but I worked in our business, so I didn’t have that much time. I really took a much more active role in the Chicana Center.

ESPINO:

When? In 1979?

00:49:06

SANCHEZ:

Oh, no, in 1975. Yeah, ’74, ’75.

ESPINO:

We didn’t talk about some of the activism of the late sixties, like, for example, the walkouts. Do you have any memories of that political activism?

SANCHEZ:

Yes, I do remember. I agreed with it. I just felt that we might be giving mixed messages. I understand the kids were tired and they wanted out. They wanted things to change and so they walked out, and yet I hated to see them leave class, leave school. So I was kind of torn then, not because I didn’t agree with everything they were complaining about, because they had every reason to do it. I thought Sal Castro was very brave. I knew the Times was going to crucify him.

ESPINO:

When did you meet him? Do you remember first meeting him?

SANCHEZ:

No, I don’t remember when I first met him.

ESPINO:

So it was after the walkouts?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, it was after the walkouts.

ESPINO:

Were you surprised, or was it something you were expecting?

SANCHEZ:

We were expecting it because actually, in our community, nothing’s a secret. We’re like a small town, the Mexican American, Latino community. Everybody knows everything, I think. It’s like a family or a small town. We may not say everything because we’re kind of used to—I remember my grandma would go, “Zip up your mouth. Don’t—.” But, yeah, we were expecting it. We just didn’t know exactly what the day would be, but it was something that was just boiling and boiling and the pot was going to boil over.

00:51:26

ESPINO:

Do you remember how you first heard about it?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, telephone. (unclear) called me, “They’re out. They’re out. The kids are out.” And I immediately turned on Channel 5, I still remember, Channel 5, KTLA, because I felt like they were always on top of everything. And they showed the kids and stuff and Sal. I (unclear), but I was in business at the time and so I didn’t have that much—my whole involvement was—my whole focus was Chicana Center.

ESPINO:

Well, even in ’68? Because this will be ’68, 1968 when the walkouts—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, I get my years—no, then what was my—oh, MAPA, (unclear) MAPA was—and for the most part, MAPA were adults, you know, which is unfortunate, when I think about it.

ESPINO:

And then your kids were in private school.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

They weren’t in the public school system.

SANCHEZ:

No, no, because I felt that they were going to get a better education. I was only too aware of the stuff that went on in the schools. I was going to save some kids, if I could.

ESPINO:

Did you have any role in, say, helping post bail or go to any of those meetings they had down at the Board of Education, parent meetings?

SANCHEZ:

I went to the meetings, but they were so long.

ESPINO:

They were? (Laughs)

SANCHEZ:

I had to get back to work or I had to get back to my children. They just went on and on and on, and I couldn’t stay that long.

00:53:33

ESPINO:

Could you identify anyone who was taking on a leadership role besides Sal Castro? Does anybody come to mind as far as—

SANCHEZ:

Al Juarez.

ESPINO:

Oh, really?

SANCHEZ:

I can’t remember who else.

ESPINO:

There’s a lot of pictures now that were donated recently to UCLA Library that help people remember who was there and who was in the audience, and it’s incredible.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Because when you’ve led a life of activism, you kind of sometimes confuse the dates and the things and people.

ESPINO:

Right.

SANCHEZ:

You really do.

ESPINO:

I’m sure, uh-huh. And then some of the names are common. But it could be opposite, like they would have the same first name but a different last name or the same last name but a different—yeah, that’s interesting.

SANCHEZ:

Or with me, you know, the thing that I regret the most is I have a terrible memory for names and dates.

ESPINO:

And specifics.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

00:54:53

ESPINO:

Well, those things can be filled in with research and other people’s interviews. But last time you mentioned that you had some interaction with the Reverend Vahac Mardirosian, who did take on a leadership role with the walkouts.

SANCHEZ:

Yes, he did.

ESPINO:

Was it around that time or was it—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, it was around that time that I got to know him, and actually it wasn’t because of the walkouts. It was—you mentioned him, the guy that was on the Board of Education. What was his name?

ESPINO:

Julian Nava?

SANCHEZ:

Julian Nava, through his family, Lucy Hernandez and them that I really got to know Vahac. But Vahac didn’t always—or maybe backwards; I didn’t always agree with Vahac.

ESPINO:

Would it be on specific educational issues or other things that you didn’t agree?

SANCHEZ:

Specific educational issues and the criticism of people who—you know, you’re formed a lot by your surroundings, the environment, and sometimes I thought he was a little hard on people, that he didn’t understand. He grew up in this religious—with Julian Nava and his sisters and stuff, so I felt that sometimes he was too critical of certain people, of some of the people who lost their temper, threw things, argued. I think he felt like they weren’t educated enough, and it kind of got to me.

ESPINO:

Like a snobbery?

SANCHEZ:

Sort of, yeah.

ESPINO:

Or an elitism?

SANCHEZ:

An elitism, maybe.

00:56:51

ESPINO:

Because there were definitely people rough around the edges, especially when you’re looking at some of the Brown Beret members and—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I felt that he was too critical, I guess.

ESPINO:

Like he didn’t have tolerance for—

SANCHEZ:

Nuh-uh.

ESPINO:

How do you think he mobilized—how do you think he was able to win—I think he became, what, the first president of the EICC?

SANCHEZ:

I think one of them was the title, the Reverend Mardirosian, his ability to be very articulate in two languages. And I don’t criticize his intentions. You know, I think he played a role. His institute there on—what was it on? Brooklyn, First Street (unclear)?

ESPINO:

Something like that.

SANCHEZ:

They did a lot of good. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a personal thing. I don’t know. I liked him. We got along well together. I just felt he was too strict.

ESPINO:

Well, I know that he was not in support of taking over the Board of Education and getting arrested.

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

Were you there at the meetings where they decided that?

SANCHEZ:

No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t. Like I said, I only had this much time. Then I had to worry about my family and I had worked in our business, so it was kind of hard at times. People like Vahac that was their occupation. They had all the time in the world. That was what they did. Do you know what I mean?

00:58:56

ESPINO:

Yes.

SANCHEZ:

And some of us didn’t have that luxury.

ESPINO:

Right, especially with kids growing up, school, and your responsibilities with your business. But, I mean, I have to ask you because just see if there’s anything that comes to mind. But it is true—oh, let me try to remember. There were two organizations. There was yours, the Mexican American Political Association, and then there was the Congress of Mexican American Unity. Did you have any involvement in the Congress?

SANCHEZ:

Very little, very little, because Congress was older than MAPA. The Congress had been around a lot longer.

ESPINO:

With Bert Corona.

SANCHEZ:

With Bert and stuff. I knew him, you know. I worked with him. I liked him.

ESPINO:

But you never got involved with that?

SANCHEZ:

Not too much, not too much, but simply because then my kids were very little.

ESPINO:

I see.

SANCHEZ:

But Bert and I were great friends from the first day we met, and I don’t remember where we met, because what I said, my bad memory. But we were great friends.

ESPINO:

What did you think of him?

SANCHEZ:

I loved him.

01:00:16

ESPINO:

What was your impression of him?

SANCHEZ:

I thought he was a wild man. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

Oh, really? You see all those pictures, and he was—

SANCHEZ:

Bigger than life.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

And had a way of dealing with people that won them over.

ESPINO:

Even people who had a different—because he was very opinionated—

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

—and very—

SANCHEZ:

And controversial, too, at times.

ESPINO:

Absolutely.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, because he was opinionated and he would voice his opinion, but then he would smile and, I don’t know, had a way around people.

ESPINO:

You never saw him lose his temper?

SANCHEZ:

Yes, but it didn’t last. It was one of those, like (demonstrates), and then it was gone. I heard a lot of people criticize him sometimes because he had this Mercedes that he didn’t always drive, but he would be criticized when he did. We were very critical, you know, just because we didn’t have one.

ESPINO:

It was not okay to display any sort of materialistic—

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

—wealth or desire to have—

01:01:41

SANCHEZ:

You needed to drive a Chevy or something.

ESPINO:

—an old and beat-up—wow.

SANCHEZ:

He was the only one who had a jukebox and he would lend it to all these groups so we could have fundraiser. We couldn’t afford a band. (Laughs) And he would come in and talk and get along. And I guess I didn’t disagree with a lot of things he thought because I always felt like we were great friends. We got along really well.

ESPINO:

Did you know his wife?

SANCHEZ:

Yes, I knew her, but not as well as I knew Bert.

ESPINO:

She wouldn’t come around to the meetings and protests and things like that?

SANCHEZ:

Rarely, rarely. She was probably doing what a lot of women were, holding down the fort.

ESPINO:

Right.

SANCHEZ:

But she was a nice woman. And I think in those days also, not Del Varela, but some of the men who married—because they’d met them in college, you know, married Anglo women, weren’t at ease bringing their Anglo wives around.

ESPINO:

Did they have reason to feel that way? Would they be criticized?

SANCHEZ:

Some people. But people will criticize everything, and others, we didn’t care. I didn’t care.

ESPINO:

Well, the activists from the Chicano Movement period, the generation after your generation, they would say things like they didn’t have respect for those who—what did they say—“talk brown, sleep white,” something like that was a term that was—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah. Richard Alatorre would not bring his wife around all the time. She couldn’t understand it, his second wife. She said, “He won’t even hold hands. Why is he like that?” Because they’d heard these and they felt they would be criticized.

01:04:09

ESPINO:

What was your view of that? Did you have an opinion?

SANCHEZ:

No. I didn’t care. My mother’s mother was named Overton. She married a gringo. Maybe that’s it. I don’t know. I just didn’t care. Inid and I were good friends, Inid Fisher.

ESPINO:

Yeah, it’s interesting. I think you had a real different upbringing. Your diverse upbringing allowed you to be very open-minded about a lot of those things. And I also feel like, in doing these interviews, that there is this desire to present Chicanos and Mexican Americans as working on their own for liberation, but there were a lot of coalitions that were—

SANCHEZ:

A lot of coalitions.

ESPINO:

—formed, and interethnic and white folks played a huge role—

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm.

ESPINO:

—and sometimes as spouses.

SANCHEZ:

And they had a lot of skills that we needed, you know. Like I said, Inid Fisher taught us how to do silk-screening. She would help us do the silk-screens for our campaigns and stuff. But I know there was—and maybe even today there are criticisms. I don’t know.

ESPINO:

There’s another person who was instrumental, Ruth Robinson Rivera. Her name is Rivera now, but it wasn’t at the time. And in the La Raza newspaper, like she did all the grunt work that you were talking about you did for the MAPA Outlook, as far as laying it out. So I think that’s—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, the farm workers. A lot of people who lent their talents to the farm workers were either Jewish or some other—

01:06:16

ESPINO:

Right, Paul Schrade and the UAW. I don’t know if you remember him, United Auto Workers.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. And I guess in the seventies is when I began to be involved again and take notice of the farm workers, of the UFW. And then they began to pick up strength and—

ESPINO:

The grape boycott?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, the boycott. First it was lettuce, wasn’t it? First it was the lettuce boycott.

ESPINO:

It was lettuce before the grapes?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and then it was grapes.

ESPINO:

That was the big, popular one, though, I think. The grape boycott was the one that really—

SANCHEZ:

That was the big one because it went nationwide.

ESPINO:

Well, I was going to ask you before we get off the topic about Julian Nava, because I couldn’t remember if it was the Congress of Mexican American Unity or it was MAPA who endorsed him for Board of Education.

SANCHEZ:

Both.

ESPINO:

It was both?

SANCHEZ:

It was both. It was both who did, because we felt we really needed—I mean, we didn’t have a lot of people with doctorates.

01:07:28

ESPINO:

What was your impression of him?

SANCHEZ:

Well, I knew him before he was endorsed and ran for school board. We got along. He was into academia a lot and really wasn’t—and maybe that’s why he was endorsed in the nitty-gritty of the organizing and the activist movements. He hadn’t been arrested, photographed, you know, all these things.

ESPINO:

He was clean?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Wow. So you thought about those things at that time, whether or not they were clean?

SANCHEZ:

Maybe we never thought enough about it because we’d get into trouble with some of the people we backed. And he had a doctorate in education, so he seemed to fit the mold.

ESPINO:

He had credentials—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

—the right credentials. So he was clean—

SANCHEZ:

And he was articulate, not—

ESPINO:

He didn’t come off as pretentious or—

SANCHEZ:

No, I don’t—

ESPINO:

—inaccessible to community?

SANCHEZ:

Not before. I think there was criticism of him after, but not before. And his family and the (unclear) family, they were all from that somewhat Protestant religious group of people. You know, his brother-in-law was a reverend, Tony Hernandez. So he seemed to us to be a person who would fit well and be able to have the credentials to be able to argue a point on our behalf.

01:09:38

ESPINO:

What about his backbone?

SANCHEZ:

His backbone. Well, before he was elected, he seemed to have a backbone, you know. He was vocal. But as I said, not of that group of activists that were known as rabble-rousers.

ESPINO:

Well, how would you compare your politics to Julian Nava’s politics?

SANCHEZ:

I thought he was a little more conservative than I was. He would come to MAPA conventions and things, but he wasn’t really what you would consider part of the organization. Kind of like a visitor.

ESPINO:

So how do you feel he handled the whole walkout situation and the question of the educational crisis for Chicanos in East Los Angeles?

SANCHEZ:

I think he handled it as best he could. I think we forget he was only one of seven votes and it must have been kind of a lonely place. I think after a while he got kind of—not coopted, but engulfed in that world, where he kind of lost a lot of contact with the community, started publishing books and all these things, and maybe got a little lost.

ESPINO:

Do you think anything changed from that activism, from the walkouts, from putting him in office?

01:12:56

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, I think it sets precedents. The world didn’t fall apart when Julian Nava was elected to the school board. Los Angeles didn’t become a hellhole, Los Angeles County, when Gloria was elected to supervisor, when Roybal went on the City Council. So they set precedents, and every little bit of precedent that’s set makes it a little bit easier, because those were hard times. Our numbers were not overwhelming. A lot of the things we did was work. It was scary to think you might lose your job, and it’s really hard to walk out.

I remember once when I said something that was unpopular on the Status of Women Commission in city government. I had to walk out. What was it about? I don’t even remember what it was about, but I walked out by myself, and everybody kind of went to the side. They were all talking together, and it was like I wasn’t there. I think it happened to Joe Sanchez too. On the commission, he would walk out alone, and I think it happened to Julian. It’s not an easy kind of thing. On the Status of Women Commission they had a ten-year anniversary. I was one of the presidents. They never invited me.

ESPINO:

Do you know why specifically?

SANCHEZ:

No. It’s just that it was these heavy-duties from the Westside who took over, and they had their own world, I guess.

ESPINO:

It’s interesting because when you talk to people about how they felt back then, it’s very different from the way they look at it now. Like the Chicano Movement’s critique of Edward Roybal, they were very critical of him at the time—

SANCHEZ:

I know.

ESPINO:

—but now they talk about him and they say, “I wish we would have known this or seen it this way because he was a pioneer and he did these things.”

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and it’s hard to be a pioneer. It’s one of the hardest things in the world.

01:14:48

ESPINO:

You mean the first one to challenge the status quo?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. It’s a very lonely world. Now, Gloria Molina, to a great extent, and Art and Richard have been in that position too. It was hard for me, as a Chicana coming from Los Angeles, to be the only member in a commission with all these people who had been activists and had a background in government, to try to hold my own—

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

—and the only one from the West Coast. It was very difficult. You say things that the group doesn’t understand.

ESPINO:

They’re talking the same language to each other, and then you’re talking a language that you grew up with, that your experience on Eastside politics, which is different.

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm.

ESPINO:

What year were you the president or what year were you on that commission? Was that under Carter administration?

01:16:45

SANCHEZ:

Yes, ’76, ’75, ’76, and it was very difficult. I remember one of the things that used to bug me was when we’d be having discussions and then we’d say, “Well, you know, a lot of people say this.” And I used to say, “Who are the lot of people?” Or, “Some say that.” I said, “Who? Who says that?” And they were well intentioned, but sometimes they just didn’t—it was drawing their attention away from what they were saying.

ESPINO:

I just said what important role, why it’s played in all activism from Roybal to today, but the critique is that sometimes they’ll take over leadership because they assume they know better than people of color, whether it’s African American activists or Chicano activists.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Is that what you experienced on the commission, that they felt—

SANCHEZ:

At first, yes, I did. They all knew each other and had worked with each other. I was like an outsider coming in.

ESPINO:

What was your role on the commission?

SANCHEZ:

It wasn’t the commission; it was the first assessment of Social Security and the unemployment compensation program. They were founded in 1936, and it was the first real examination and what the future would be. And the Railroad Retirement Act. Well, I knew a lot of people that worked on the railroad and I knew a lot about the Railroad Retirement Act. Working with the Chicana Center, we kind of were Manpower people. We’re worried about getting people jobs and things like that.

ESPINO:

Job training.

SANCHEZ:

Job training and stuff.

ESPINO:

With the War on Poverty?

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm. But their experience had been at a different level. They weren’t down with the troops on the front lines, except for Sullivan, who was with the UAW. And I had a long experience through Larry Ramirez, through a lot of people with the UAW, so we understood each other.

01:18:49

ESPINO:

Was she a white woman?

SANCHEZ:

No, a man. He was from Boston.

ESPINO:

So the commission isn’t called the Status on the—

SANCHEZ:

No, that was Los Angeles. I was appointed to that by Tom Bradley.

ESPINO:

So what are we talking about right now then?

SANCHEZ:

I was appointed, and Gloria Molina had a lot to do with it, to the National Commission on Unemployment Compensation.

ESPINO:

Oh, okay. So in that commission, you were with men and women, not just (unclear).

SANCHEZ:

There were three women on the commission—

ESPINO:

Wow. Not very many.

SANCHEZ:

—and there were thirteen commissioners. All the rest were men.

ESPINO:

So you’re outnumbered by ethnicity and gender.

SANCHEZ:

I was the only Latina. I was the only one.

ESPINO:

Okay, so we jumped ahead a little bit. So in 1976, you were appointed to a commission on—can you repeat what that—

SANCHEZ:

Unemployment Compensation and the Railroad Retirement Act.

ESPINO:

And in ’75, that was—

SANCHEZ:

Appointed by Bradley to the Status of Women in City Government Commission. That was the city.

01:20:16

ESPINO:

That was just local.

SANCHEZ:

That was local.

ESPINO:

That wasn’t even state. It was just L.A. County. Or was it just L.A. City?

SANCHEZ:

L.A. City.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

And then later on when I left the commission, I was appointed by Jerry Brown to—I can’t even remember that. At the time we were changing from CETA to—can’t remember what the program was. The federal government had started changing from CETA to another Manpower program, and I don’t remember what it was. And Jerry Brown named me to head the committee that would study ways to transition from CETA to—I can’t remember the name.

ESPINO:

It’s healthcare, right, CETA?

SANCHEZ:

No, it was a Manpower program.

ESPINO:

Why does that sound familiar to me? What did it stand for?

SANCHEZ:

I can’t remember that right now.

ESPINO:

Is it C-E-D-A?

SANCHEZ:

No, C-E-T-A. It was all the work programs and stuff, and Jerry appointed a committee to—he had a fund to use those funds to help change from CETA to the other Manpower program, and I can’t remember what it was. It’ll come to me. And so I chaired that committee right after I left the commission.

ESPINO:

And how long were you on the commission?

SANCHEZ:

I was on the commission for two and a half years, and Jerry’s committee, about two years, and I was on the Commission on City Government for two years. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

01:22:40

ESPINO:

Did you ever want to run for office?

SANCHEZ:

I figured if I ever ran for office, I would run for supervisor, but I really don’t think I had the kind of energy that it takes. I was much older, you know. I’m much older than Molina and all these people.

ESPINO:

Well, Jerry Brown’s thinking about running for president. (Laughs)

SANCHEZ:

I know. What can I say? He’s a character. We kind of lost contact. Once he got married, I don’t think his wife and I — our personalities don’t mesh. He’s become a different person, as far as I’m concerned.

ESPINO:

Are you pleased with how he’s—

SANCHEZ:

I’m pleased with what he’s doing, but mostly pleased. I’m never going to be completely pleased with anything.

ESPINO:

Right, because you’re a change maker. (Laughs) So you can see the holes. You try to fix it, huh?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. But I think he’s done a good job. I think he’s too old to run for president. I think he’s crazy to run for president. I thought he was crazy to run for governor again.

ESPINO:

Right. I didn’t think he was going to be able to pull it off. I’m pretty impressed.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

01:24:20

ESPINO:

But going back to the MAPA days and—okay, so we talked about your endorsement of Julian Nava. Were you happy with the candidates that you were endorsing? Who would be your ideal candidate? What kind of personality would they have? I mean, was Julian Nava your ideal candidate?

SANCHEZ:

No, but he was a candidate that—I don’t think I had an ideal candidate. It all depended. To me, Ed Roybal was the ideal candidate to go into the City Council, the first one, because in those days he was extremely daring. I thought he was the ideal candidate for the Congress. I was the only one sitting in the galleries when they took him up on that Koreagate. I was the only one from Los Angeles sitting with him, sitting with Lucille.

ESPINO:

She invited you to go or—

SANCHEZ:

No, I went. I was in Washington at the time. I was on the commission and I decided to go. One of my dear friends was Ron Dellums from up north. He would look up and (unclear), and the hearings went on and on. And then I kept staring at Ron. He got up and went and sat next to Ed. When Ron did that, the entire California delegation—and then I had to leave because I had to catch a plane. And so when I got—I’m emotional about that one because he was so alone. When I got to L.A., there was a message for me that everything’s okay.

ESPINO:

Lillian Roybal told me that story from her perspective, you know, what she remembered from what her mother had told her, and it just sounded so—

SANCHEZ:

That’s why I think Lucille Roybal, Jr.—I call her, “Hey, Junior,”—are so close because her mother and I were very close.

01:26:53

ESPINO:

Did they ever think of why it happened, or what was their understanding of how it evolved or devolved so quickly?

SANCHEZ:

Devolved. I think he was kind of a fall guy. Koreagate, you know, a lot of people took a lot of money. He had got a contribution of $1,000, for God’s sakes.

ESPINO:

(unclear) nothing, yeah.

SANCHEZ:

And I remembered that we formed MAPA, and some of us formed a group and we went and picketed in front of the Federal Building about that, that we just felt he was the fall guy.

ESPINO:

Well, why would they choose him, of all people?

SANCHEZ:

Because the weakest link, that’s why.

ESPINO:

Was he a controversial figure at that point in politics?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t think so, but he was gaining seniority. He fought very hard for programs that came to California, and he wasn’t black, so the black community wouldn’t rise up in arms and the majority community wouldn’t rise up in arms, they thought. So he was the weak link. They had to have somebody so that the party wouldn’t be saddled with this Koreagate thing, and they sensed that he had the least amount of power, the least amount of backing. I think they were wrong. I think that eventually when Ron got up and sat next to him, the Jewish community kind of stood up and took notice, and then the entire delegation moved over, sat around him.

01:29:42

ESPINO:

Jeez. Lucille really witnessed a lot being married to him because she—I think it was Lillian told me the story of when he wouldn’t vote for the—it was a legislation around communism, and they wanted him to vote for it so that you would have to name your loyalties.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, for HUAC. Yeah. I’d forgotten about that one. I told you my memory’s bad. I’d forgotten about that.

ESPINO:

Do you remember when it happened? Were you paying attention to the news or—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. And I think he was right and I think history proved him right. But like I said, it’s a lonely world when you’re the only one, when you’re a pioneer, very lonely.

ESPINO:

Yeah, he’s the perfect example of that.

SANCHEZ:

And Lucille just holding up—no wonder she never gained an ounce. And they were sweet people. I remember we were on a plane once going from here to Washington, and it was pouring rain. It was just pouring rain. I was going to get a shuttle. They said, “No, no, no, no, no,” and they took me all the way to my hotel. It was pouring. You could hardly see. They were that kind of people. They were very welcoming. I guess they understood how lonely it can be. By the time they go to Molina and Carter was there, there was more Raza there.

ESPINO:

More community.

SANCHEZ:

And so they could comfort each other, you know. They’d make tamales together and they did things. But before that, it was hard.

01:31:44

ESPINO:

Some people say that they would have liked him to stay local. They felt like he could have done more for the city had he stayed.

SANCHEZ:

That’s where you’re torn sometimes, because the fact that he was in Congress and was gaining seniority, look at all the things he did for seniors. He filled a role that nobody else was able to. So sometimes you lose here but you gain there, and it’s hard. It’s hard. It’s like Xavier. If he comes back here to run for office, we lose all that seniority, all that experience.

ESPINO:

All that networking and actions that he’s made. Do you think he’s going to come back? Has he decided yet?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him for a long time. Well, he was going to come back to run for supervisor. I said, “Don’t. Please don’t. Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t.” And I guess Pete got the same reaction from a lot of people. Then he decided he was going to come back for the 14th. “Don’t.” And you can’t blame him sometimes. He wants to come home, you know. But we lose all that experience, all the Brownie points he’s got, because, you know, “You do this for me and I’ll do that for you.” So we’d lose all that.

ESPINO:

Right. Someone has to start from zero, the next person. Well, how do you feel about Hilda Solis coming back, not continuing?

SANCHEZ:

Well, her role was different. There are things that she could do here. I don’t know why she decided to come back. I haven’t talked to Hilda in a while, so I’m not quite sure. She may just have wanted to come home. I wanted to come home. I didn’t want to get on another plane. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be home.

01:34:20

ESPINO:

You didn’t like the role that you played in D.C.?

SANCHEZ:

I just didn’t like the whole thing, you know. I mean, it was an experience, and I’d be stupid to say I didn’t really get a lot out of it personally, but I did want to come home. I didn’t want to do it anymore. And maybe Hilda—I don’t know. I haven’t talked to Hilda. John talks to her more. John talks to Gloria Molina. They only talk at night. She knows he’s here late.

ESPINO:

They call him for advice or just to commiserate or just to—

SANCHEZ:

Both, both. And mind you, he’s a Republican and they know it. Yes, he’s quite well known in the Republican Party, but he’s also not the kind of Republican that gives up on his people, and they know that too.

ESPINO:

He’s not a Tea Party Republican?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, no, not at all, but he’s firm about certain things he believes.

ESPINO:

Well, that’s a whole other discussion. That’s really interesting. (Laughs)

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Sometimes we don’t discuss things. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

I would imagine. There’s that famous couple and I can’t remember their names now, but they were under the Clinton administration.

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah, I know.

ESPINO:

And he’s bald, gregarious, funny guy, and his wife is a Republican and worked for the Bush administration. They seem to have a wonderful relationship.

SANCHEZ:

Well, we’re going on our thirty-third year.

ESPINO:

Incredible. And was he always a Republican?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

From the time you met him?

SANCHEZ:

I didn’t know how much of a Republican he was.

ESPINO:

Is he an advocate, as far as actually working in—

SANCHEZ:

In the party?

01:36:24

ESPINO:

Uh-huh.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Not lately, because I think he’s tired. He has to deal with me and then he has to deal with them and the newspapers, you know. He’s in charge of the bottom line here, so—

ESPINO:

And so he doesn’t go to fundraisers for, say, Gloria Molina or any of the Democratic candidates?

SANCHEZ:

We will, but we don’t contribute, and it’s because we just don’t feel we should take that kind of role.

ESPINO:

As a newspaper.

SANCHEZ:

As a newspaper.

ESPINO:

Not because of your party?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. He goes to Democratic things sometime, but he is a Republican and makes no bones about it. Everybody knows. And he’s helped a lot of people with Republican votes, but he doesn’t like anybody to know, because he says, “I don’t like the idea of being co-publisher and saying that I influenced votes or that I influenced people getting things.” So he’s very, very careful.

ESPINO:

It’s like an ethical question.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. I don’t give to Democratic candidates and stuff, simply because I think that—and there may come a time when you have to criticize.

ESPINO:

Yeah, and I think last time I asked you if you could start thinking about some of those stories that you’ve covered—

SANCHEZ:

Richard Alatorre.

01:38:09

ESPINO:

—in the paper.

SANCHEZ:

Richard and I have always been very close. Richard was one of the few people that held me up after the divorce, and I won’t give him a penny.

ESPINO:

But did you have to cover things about him—

SANCHEZ:

I had to cover things, you know, like the—

ESPINO:

—that were controversial?

SANCHEZ:

—controversy with Henry Lozano, the controversy over the—

ESPINO:

The daughter?

SANCHEZ:

We had to cover that, you know, and drugs and all of that. We had to cover that, had to cover some of the things that Art did, Art Torres. And that’s what I mean. When you say, “Will you give me (unclear)?” “No. Don’t ask me to do anything for you in the paper. I won’t.” Like right now with the Water Basin District and all the Latinos on the board and stuff, we have to run it. We have to find out what it’s all about, and some of it isn’t pleasant. I don’t think we relish it like other newspapers, but we do our work.

ESPINO:

Do you have investigative reporters who are out there digging stuff out?

SANCHEZ:

No, we don’t dig, but if somebody brings something to us or we happen to feel funny about something, we will do it, we’ll dig out the facts, but we’ll give the other side a chance all the time. But even when we first got the newspapers, there were some things that were hard to cover.

01:40:31

ESPINO:

Do you have any examples of some of those things that were hard to cover, maybe one thing? It’s 1:40, so I don’t know how much longer you can—I mean it’s been an hour and forty minutes. I don’t know how much longer you want to—

SANCHEZ:

Well, mainly the hard thing we had to cover that really tore us apart were like AIDS, when AIDS started hitting our community, and (unclear) people didn’t want us to do that. When we carried articles about people that needed to be tested and things like that, a lot of people were very upset with us.

ESPINO:

How did you first come to that issue, the issue of AIDS? How did you first hear about—or when did you first decide (unclear)?

SANCHEZ:

I had a friend whose daughter was married to a dentist in Palos Verdes, up there, who had to take care of gays, and how he started losing all the rest of his clients, all of his patients. And Richard Palonco (phonetic) said, “You wrote this. How about gays in the Latino community? Here are the statistics.”

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

And so we started covering it. Whoa. Richard Alatorre can tell you.

ESPINO:

Did you get hate mail or phone calls?

SANCHEZ:

Both.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

A lot of it, “They should die. They should die.”

01:42:13

ESPINO:

“It’s God’s will”?

SANCHEZ:

“How dare you? If they weren’t doing something bad, they wouldn’t—.” Or the people (unclear), “You’re putting your people down. They’re going to think we’re all a bunch of no-goods.” Also the end of the Vietnam War and the involvement in drugs that a lot of the young people had. We kind of defended the guys coming back, and all my activist friends got very upset, “That’s an illegal war.” I said, “Yeah, but they’re not illegal. How dare you? They’re hurt.” And the GI Forum was very upset, and we took the GI Forum on in the paper, and a lot of them changed. So those were important issues. When they first started talking about health and we started forming the community clinics and things, they were having a hard time keeping their funding, so we did a lot of series on them too.

ESPINO:

What do you think your readership is right now?

SANCHEZ:

How do you mean?

ESPINO:

How many people read the paper, do you think? Because I know you have all the different—you know, Brooklyn, Belvedere, the Bell Gardens, Montebello.

SANCHEZ:

Actually, we have a big readership beyond our circulation because a lot of people will take articles and email them to other people. So I don’t know, several hundred thousand.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

They tell us, you know, “Oh, I like this and I sent it to—.” Or somebody will call me, “Hey, so-and-so just sent me this copy of your article on—,” whatever it is. And we’re not that controversial most of the time. Most of the time it’s things that we think people need to know.

01:44:52

ESPINO:

Or covering things. What I notice is covering things that happen in the community.

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm.

ESPINO:

If someone is—well, like, the football game, you know, the famous—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, the East L.A. Classic.

ESPINO:

Yeah, the East L.A. Classic, things like that that a community’s interested in. So it’s not all negative.

SANCHEZ:

Well, Ronquillo, when he was the principal at Roosevelt, banned us from the field.

ESPINO:

Why was that?

SANCHEZ:

Because we criticized him. They were organizing; the teachers were organizing there. Now, we had nothing to do with the organization, but they asked us to drop papers there, so we did. And he says, “No, you can’t drop papers here anymore because they’re organizing and you ran an article.” And then he says, “And by the way, you won’t get credentials to go to the Classic.” And I sent a letter to the Board of Education, and he was very upset, never forgave me for that. He said, “How dare you? Do you know you’re ruining my record?” or something. I said, “Hey, what right did you have to ban us from the Classic and that I have to deliver the newspapers that the kids love to the store down the block because you won’t let us deliver to the school?” So even there, you know—

ESPINO:

Right, which is really nothing—

SANCHEZ:

Nothing.

ESPINO:

—controversial about teachers organizing for—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

01:46:38

ESPINO:

I mean, that’s going to happen.

SANCHEZ:

I think we were one of the first people to endorse teachers—sometimes I regret it, sometimes I don’t like what they do—but endorse teachers getting organized, because I have a labor background with my mother. I don’t like some of the tactics or now where they’ve gone.

ESPINO:

The union, you mean, the teachers’ union?

SANCHEZ:

I just don’t understand how they can be so adamant about certain things that are wrong.

ESPINO:

Well, you did mention last time that these same issues exist that you were fighting for back—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, they do.

ESPINO:

Would you say education is one of those problem areas?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, education, employment. We were fighting then. The walkouts started in 1968, and if you were to look at the issues that some people talked to you about, as far as education is concerned, it’s the same thing, lack of facilities, teacher aptitude, the way the—oh, what is it when they’re not allowed to go to school? It’s a punishment criteria.

ESPINO:

Suspension?

SANCHEZ:

Suspension and—

01:48:39

ESPINO:

Right. There’s all that new research that shows they were getting suspended for tiny little things, for getting to school late, and then they can’t—

SANCHEZ:

I think in 1968 there was still that problem that the cops would come around and pick up some of the students just because they looked different or were acting silly. I mean, that’s their job, to act silly. So I don’t think that things have changed that much, grade level, dropout, dropping out. Why do they drop out? They all seem to be almost the same thing, and I don’t know that it’s going to change much because we do have a problem with language, and it hurts the kids. No one could tell me it doesn’t, that it doesn’t pull them down as far as being at grade level, being able to read, do some of the things that other students can who are not monolingual, Spanish monolingual. And I don’t think that’s going to stop as long as we have the influx of immigrants. And I’m not saying it’s bad that they’re immigrants. What I’m saying is that you have to deal with every generation. It takes a generation. It takes a long time. You know, we expect people to just tomorrow learn English and just pick up where everybody else is. It’s not the way it works. It didn’t work for the Irish, it didn’t work for the Jews, the Polacks, anybody. Why should we be different?

ESPINO:

Yeah. They always hold up the one example, (unclear) English in six months. It becomes a straight-A student and—

SANCHEZ:

And I’m sure there’s a lot of them, but there’s a lot of them—

01:50:37

ESPINO:

Yes, it’s not the norm, that’s for sure.

SANCHEZ:

No. A lot of our kids graduate from high school, the second generation and stuff, but a lot of the kids from recent arrivals, they can’t. I know that if somebody picked me up right now and put me in a corner in Mexico, I don’t think I’d do any better than they do; probably worse. So why do we expect them to, overnight, become models?

ESPINO:

Were you an advocate of bilingual education in those early days? That was part of the Julian Nava’s—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Because he was bilingual education.

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

You weren’t?

SANCHEZ:

And it wasn’t because I wasn’t—I felt they needed to be mainstreamed and I even do now when I tell you about how we don’t expect them to change. But we don’t also—to me it’s never been—how can I say—equal. I figured they could learn English as they were learning everything else. I don’t think that setting them apart and just being with Spanish alone helps them.

ESPINO:

So you didn’t believe that philosophy that—

SANCHEZ:

I have a sister who’s a teacher, and we argue about that all the time.

ESPINO:

So she’s an advocate for bilingual education?

SANCHEZ:

She teaches—

01:52:23

ESPINO:

She’s bilingual. Because there is the idea that if you learn the basic skills in your own language, you just transfer those skills once you learn the language.

SANCHEZ:

But I just don’t think that you learn the language that well being with others that don’t know the language that well. I think they can go to English class during the day, but I think they need to be mainstreamed to be able—because kids are smart. They learn. I told you I went to school with a lot of immigrants, but they were never segregated. They were put into the classroom and we helped them, and now I see them and they learned everything we learned. They graduated at the same rate that we did. And now I think, “Well, maybe they were right.” I don’t know. Who knows? But I think they’re there too long because they still need to be mainstreamed. I’ve never thought that separate but equal is equal, anything.

ESPINO:

Yeah, they haven’t been able to figure it out yet.

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

But good intentions. But never really being successful in the—at least at LAUSD. Where does your sister teach? Is it with LAUSD?

SANCHEZ:

No, Alhambra School District. But I don’t think that they’re that successful.

ESPINO:

You don’t think so?

SANCHEZ:

Maybe now some of these kind of charter schools, maybe in that way they can—I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer is. I’ve never been for the Grammys to have a Latino Grammy. I’ve always wanted them to be the Grammy winners. I think we have the talent. I think we can win a Grammy on our own, not be separate but equal. That’s not equal in anything. I just don’t think it is, but that’s my feeling.

01:54:56

ESPINO:

That’s interesting. That’s a good perspective. And now at El Dom (phonetic) Elementary, they do have a bilingual, but it’s for everyone.

SANCHEZ:

See, that’s different.

ESPINO:

Yes.

SANCHEZ:

That’s kind of like everyone is experiencing the same thing at the same time.

ESPINO:

Yes, anybody can be admitted to that. I don’t know if you have to apply, if it’s a charter—no, it’s not a charter school. But they’re having some success, from what I hear.

SANCHEZ:

Well, my niece’s daughter, Lily, is in first grade, and she’s learning Chinese, but all the other kids are learning Chinese, too, Mandarin, so they’re all experiencing the same. And she’s learning Spanish too. She’s learning to read and write in Spanish. That’s a hard one. I know a lot of people who are bilingual, but they’re not literate in Spanish.

ESPINO:

Right. The idea is to keep your language or to keep a language—it might be yours, might not be—versus mainstreaming you to English. Because I think that’s what the goal of the other bilingual—the idea was to mainstream you into English, and then you wouldn’t have to have the bilingual program anymore.

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm, but it hasn’t worked out that way.

ESPINO:

Right.

SANCHEZ:

We need to figure out what will work. Like I said, maybe some of these charter schools like Avance (phonetic) and the one that my niece’s daughter goes to—I don’t know the name.

01:56:36

ESPINO:

Is it in Los Angles?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

No, I’m not familiar—

SANCHEZ:

They live in Alhambra, but they kind of—

ESPINO:

Finagle? (Laughs) You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to get a good education for your kid.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and she’s doing very well, but so are all the other kids. All the other kids are the same way, you know.

ESPINO:

Uh-huh, of different ethnic groups?

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm.

ESPINO:

Well, that’s great. Well, I think I’m going to stop it right here.

SANCHEZ:

Okay.

ESPINO:

We’re approaching the two-hour mark. (End of January 17, 2014 interview)

SESSION SEVEN (March 7, 2014)

00:01:10

ESPINO:

This is Virginia Espino, and today is March 7th (2014). Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, one of my favorite holidays, and I’m interviewing, appropriately, Mrs. Dolores Sanchez in the Eastern Group Publications offices in Highland Park, Los Angeles. We’re getting closer to the present. Now we’re looking at the seventies, and before we move into that whole period, I’m wondering if you can reflect back on that change, because lots of historians write about the shift between the sixties and the seventies and how that period shaped even the present that we’re experiencing today. So if you could look back and reflect on some of the things that you saw were different, maybe how your consciousness changed or your ideology changed from that sixties involvement, the walkouts that we talked about last time. I don’t know if you remember we talked about the walkouts. We didn’t talk too much about other things like the Watts Riots, but we can go into that this time too.

00:02:24

SANCHEZ:

The seventies. Well, there was a change. You could almost say it was kind of a change in leadership too. Young men graduated from college, they became professionals, a lot of them decided they wanted to go into public office. There was an interesting kind of divide. There were those who wanted to do community work and had the talent, I guess, and the education and the contacts to start community organizations, and then there were those who wanted to be political, who saw progress as political. I kind of believed both of them, we needed both, but having been an activist, I really enjoyed the fact that we had the talent to be able to do that, the Alatorre’s, the Torres. We had the ability to raise enough to run people for statewide office. They might not have won, but it was a change.

I noticed that there was a change in the grassroots. The grassroots were kind of the organizers, and I felt like there was, at times, a divide, a divide between those who felt that if you had position and money and things like that, you could take care of the grassroots, and the grassroots were kind of older, beginning to age a little more, and were beginning to feel that perhaps they had laid the groundwork and they weren’t being recognized for it. So there was a change. Women took more active part. They headed organizations. They began. Women run organizations. We had young women who, again, were educated and had the ability to do that, and there wasn’t that need in women to sort of protect the male, to sort of think of the male as having gone through a lot. It became more common to hear women call men pigs, you know, cochinitos and things like that, and by then, women were forming organizations like the Chicana Service Action Center, Comisión Femenil. Let’s see. Which other women’s organization was there that I might—

ESPINO:

Wasn’t there, like, the Mexican American Women’s Political something?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. It didn’t last that long.

ESPINO:

Oh, it didn’t?

SANCHEZ:

No. It was a reaction against what the women in MAPA felt was not being allowed to take leadership roles, being kind of forgotten, and so they started to organize. Francisca was very active in that, to try to organize a women’s association to recognize other women’s work. I remember the first banquet. I think I told you that I’ve always been a very private person. They wanted me to give a speech, and I actually got sick. I didn’t go because I was actually sick. I wasn’t accustomed to women being in the leadership. I had to learn fast because that had—

00:05:50

ESPINO:

You were afraid to give that speech?

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm. And I got very sick.

ESPINO:

Was that the very first time you were asked to give a speech?

SANCHEZ:

No, but the speeches we had given before were more intimate. They were in our groups, you know, in our social groups or in a school at the PTA. This was an actual banquet with people. A lot of people are going to be there, and they’re going to be staring at you. My knees would start to knock just—I still have to sort of almost go into a trance before I can speak. Everybody says, “You’re a good speaker,” but if they only knew. (Laughs) So that changed too. I think we also became more active in the greater society’s activities, you know, their campaigns, the Tom Hayden’s, the Kennedys. A lot of those campaigns we took active part in, which I don’t know if we were the ones or they were the ones, or maybe it was a combination of not feeling welcome and not being welcomed. We started to take active participation in Tom Bradley’s campaigns, which was really unheard of.

00:07:42

ESPINO:

Yes. Well, how about—talking about the Kennedy campaign, that seemed to have been a huge marker for a lot of people in the sixties. How did it affect you?

SANCHEZ:

The Viva Kennedy Clubs. I think it affected me, and maybe it affected all of us. He was kind of the modern, dashing, aristocratic Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt was an aristocrat, but he didn’t give that image. He could get down and dirty somehow. Somehow young people and other people felt that here was a way for us, and he was receptive to our Viva Kennedy Club, so it was a change to be able to be really an active part of a campaign, a great campaign, you know.

ESPINO:

Right. Huge, important campaign. Did you feel that he represented your interest as a Mexican American?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, because don’t forget he was still the G.I. generation, and our leaders and a lot of our parents were of that generation, so he was kind of like the bridge. From him the torch would be passed to the newer, maybe non-G.I. generation, but he still represented the old, too, so he could bridge those divides for us. He was more accepting of civil rights, and I think Bobby really reminded that whole family that there were Mexican Americans, Hispanics that also needed a step up. That really hadn’t been the focus before. It had been racial segregation, it had been the Black Movement, because most of the people that were in politics or in leadership roles were Ivy League or from the South, very strong trend, or East Coast, and we were West Coast southwestern kind of people. So that began what I call the penetration into these different roles.

00:10:43

ESPINO:

So you look at him as someone who opened doors for the Mexican American community that were previously closed?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. He wasn’t exclusively focused on black, and I’m not complaining about that. I’m just saying that everything had been focused on the Rust Belt, the East Coast, and the South, you know, as far as segregation is concerned. And I think there was a feeling that we hadn’t suffered like the blacks had, we really hadn’t felt segregation in that way. And maybe we hadn’t. I don’t know. So there was that change.

ESPINO:

How did the Watts Riots impact you?

SANCHEZ:

It impacted us, I think there was empathy, but no really involvement. We didn’t really feel that it was our battle, I think.

ESPINO:

Did you feel like—I’ve heard people take different positions, because some people felt like, “We’re not going to do that.”

SANCHEZ:

We would never burn down our barrios, and when they tried, there was strong reaction against it, very strong reaction against it. After the moratorium and all the problems, there was a feeling that the next moratorium, the march, people started getting into caravans and threatening and threw a few—those small Molotovs or something, you know.

ESPINO:

Right. Molotovs, the Molotov cocktail.

SANCHEZ:

But the reaction from the community was not at all welcoming, nuh-uh. I recall that people, workers and stuff, would stand outside their buildings, their workplaces and, “Not here you don’t.” So there was a big reaction against it and reaction against that reaction.

00:13:44

ESPINO:

Right. Within your political activity, did you know people who represented that area in social justice organizations?

SANCHEZ:

Mainly it was a relationship of cooperating with their organizations, with CORE, with—what was the other one that’s still there? The Watts—

ESPINO:

Labor Action Committee.

SANCHEZ:

Labor Action Community. But it was more of a cooperative kind of thing. I don’t think we were part of the organizations.

ESPINO:

Say, for example, Augustus Hawkins, individuals like that, did you—

SANCHEZ:

Well, because he and people like Ron Dellums and others were politically elected and were receptive to our joining in their campaigns and stuff, there was a different relationship there between a certain level of people and another level of people. I remember Yvonne Brathwaite telling me once, “Dolores,” she says, “there are some of us who have been exposed to what happens to all groups and some of us who have been hurt so badly by it they were in denial, and so there’s going to be clashes between these two groups.” She was very correct.

ESPINO:

Do you remember why she told you that, what the situation was?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t remember what it was, but I do remember the conversation. And I remember Ron Dellums getting up and giving a speech at a Democratic convention and talking about, “White niggers, black niggers, yellow niggers, brown niggers. You have to understand that the majority thinks of us as niggers. They don’t distinguish color. It’s class. It’s status.” Very strong, and I don’t remember that anybody reacted against it. In fact, there was a loud applause for him. Of course, he was a dynamic speaker. That had a lot to do with it, but that speech has always stayed with me.

00:16:21

ESPINO:

How did you meet him? Because last time you mentioned that you were good friends.

SANCHEZ:

Well, we were acquaintances. Both of us didn’t have time to be really good friends with anyone. (Laughs) You know what I mean?

ESPINO:

Well, I wondered about that because you did say, “He was a good friend of mine.”

SANCHEZ:

We were acquaintances. Yeah, we knew each other and we heard of each other. It’s like when you’re in a political group and somebody mentions, oh, yeah, I remember I met, but they might not have been intimate friends.

ESPINO:

But you shared the same viewpoint?

SANCHEZ:

Right. And we knew what the other was thinking, you know. Certain people would turn around and look at each other when somebody made a statement, and we either accepted it or not, and it came from that.

ESPINO:

So how did you first — your first encounter with him or your first contact with him?

SANCHEZ:

It was at a Democratic convention, was at a Democratic convention. He was sitting in the lounge, I guess, I don’t remember, and I was tired and I went and sat down, and he says, “I think what you need is a drink.” I said, “I sure do.” He gave me a good thing. “I think I’m going to go visit the bar.” He says, “Oh, I can’t because everybody’ll talk.” (Laughs) And so when we would see each other, we’d say hi, hello, you know. Not the kind of relationship that, for instance, I had with Tom Bradley, where we were friends, we had really worked together and done things together and discussed things.

00:18:07

ESPINO:

And how did you first meet Tom Bradley?

SANCHEZ:

At a CORE demonstration in Dominguez Hills, which was in those days what was at Carson. They weren’t selling to black families, and they had a demonstration, and I attended that demonstration. This guy in this pink Jeep came by to bring us sodas, and it was Tom Bradley. That’s the first time I met him, and after that we just—I guess we hit it off for a while.

ESPINO:

Was it difficult to convince people, Mexican Americans on the Eastside, to put their endorsement behind him? Because you met him in the early days. That was early. That was like early sixties.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but after that, no, it wasn’t difficult. The problem with endorsing is the fact that the city of Los Angeles doesn’t go very far into the Eastside. East of the river, it only goes two miles. But the political groups all endorsed him, the Democratic Clubs, MAPA, and other groups.

ESPINO:

How do you think he was able to break down that barrier of that racial barrier and also regional barrier? Because he’s not from the Eastside.

SANCHEZ:

He was able to break it down because of his interaction with people, his ability to get them to respond to him, and in talking to him, you knew that he cared. He was kind of a humble man when he first started running. He wasn’t at all hard to get along with or standoffish. He was very easygoing, very affable. In fact, I think at my house—I also think that people didn’t—there was a feeling that they didn’t want to waste a lot of energy on getting him into City Hall, unfortunately. The only real fundraiser that was ever given for him in the Latino and the Chicano community was at my house.

00:21:12

ESPINO:

Was this for the Viva Bradley campaign effort? Who started that? Do you recall in your mind who it was?

SANCHEZ:

It was, I think, Ron Gastelum because he wanted a job, and Delfino—

ESPINO:

Delfino Varela was—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Who else? Pierre—I can’t remember his last name.

ESPINO:

That’s okay.

SANCHEZ:

The more politically experienced people. The newer politically involved people weren’t at—but we had a good turnout, we made money, and he was very, very pleased. As a result of that, a lot of people got jobs with the Bradley administration, like—what was his name? Manuel—

ESPINO:

Aragon? He attended this fundraiser?

SANCHEZ:

No. But he had his own—I guess he gave him money or something, his own.

ESPINO:

And Grace Montanez Davis.

SANCHEZ:

Grace was there, Grace was there. Grace got it. Who else got it? Well, Joe got appointed to the Fire Commission. He appointed me to the Women’s Commission on Women in City Government.

00:23:13

ESPINO:

Did you expect that when you put your endorsement behind him? Did you expect these kinds of appointments?

SANCHEZ:

No. We formed an organization after he was elected on the foundation of that one fundraiser. We formed an organization called the Bradley Chicano Blue Ribbon Committee, and I chaired it because I had given the fundraiser, to get together résumés of people to submit to him, and he picked from there, he and who did I say the—he got a job as a liaison and other things.

ESPINO:

Pierre? No. You mentioned Manuel Aragon, Grace Montanez Davis. Delfino Varela didn’t get appointed to anything?

SANCHEZ:

He didn’t want one.

ESPINO:

He didn’t want one?

SANCHEZ:

Francisca. No, she was going to get an appointment, and it created a big, big hullabaloo. She was going to chair, I think, Parks and Rec, and she didn’t—what was that guy’s name? I said he wanted a job. Remember I told you?

ESPINO:

Gastelum?

SANCHEZ:

Gastelum. Art Gastelum said, “No, I don’t think so. She’s a communist,” or something, you know, too liberal or something, and they backed off the endorsement. And I didn’t know because, you know, I had work to do. And so when she says, “Well, you know they were—,” I made a public apology to Francisca, and I said, “We’ve done ourselves and you a disservice. I’m very embarrassed and I apologize to you.”

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

“And, Art, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

00:25:52

ESPINO:

How did he respond?

SANCHEZ:

“Well, you don’t understand. I have to protect Tom’s reputation.” Since then, we’ve had a relationship, but I’ve never really—I always carry that with me when I see him.

ESPINO:

Do you think it was personal or do you think he really genuinely—because there were some people who were genuinely afraid of being linked—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, it was genuine, it was genuine.

ESPINO:

—to communism.

SANCHEZ:

He felt he had to protect Tom. That’s what it was.

ESPINO:

But was she that Left that—because when you look at—

SANCHEZ:

I didn’t think so, but then I didn’t think anybody was that Left. (Interruption)

ESPINO:

Okay. Well, I guess the reason why it strikes me is because we’re talking about the seventies. We’re not talking about the forties during that period of real communists. I mean, they were legitimate, officially in the party, etc., or had friends or had beliefs, but we’re talking about a period where rarely you would find somebody, especially somebody like Francisca Flores, who was considered a professional, working with professionals, trying to professionalize the movement, and not with the militants. Or am I wrong?

00:28:32

SANCHEZ:

No. Again, in the seventies there was that transition of people being reticent to show their activist roots. They thought it might upset the applecart for them. I recall that Manuel Aragon called several commissioners into his office and told them, “You know, you can’t be that forward and demanding. If you’re on a commission, you have to sort of be careful what you say. You can’t be that clear in your disfavor or wanting to change things.” That was in the early seventies.

Then when Kennedy was killed and Johnson took over and the War on Poverty started, a lot of people started forming organizations, got funding, and again, they didn’t want to lose that funding. So there’s always been—and maybe it’s in the greater world. I don’t know. I think politics enters everything.

ESPINO:

Yeah, Lilia Aceves mentioned that her organization when she was working for—

SANCHEZ:

Who was she working for?

ESPINO:

Was it the Reverend Tony Hernandez?

SANCHEZ:

The Episcopalian—

ESPINO:

They had to change their name and they had to stop funding—I believe they were giving money to something related to the moratorium.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

So they were always highly scrutinized.

SANCHEZ:

I think they were also almost excommunicated.

ESPINO:

From?

SANCHEZ:

The greater group.

ESPINO:

Of Mexican Americans—

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

—or of welfare?

SANCHEZ:

Of the church group.

00:29:56

ESPINO:

Of the church group itself?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

It was very delicate, very delicate dance you had to do because everybody was involved with everybody, and then they had their own private—like Del Varela, who had his own strong political beliefs, but yet he was associated with these people who were more mainstream. So how did you feel about that? Were you one of the commissioners that got called in to Manuel Aragon’s office?

SANCHEZ:

No, no, but others were. I can’t remember who, so I won’t mention names because I don’t remember. But I do recall hearing that.

ESPINO:

So you didn’t consider him to be—he’s now living in Florida and they’re trying to find him to interview him for the Bradley documentary, so I’m curious to hear what he would have to say about that whole time period. But I interviewed Soledad Alatorre, who speaks of him, and his brother, apparently. Do you remember the whole family?

SANCHEZ:

No, I don’t. No, I don’t. I might have met him and had interaction with him, but I don’t remember them as clearly as I do Manuel.

ESPINO:

So what were those first months like? Do you recall the feeling once Bradley was elected? Do you recall how you felt?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. It was a feeling of having accomplished something. I think our people came around, those who—I don’t think they were ever against; they just weren’t interested, you know. They were busy building our own groups, but because Tom was very inclusive, extremely inclusive.

00:32:00

ESPINO:

Was that the first time you had seen that in L.A. city politics?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. For instance, Yorty would only invite Republicans, a few of the upper-crust Latino Republicans, into his fundraisers and things, you know. So if they had banquets or celebrations, even with the other groups, he would always include Mexican Americans. I remember him inviting me to a thing when the Emperor of Japan came or Prince Hirohito or something came, and he did that for a lot of people. I thought he was good to Grace, very good to her, very respectful.

ESPINO:

That was a powerful position she was placed in.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and it was good for quite a while until—I think when people stay too long in office, the people that surround them begin to take liberties, begin to become establishment, and some of the women in his administration weren’t—there was, I thought, a feeling of elitist, an elitist attitude among some of them.

ESPINO:

Well, taking it from the point of Bradley’s having a long administration, do you think he himself also had a long administration and everybody that he took along with him for that length—because if he would have left, Grace would have also left that position. Do you think that he was there too long as well?

SANCHEZ:

No, I think the people that surrounded him were there too long. You know, they begin to coopt, they begin to—and that’s any elected official, I’ve noticed. I’m not singling them out.

ESPINO:

So you think there should have been some sort of transition in his administration like—

SANCHEZ:

Well, there was some. Manuel left.

00:34:55

ESPINO:

That’s right. But just as a standard, you know, considering you’ve worked with many political—some campaigns that weren’t successful, but the advice that you would give to somebody who takes an office like that.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, you need to move people around. But I guess in those days, as inclusive as he was, the people around him felt like guardians, including Gastelum, Art Gastelum, and that was bad. They kept him away. It got to the point where Tom and I would be standing next to each other and not have anything to say to each other, no conversation, when for a long time we had had a very close relationship.

ESPINO:

So you think he got detached from the grassroots?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Yes, I do.

ESPINO:

We’re indoors. The door’s closed. I’m just saying this for the recording. We’re not outside on the street. It sounds like with the loud music and the skateboards. You can hear everything. But that’s fascinating, that’s really fascinating, and I really look forward to seeing that documentary, what they come up with, because his campaign was so, so different, like you say.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, it was almost a new era of campaigning. It was a precursor to what now people call “Los Angeles, the city of diversity.” It was the beginning, I think, of that kind of—slow beginning, but it was a beginning. It was a breakthrough in the recognition that there were the diverse groups in the city that they had always been here.

00:36:59

ESPINO:

Right. Yeah, because like you say, CORE was, you know, something of the civil rights period, early civil rights period of the fifties and sixties.

SANCHEZ:

And I think Grace Montanez Davis was very instrumental also in that.

ESPINO:

In CORE?

SANCHEZ:

No, in bringing about that feeling, that she would have gatherings and seminars in which the group would be mixed, very mixed.

ESPINO:

Before the Bradley administration—

SANCHEZ:

No. After—

ESPINO:

—or during? When she was the deputy mayor?

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm, much more so than—Manuel was more of an administrative kind of person. She was more of a community person, which was good, you know. You need both, I guess.

ESPINO:

So did you ever attend any of those seminars?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

And do you remember the topics?

SANCHEZ:

There would be topics of, like, what’s going on in South Central between the Mexicans and the blacks? Why aren’t they getting along? We need to start a dialogue. There would be groups that would have Jewish people there and trying to get them to understand that Chicanos also wanted an “in” to education because that was kind of their bailiwick. And so I think they were very good, very instrumental in bringing that breakthrough, because now you go to any meeting and you’re going to see all groups there. Wasn’t always like that. It was (unclear), it was the Jewish groups, you know.

00:39:15

ESPINO:

Well, you mentioned that in the early days you—like the women accepted the situation of having men be in the leadership roles because of what you witnessed as far as discrimination against them, so you felt they needed to be in that position, you needed to be supported. When did that change and how did it change? Because then later on you become really involved with the Chicana Service Action Center.

SANCHEZ:

I think when the younger women started coming forward, and Francisca was also very instrumental in that, in saying that, “No, we’ve been supportive. Now we need your support. We need you to be—.” And as in all groups, some women carried it too far and some, you know, did a good job then. The Manpower funds starting coming down, and we wanted to have training for women, we wanted women to develop expertise to run for office also, and so they took a more active role. It wasn’t that trying to just get in the door, you know.

ESPINO:

Were you at the meeting that she called convening when Comisión was actually formed? Do you remember that?

SANCHEZ:

No, I wasn’t. I don’t remember.

ESPINO:

Gloria Molina was there, I believe, Yolanda Nava, Lilia Aceves.

SANCHEZ:

Maybe I was. I just don’t remember.

ESPINO:

And there was some dispute about the males who were also invited not wanting to put Francisca’s—those issues that you just mentioned on the agenda, and so they decided to just start—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, their own group.

00:40:46

ESPINO:

—to separate.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, I think I was, yeah, yeah, because they—I don’t know what this—maybe because Francisca was so outspoken. She was the vanguard, you know, and they had a hard time dealing with that. They never had to deal with—in our groups, within our groups we would, but not kind of in public, not in a public forum.

ESPINO:

So she would come right out and challenge the men—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

—right in public view?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Do you have any memories of one instance where she did that?

SANCHEZ:

I think I remember a MAPA convention where she got up and complained about how the people at the front of the room were all males, and, “When are you guys going to start including the women?” or something, and, “We’re going to belong to any assembly district we want. You’re not going to tell us what to do.” So things like that used to kind of irritate them.

ESPINO:

Wow. How about your ex-husband, did he have an opinion about her? Did he tell you, share his viewpoint of her?

SANCHEZ:

No, because he always liked women, including Francisca, you know.

ESPINO:

So that brazen attitude—

00:42:52

SANCHEZ:

Because people from New Mexico are very brazen to begin with. But for a lot of the guys who had been around a while and who felt they had built something, you know, they had laid the foundation, “How dare you try to climb onboard?” or something. So she was very instrumental in the founding of a lot of groups.

And then there was the activism of the women as far as other women were concerned, Gloria Molina, about the sterilization. Gloria went to Sacramento to work for—who was she working for? Was it Richard or Art? One of them. And started to become very political. Yolanda was married to Art Torres, and so they were supportive. They were elected officials, and so there became that ability for them to push the guys in the legislature to try to convince them to get women into elective office.

ESPINO:

Was he supportive, Art Torres, of that position?

SANCHEZ:

So was Richard. Very supportive.

ESPINO:

Do you see them as different from, say, the Edward Roybal’s or Tom Bradley’s as far as their political consciousness?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, yeah. They were almost the second generation and were more self-assured, more willing to challenge Sacramento, more involved with community groups, with women’s groups, with Comisión, like I said, with the Chicana Service Action Center, even though Roybal, because he was in Washington, he didn’t have that closeness, you know, because he was so far, but I think he was supportive of women. He was very supportive. Then came the Jimmy Carter campaign, and a lot of women took very strong positions in his campaign, strong positions as far as lobbying him for more inclusion of Latinos and primarily women, because that was their focus. Gloria Molina went to Washington and worked in his administration and was very, very—she worked where you received résumés and appointments, and she was very inclusive, very pushy, and wasn’t afraid of being pushy the way others had in the past.

00:46:29

ESPINO:

Well, I’m wondering if Art—what his last name? How do you pronounce it again? Who worked for Tom Bradley?

SANCHEZ:

Gastelum.

ESPINO:

Gastelum. If his critique of Francisca wasn’t about her politics but about her demeanor, her—

SANCHEZ:

No, it was about her politics too.

ESPINO:

It was about her politics too?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah. Oh, no, very definitely about her politics. He felt that might kind of get those who weren’t that receptive of Tom to feel that he was left of Left. You know what I mean? Extremely Left, his administration.

ESPINO:

Yeah, but her politics were basically equality for women and job opportunities. That was considered left of Left?

SANCHEZ:

Well, before that, she had been equality for everyone and would talk about the socialist movements and things like that.

ESPINO:

So she did have some—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, some.

ESPINO:

In the early days some Leftist.

SANCHEZ:

But not like she was joining them. She just felt that they were supportive, you know. But as I said, they were very afraid of tarnishing his image as being too far to the Left, and maybe he was right. I knew someone that was in the—at the time in—I can’t mention his name, and he was not Latino. He was at the Academy, the FBI Academy. He had wanted to join the Treasury, and he said one of the statements that—because they also had to have a background in accounting, that the IRS person said that the guy in charge of here had said when they made all the appointments, when Tom made all the appointments, “Pull all their returns. Let’s see who these people are.” And because of that statement, I don’t want to mention his name.

00:49:04

ESPINO:

Right, right.

SANCHEZ:

And I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s still some of that. I don’t know.

ESPINO:

I’m sure.

SANCHEZ:

It may be dying, you know, because people leave, they retire, or they died.

ESPINO:

Well, I was surprised how it wasn’t an issue for Antonio Villaraigosa. He was associated with leftist groups and it did come out, but it never really—nobody really cared like they might have cared back in the seventies.

SANCHEZ:

But by then it was beginning to die down. Like I said, people die, retire, become acculturated to the fact, I don’t know. So there was a big change then.

ESPINO:

Right. Doesn’t seem like “communism” and “socialism” are such scary words like they were back—

SANCHEZ:

Well, it had fallen apart too. You know, that whole communist kind of structure had kind of fallen apart. The only one who remained strong was Castro and Che, but otherwise it wasn’t really—it was more of a liberal with a capital “L” kind of attitude that the activists had. Like I said, I joined Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda’s organization. What was it? I can’t even remember the name. Something for a Democratic Society.

ESPINO:

Oh, SNCC? Students for a Democratic Society? No, not SNCC. SDC?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

00:51:00

ESPINO:

Students for a Democratic Society. SNCC was the African American, Students for a Nonviolent—

SANCHEZ:

And then they started the Campaign for Economic Democracy, which Jane supported, you know. She was our only support, really, and a lot of people joined that organization.

ESPINO:

Here in Los Angeles?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. It was focused here because Jane was Hollywood, you know. Jane brought a lot of Hollywood panache to it, to our organization and stuff.

ESPINO:

Did you go to any meetings?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah, a lot of them.

ESPINO:

Did you feel like your issues were, as a Mexican American, as a Chicana, were—

SANCHEZ:

Not always understood, but when you would speak up and say something, they would listen, especially Tom.

ESPINO:

Well, people say about that period that it was very difficult to be involved with white-run organizations because of the lack of understanding. What was your experience?

SANCHEZ:

True. They had a black/white kind of knowledge, you know, about what had gone on in the past.

00:52:27

ESPINO:

Even here in Los Angeles?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, yeah, because I think we were so concentrated. East of First Street, I guess you could say. There was very little relationship, and so they didn’t understand us. We can be very obstinate. We can be very hard. They didn’t understand that. The activists on this side, we weren’t ever gentle. We could be opinionated and even arrogant at times, and a lot of people east of the river had a sense of entitlement, you know, “You don’t come in here and start your organizations without us.” They weren’t accustomed to that. That was not their relationship. I had trouble with some of the women who worked for Tom.

ESPINO:

They thought they knew better what your community needed?

SANCHEZ:

At times they would finish sentences for me, you know, but it wasn’t a lack of empathy; it was a lack of understanding. They never really—except for the Jews who stayed in Boyle Heights or who had parents in Boyle Heights, for instance, even the Jewish community didn’t have very much interaction with us. So, yeah, it was very hard. I think Gloria and Richard and Art were the ones who pushed me into Jimmy Carter’s administration to become a commissioner on employment compensation because I had worked with the Chicana Service Action Center and I’d had business, had relationship with workers. They felt that I could represent that Manpower kind of group. They were studying unemployment compensation and kind of Social Security and the Railroad Retirement Act, and it was Gloria who pushed the appointment, but as the only person west of the Mississippi and the only Latina, it was often difficult to break through, not because they didn’t want me to break through, they just didn’t understand at times where I was coming from.

00:56:07

ESPINO:

How would you describe your different views, your differing views?

SANCHEZ:

Well, a lot of the people there—there was the AFL-CIO there from Michigan. It was the Service Employees and the Auto Workers from Massachusetts, it was the ILG woman who worked—the woman, she owned the bra—what is it, that bra company?

ESPINO:

Playtex or Maidenform?

SANCHEZ:

Maidenform. She was the president of Maidenform, and she’d had a long relationship with the ILGWU, so she and the guy that represented the ILGWU had a close relationship.

ESPINO:

Interesting. They were both on opposite of—you would think that they were on opposite sides of the issues.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, they were very friendly. And so I was kind of like almost on the outside, so when they’d say things like, “Well, you know, some people say that—,” and I used to have to get very angry and say, “Who are ‘some people’? Who are these ‘some people’?” Or, “Who are ‘those that say’?” There was a breakdown in communication because they all communicated—not that they weren’t willing and accepting of my suggestions, but there was just not that relationship.

ESPINO:

Right, and they were all union people, although the woman from Maidenform was—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

00:58:04

ESPINO:

But she was very close to the union person.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Mr. Cohen, the chairman, had been Secretary of Labor under Johnson.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

Now, he was very into small businesses, so we related very well. I would relate with him very well.

ESPINO:

So your interest or your experience and your interest were in the small business.

SANCHEZ:

No, in Manpower, training people and starting organizations that women could go to for training.

ESPINO:

To work in factories or to work in corporations or—

SANCHEZ:

Wherever, yeah. I felt that unemployment compensation, which originally started because of the Great Depression, was for temporary unemployment. Here on the West Coast, sometimes our people were unemployed for longer than six weeks. They earn less, so their take-home for unemployment compensation or Social Security was lower, and so we needed to raise the bar, and some of them kind of felt, “Well, we’re going to make it impossible. The employers aren’t going to want to do it, so they’re going to cut down on hiring people.” The same arguments that you hear now.

ESPINO:

Do you think that your perspective was different from the union perspective when you were on this commission?

SANCHEZ:

At times, at times. It wasn’t an adversarial kind of perspective, you know, that we were adversarial, but they had very little insight into really what was going on over here.

01:00:21

ESPINO:

And do you mean in reference to the non-union labor?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, sometimes.

ESPINO:

Or do you mean just in general?

SANCHEZ:

Just in general.

ESPINO:

Because the only thing that I can think of similar is what happened with the waiting period after the sterilization incident, it blew up, and how white women, middle-class, upper-class women were saying, “We don’t want to wait. We want sterilization on demand,” and the Chicanas were saying, “Wait a minute.”

SANCHEZ:

“Wait a minute. No, that’s going too far.”

ESPINO:

Is that something similar to what you’re talking about as far as—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, yeah.

ESPINO:

Because the union people might want that period of unemployment extended for infinity, whereas you’re saying—well, what were you saying?

SANCHEZ:

Well, I was saying that we did need to extend the period, but we also had to be cognizant of the fact that small businesses, for instance, couldn’t always handle what they wanted to do too. For instance, the people they were more associated with were civil workers, you know—

ESPINO:

County employees or—

SANCHEZ:

Things like that. Our people were entrepreneurs, and so they sometimes needed a little understanding as to what they could handle. How are you impacting their bottom line while still trying to take care of the workers?

01:02:26

ESPINO:

Right. Well, because United Auto Workers, they were representing big corporations primarily. I’m sure there were some little small factories here and there throughout the U.S. at that time in the seventies. So you felt like there weren’t two pathways to address the issues of workers for small business and the issue of workers for these big entities?

SANCHEZ:

No. They didn’t think there should be a difference.

ESPINO:

Did you think there should be a difference?

SANCHEZ:

I thought that small businesses provided an entrée into the workforce, a honing of skills, and then they would go into the major workforce.

ESPINO:

Like a steppingstone.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. I still feel that way.

ESPINO:

And what was their perspective?

SANCHEZ:

Their perspective was that if a small business can’t afford to give their workers these kinds of benefits, then they shouldn’t be in business. That was going to kill a lot of the small business because, like I said, we’re entrepreneurial. We have small businesses, and it doesn’t mean we’re anti-labor. In fact, whenever there’s a movement of some kind, who do they first go to? The small businesses in the community. Who marries the workers in the community? The children of the small businesspeople. So that we needed to find a way to be able to mesh the interests of the workers and their needs for benefits with the ability of some people to pay them, which was something unique to them. They didn’t—I mean, Maidenform, you know—

ESPINO:

Huge.

SANCHEZ:

The UAW, huge.

01:04:13

ESPINO:

SEIU.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. In those days (unclear), you know. But of all the people that were more conscious of the workers, janitors and stuff like that, I found the UAW people more in tune than the others.

ESPINO:

When did your husband form the Mexican American Grocers Association?

SANCHEZ:

In about ’74, ’73, somewhere like that.

ESPINO:

So around the same time, a little earlier. Were those some of the similar issues that they were addressing?

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm.

ESPINO:

Were you part of that founding?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, I wrote their first brochures and things, and they all got mad at me because I was very inclusive because that was the way I was, and they wanted to fight with the big grocers, you know, the big market chains and stuff, and later on they became coopted by the big markets because the small markets started to disappear.

ESPINO:

Yeah. It’s hard when you get those big monopolies. Well, tell me about that then. Tell me about that first—because that’s—

SANCHEZ:

The reason that was formed was because the grocers, the neighborhood grocers and the markets felt that they weren’t getting—they didn’t have the ability to buy and they weren’t getting the discounts that the big chains got. Of course they didn’t. And so they felt that by forming an organization they would be able to do that, or that when a large chain was giving up a market, that they wouldn’t immediately go to another big chain, that they would go to an independent to lease from them, to be more—not to make the same demands they would do on a large chain market. That’s why they were formed, and they did for a while. They did very well.

01:07:08

ESPINO:

How did you recruit people? How did you get people to join that association?

SANCHEZ:

Just called them up, called the market owners up, and most of them were glad to join.

ESPINO:

And did it run out of your home or out of your business?

SANCHEZ:

Out of the business.

ESPINO:

And what were your big accomplishments for that period?

SANCHEZ:

I think the big accomplishments were that Latino markets were becoming larger independents, you know. They weren’t the mom-and-pop stores so much any longer. They were becoming the supers, and that’s where they got their start. Smart and Final would let them get in with smaller deposits. The Board of Equalization was more willing to work with them. So I thought that was a big accomplishment. Now we have large independent markets.

01:09:00

ESPINO:

My family there, we don’t have anyone who’s ever owned a business, and a lot of immigrant families, that’s how they start, that’s how they get their foothold is by owning a business, but my grandparents never—they worked for other people. So how do you negotiate that idea of making a profit in a community when you purchase something for five dollars and then you resell it for five-fifty or six dollars or whatever, what’s that—

SANCHEZ:

It’s very difficult, because immediately the community surrounding you says, “Well, I can go to Rite Aid and buy it a dollar cheaper,” whatever, and it’s very difficult to do that. Like I said, the mom-and-pop stores and neighborhood stores were kind of emergency places. I remember a lot of them used to complain that, “Yeah, they come with us, come over here with us when they don’t have any money to charge it, and we give them credit because the big markets won’t, but when they have money, they go to the big markets.” And that might even be true of newspapers and other things, you know, shoe stores and stuff, and I don’t think it’s ever going to change. I don’t know. Because there isn’t that tradition of investing. If you look through at all the South American countries, there isn’t a tradition of investing in the future. The entrepreneurs here, the Latino entrepreneurs, do have some kind of tradition because they want to pass it on to their kids, but for the community as a whole, I don’t think there’s that tradition. They buy from la panaderias because they’re the only ones that carry the Mexican bread. Know what I mean?

ESPINO:

Right. And then when they don’t, when the big—

SANCHEZ:

When they want a big wedding cake, they go to Porto’s or something.

ESPINO:

Yeah.

SANCHEZ:

And you can’t blame them. They want something better, you know. I understand it.

ESPINO:

Or the best deal when you’re struggling economically.

SANCHEZ:

Right. Yeah, it’s not a criticism; it’s kind of like a culture thing with us.

01:10:59

ESPINO:

It’s a difficult dilemma.

SANCHEZ:

We’ve always had to live from paycheck to paycheck, and so we have to go wherever we can get a deal, you know.

ESPINO:

Yeah, it’s a paradox. That’s for sure. And do you think that it was a community service, what you and your husband were doing?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Why is that? I mean having the supermarket, just to explain for the record, having your first market or store.

SANCHEZ:

Because we were in the salvage grocery business, so we would buy cans that were kind of dented and stuff like that and sell them at a discounted rate so people could go and save money, so it was a community service. Plus, the money that came in was used often to help organizations. I don’t think it was that way with everybody, but—

ESPINO:

What do you think about the idea of, well, then you have the La Raza Unida Party forming, and what they argue is that they weren’t successful in incorporating East Los Angeles because of the small business owners. Do you think that—

SANCHEZ:

I don’t see how.

ESPINO:

—there’s like some tension between—

SANCHEZ:

There’s always going to be tension.

ESPINO:

—that kind of leftist politics and—

01:13:38

SANCHEZ:

I think there’s always going to be a tension because organizations rarely worry about the bottom line, but small businesses, you know, they make their bottom line on pennies and low percentages, and they were afraid they were going to be—their taxes were going to go up, but that really wasn’t why they lost. The reason they lost was because they concentrated on the people running. Everybody ran their campaigns to be elected and everybody forgot about the incorporation, so a lot of people were elected, but their incorporation failed. Had nothing to do with the small—they weren’t that powerful, there weren’t that many. It was kind of a—what do you call it? A subterfuge into why it was lost. It wasn’t because of the small business people.

ESPINO:

Do you think the incorporation was going to hurt the small business owner though?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know. I was against it, but I was against it for a completely different reason. I felt we should seek annexation to the City of Los Angeles because I felt that’s where our growth would be as a community. Otherwise, I felt we were just going to be a little East L.A. town looking in on the big city. That was my reasoning.

ESPINO:

How did you feel about the La Raza Unida Party in general?

SANCHEZ:

I sent them money. I supported them.

ESPINO:

Did you have any fundraisers for them?

SANCHEZ:

No. Any fundraisers we gave were for MAPA. (Laughs) We were embedded in MAPA.

ESPINO:

So you were never going to vote La Raza because of your Democratic politics?

SANCHEZ:

Because we felt we could elect more people through the Democratic Party. We wanted to infiltrate the Democratic Party.

01:14:57

ESPINO:

You sent the money, but what would be your political analysis of La Raza Unida Party? How did you understand it?

SANCHEZ:

They were the two-by-four that hits the jackass between the eyes to make him look up and, “Oh, yeah, the water’s there.” I didn’t think they would ever—because there were too active people. People shy away from, you know, become a really big party because of the Democratic Party.

ESPINO:

Did you think they had a chance to win?

SANCHEZ:

In small cities and things, yeah, but I didn’t think a big city—you know, you’ve got to raise enormous amounts of money, and it’s just almost impossible.

ESPINO:

What was your viewpoint of the different officials or the different individuals that ran for political office? Like I think Raul Ruiz had one of the big campaigns, Esteban Torres.

SANCHEZ:

Oh, I supported them. I felt that we had to support them because if we didn’t, who would? And I would give funds whenever possible. I was never against anyone running for office. I felt the more people ran, eventually it’s like when you’re shooting pictures, if you shoot enough, eventually you’re going to get a good one.

ESPINO:

That’s funny. (Laughs)

SANCHEZ:

That’s why they have that motor. They keep shooting until—then they go through all of them and they pick the good one, right?

ESPINO:

Right, right. Some of the people I talked to of your generation talk about how they just wanted to get a Chicano or Mexican elected. Was that your perspective as well?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, I just wanted to get our people elected, and I felt our best chance was through the Democratic Party.

01:17:08

ESPINO:

What about today? Do you still see it that way?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, even though, you know, there are Latino Republicans. My husband is one, and he was able to—the nemesis of the Latino community, Wilson, he was able to get him, and Bert Corona would have told you and so would the guy that ran MAOF. What was his name?

ESPINO:

A guy who what?

SANCHEZ:

MAOF, started it.

ESPINO:

Dionicio Morales.

SANCHEZ:

Dionicio Morales would have told you that he got them to give him funds. He got them to give him grants.

ESPINO:

Your current husband got the Republican Party—

SANCHEZ:

Got the governor to support and get him funds.

ESPINO:

MAOF funds. CASA or Bert Corona’s organization?

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm, for bilingual training and things, yeah. And if he hadn’t been there, they might not have gotten it.

ESPINO:

Thinking of this millennium, the new millennium that we’re in, how would you define a candidate that you could endorse? What qualities would they have? Because now we have, like, this recent Board of Education campaign with two great female Latina—I think they’re both Mexican American Chicanas. How do you—

SANCHEZ:

Make a choice?

01:18:53

ESPINO:

Mm-hmm.

SANCHEZ:

I make the choice and I look at their record. I look at who’s endorsing them, pro or con, and I make my selection on what I know to be true of them. I have to tell you I wouldn’t be averse to endorsing a Republican if I thought that that Republican had the qualities that I thought would be good for that seat and that had qualities that were much more in tune to the needs of our community than the Democrat that was running.

ESPINO:

How about if it was a white Democratic who had all these values that you’re talking about against a Latino Republican who had the more conservative, more—

SANCHEZ:

I would go with the white Democrat. We’ve endorsed white Democrats.

ESPINO:

So then it doesn’t just come down to race for you.

SANCHEZ:

Nah, not for me. It plays a part, you know. You know, all things being equal, if all things are equal, yeah, I’m going to choose a Latino, Latina, because that’s where my sentiments are. It’s like covering the news. What do we cover? We cover what we think is important to the people that read us.

ESPINO:

I don’t know how much longer you want to talk today. It’s been an hour and twenty minutes. Because that’s definitely the next thing that we need to get into, is your taking over the paper. How much more time would you like to talk today?

SANCHEZ:

I’d like to stop now, and then we can do it next time.

ESPINO:

Okay. That sounds good. Yeah, so then next time it’ll be about that that experience, which you said was in 1979?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

01:21:45

ESPINO:

Before we stop, though, can I just ask you if—you know, because sometimes you don’t have an experience and the discussion stops there, but did you have an opinion or have exposure to those working with the La Raza magazine or the La Raza newspaper?

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

Okay. Okay, so we’ll stop now, and then we’ll—

SANCHEZ:

In those days I was really busy.

ESPINO:

Did you read it?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

Oh, okay. What did you think of it?

SANCHEZ:

I agreed with a lot of it. I’m kind of more—what did Rodriguez say about me? I sometimes don’t like wild talk, and if I felt that an article was kind of wild, I didn’t like it. If I thought it made sense, I’m into making sense, looking at things the way they really are. My children will tell you that.

ESPINO:

Would you have an example of what you mean by “wild talk”?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, saying something, writing something about a person who is a rumor or somebody said. I don’t like that. I like to know for sure that that’s what happened, and I’ve always been that way.

ESPINO:

I’m just assuming because I don’t know exactly what you mean by that, but do you think that they put too much of their own emotion—

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm.

01:23:27

ESPINO:

—and their own personal feelings into—

SANCHEZ:

And I think that sometimes you can be your own worst enemy, that words can either sway people if they agree that it’s sensible what you’re saying, but if they feel that it’s way out there somewhere in left field, you alienate them, you kind of shut a door, and it’s hard to get your foot in if the door’s shut.

ESPINO:

So you think they were shutting out a whole group of people by their talk.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, I think they were being too hard on some people. I think they wanted people to change overnight. I also felt that some of the writing, some of the articles were judgmental when it didn’t need to be. I liked it when they were combative if I believed that that’s what was needed. I’m not against being combative.

ESPINO:

Do you think there’s a place for that in a paper? Like, for example, the way a paper is structured, where would you categorize that kind of piece that was combative?

SANCHEZ:

Opinion.

ESPINO:

Do you think it served a purpose?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

And what purpose would that be?

SANCHEZ:

The purpose was to enlighten people, to expose people to a lot of things that they weren’t even aware were happening, to make people more comfortable with being confrontational. Most of our people are not comfortable being confrontational. I don’t know if you notice that. They kind of shy away or back off. Makes them uncomfortable.

01:26:09

ESPINO:

Yeah, I think it really depends on the issue too. You know, there’s some things that just bring your ire out, and there’s other things that you’re—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, because they’ve been exposed to it, but if you’ve never been exposed to, oh, you didn’t know that women were being sterilized and you had six kids and didn’t want any more, you wondered why—I have a lot of women tell me that. “Les están haciendo un favor. Les están haciendo un favor. Callate. ¿Para qué quieren cinco, seis muchachos? ¿Cómo los van a mantener?” A lot of women were—abortion wasn’t that easy to get. A lot of guys didn’t agree with family planning. Even now, if you noticed yesterday there was a woman who drove her car into the water. What do you think made her do that? She had three little ones and she was pregnant. The other woman who killed her kids that the husband said was—who drowned them, remember? She had four kids and she was pregnant.

ESPINO:

I was thinking of the one who gave a description of an African American male that kidnapped her children, and it was all a lie. She drowned her—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, it was another one.

ESPINO:

And two kids.

SANCHEZ:

When they feel overwhelmed. So it was not an easy—I admired Gloria and Yolanda especially because those two were the ones that were really the leaders of that whole thing, because a lot of women especially that had four or five kids—but some didn’t want any more, thought they were being done a favor. I heard that a lot.

ESPINO:

From people—I mean, how would you be in a situation where you would hear that?

SANCHEZ:

PTAs, the grocery store—

ESPINO:

Right, you had the store.

01:28:28

SANCHEZ:

—a shower, a baby shower.

ESPINO:

When you were in the grocery store, did women come and commiserate with you—

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm.

ESPINO:

—and talk to you about their—

SANCHEZ:

You know, you get to talking to people.

ESPINO:

Yeah, I would imagine that would be a space for that.

SANCHEZ:

So a lot of them didn’t agree with that, with their stopping it. That didn’t mean they didn’t want abortion. They wanted sterilization. That way you didn’t have to abort children. “No ay también andan con las brujas, esas que maten niños. Si no pueden tener más, mejor.” There was a lot of that.

ESPINO:

I’m sure.

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know that they were exposed to it that Gloria and Yolanda were exposed to it, but I was.

ESPINO:

Right. Well, what I found was that in the documents, that when they were looking for plaintiffs for the lawsuit, some of the women would say, “I’m happy with it.” So then they would not follow up with that person, even though it was coercive and they didn’t necessarily agree to it.

01:30:18

SANCHEZ:

It was secretive. They didn’t coerce them; they just did it, especially if they were on welfare. It said they’re on welfare, only support so many kids or something. I don’t even remember what the laws were. I wasn’t that involved in it. I was supportive, but I mean, you know, I didn’t know all the ins and outs of the legislation or anything.

ESPINO:

Yeah, there’s various reasons or there were various tactics in getting them to sign a legal document, and in some cases they didn’t even sign or they don’t remember signing, so there’s just a lot of difference scenarios of how it happened. I guess that’s what I mean, but I also mean that—now I’m went blank on my thought. But the idea that—I’m going to pause it for a second because I can’t remember what I was thinking about. So for the next time. Anyway, I can’t remember what my initial idea was, but—

SANCHEZ:

I don’t remember how we started on that.

ESPINO:

Yeah, because we were talking about being vocal about something and having a specific opinion.

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah, how not everybody was supportive.

ESPINO:

Right, and the idea that sometimes the person that you’re endorsing could be a non-Latina because they share your politics and they share your—oh, we were talking about the La Raza newspaper, and you were saying that they were too—

SANCHEZ:

At times too confrontational.

ESPINO:

At times too confrontational. And then the last thing I’m going to ask you—and this is related to the La Raza, is what I was thinking about, is they felt like they were living a revolution and participating in a revolution. Did you feel like there was a revolution happening coming from your experience and your generation and your—

SANCHEZ:

No.

01:32:08

ESPINO:

You never felt like you were part of this great social movement, social change that was occurring in the community?

SANCHEZ:

I didn’t think of it as a revolution; I thought of it more as like a transition. Like even now, we’re going through a transition. Our younger people aren’t always—for instance, my kids. Except for Gloria, they’re not politically active. And Gloria Molina was telling me that her daughter Valentina could care less. So it was almost—I think at the time we were going through a transition of being more vocal, of being more demanding, and sometimes it was just question of how you did it.

ESPINO:

Interesting.

SANCHEZ:

I always like to be able to not get upset because people get angrier and angrier the less you get upset, and to keep talking, trying to make sense. I guess it came from my grandmother. My grandmother told me (Spanish phrase), which didn’t mean she was mild-mannered at all.

ESPINO:

Right. You told me about her discipline and hard work, expectations for you and your sisters.

SANCHEZ:

My mother’s still very demanding, very—“What’s the matter with your kids? Don’t they know how to do this?” She still listens to the news, and she’ll mention something, and if, “Oh, I didn’t know,” it irritates her. “If you wouldn’t be on that stupid thing.”

ESPINO:

The cell phone. (Laughs) That’s funny. You’re getting scolded by your mom for being on the cell phone.

01:34:40

SANCHEZ:

No. They’re being scolded by their grandmother.

ESPINO:

Oh, she wasn’t talking to you; she was talking to your kids. Oh, that’s funny. Anyway, I’ll stop it here.

SANCHEZ:

Okay. (End of March 7, 2014 interview)

SESSION EIGHT (May 11, 2014)

00:00:25

ESPINO:

This is Virginia Espino, and today is May 11th (2014), and I’m interviewing Dolores Sanchez. This is our last interview at the Eastern Group Publications offices in Highland Park. I wanted to start with—we talked some about your involvement with the Chicana Service Action Center, and I’d like to start there. We didn’t really dig deep into your role.

SANCHEZ:

Well, I was the president for five years. I was the chairman, and we were very proud of saying “chairman.” We did not call the women “chairwoman.” The Center was growing. It concentrated on really Manpower, what was called Manpower and retraining and training people. We also decided that we wanted to sponsor a battered women’s shelter for the women that did not qualify for government benefits. There were a lot of immigrant women who were having a lot of problems with their lives and their boyfriends or whoever, their husbands, and so Edward R. Roybal got us a church house in East Los Angeles and we embarked on the battered women’s shelter, and it was our Spanish-speaking shelter. We hadn’t realized what a need there was for it. We kept getting calls from other states trying to send women to us and the shelter quickly filled up, so we did that. (Recorder turned off)

SANCHEZ:

Francisca Flores and I, as I’ve said before, we knew each other from our MAPA days, and at that time I was in business, I was working, and so the woman that was doing their books moved to Oregon and she had no one to close the books and put in her final report on a grant, and she asked me, “Dolores, can you come in?” And I said, “Sure, I will,” and I never left. I didn’t leave for five, six years, I guess.

00:02:53

ESPINO:

So on top of doing your work for your husband’s business, your ex-husband—at that time you were still married to Joe—you would go after work, or how did you negotiate that schedule?

SANCHEZ:

Well, one of the things that—it’s advantageous for people when they’re in their own business, they can kind of set their own hours. They don’t really have a boss. But most of our meetings were in the evening. They could call me whenever something was needed, if there was a special meeting. I remember when there was a problem between the Chicana Service Action Center and Comisión Femenil over the funding. We wanted to be masters of our own fate. We wanted to really spend and make our own plans for how our Center would run. Originally when Chicana Service Action Center first started, we didn’t have a 501(c) (3), so as a result, we started under the umbrella of Comisión Femenil. I can understand how Comisión Femenil felt that we were taking the program out of their umbrella, since they felt they had some ownership, but Francisca and the other board members, Connie Muñoz—who else was on our board?

ESPINO:

Yolanda Nava?

SANCHEZ:

No, Yolanda Nava and Gloria Molina were members of Comisión. They were the ones that were adamant about not letting Chicana Service Action Center go on their own.

ESPINO:

Chicana Service Action Center had its own board.

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

And Comisión had its—

SANCHEZ:

Own board, yeah.

00:04:47

ESPINO:

Yeah, leadership.

SANCHEZ:

But, you know, sometimes when community organizations, especially in those days when they first started, they did not have a 501(c) (3), and so they would go under the umbrella of another group, and since most of the women who were involved in the Chicana Service Action Center were members of Comisión, it seemed natural for them to do that.

ESPINO:

Was it a question of—was this before or after the battered women’s shelter?

SANCHEZ:

Before.

ESPINO:

So it was before, so this is in the beginning when it was first—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, when we were really—we wanted to train women, you know. We wanted to run programs for women to either get off of welfare and learn, have a trade or a profession, or some of them were unable to find work or they were mothers who found themselves having to work. Comisión was more of an organization that did not have what you would call a staff. It was like many—like NOW and other groups, they did not really run programs at that time. So we felt that we needed a staff, we needed a location, and we wanted to be masters of our own fate, I guess.

00:06:30

ESPINO:

Also seems like the timing was right, the funds, the War on Poverty, funds were made available.

00:09:12

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, the Job Training—what was it? JTPA, Job Training something or other, I can’t remember. So I recall that when we first applied for job-training funds, we had to go to a hearing because with—I don’t recall who it was, that we had to go to a hearing to explain why it wasn’t Comisión Femenil who would be getting the funds as they originally had the first time. Gloria and Yolanda, especially, I think, were kind of upset, Sandy Sewell, that we wanted to become independent, but we felt that originally we got our own funds. We got them from Ed Aguirre, the Department of Education. He gave us our first grant, and so we felt that it was always understood that it was our money and that we would eventually, when we got a chance to get organized as a corporation, that we would go on our own. That led to a lot of hard feelings for a while. There was a problem with Comisión between Comisión and Chicana Service Action Center. It finally, I think, kind of—well, no. Even to just lately when after Francisca died and her records and some of Chicana Service Action Center’s records, Francisca wanted to donate them to Santa Barbara, where Ed Aguirre was, who had given us our first grant, and the women, among them Yolanda, who were tied in with UCLA wanted them to go to UCLA, and as you said, there was even a court case and a brouhaha. You can imagine. I can remember when I guess Comisión had a yearly banquet and they had it at La Fonda, and the Chicana Service Action Center, though we had bought our own tickets, we were nearly out the door because they were so upset with us. (Laughs) But it finally straightened out. I guess we all matured.

And my work there was really handling the board, being available whenever something needed to be done or when some advice or whatever was needed. It was simple at first because Francisca was such a dominating personality that she really handled most of it. It wasn’t, I think, until she started getting a little tired we got different programs. We had the Manpower programs, we got the battered women’s shelter, and we began to need more and more staff regulations. Corrine—

ESPINO:

Corrine Sanchez?

SANCHEZ:

Corrine Sanchez was our deputy director, and she was taking up a lot of the slack because Francisca was getting a little bit slower, you know.

ESPINO:

And you also had the—I don’t know if this was around the same time you had the Centro de Niños. That was starting to emerge.

SANCHEZ:

Centro de Niños was part of—

ESPINO:

Chicana Service—

SANCHEZ:

No, it was part of Comisión that was organized by Sandy Sewell and the members of Comisión, but we always tried to cooperate.

ESPINO:

Did you feel like you were separate entities, the Chicana Service Action Center and Comisión Femenil?

SANCHEZ:

Eventually, yes. Because of all the problems we’d had before, we kind of were mired in program work, you know. We had programs to run, and so we didn’t have the kind of time it took to do a lot of public events and—

00:11:14

ESPINO:

Which Comisión wanted.

SANCHEZ:

—press conferences and women’s conferences, which Comisión did. So it really was a very compatible way to be. We had our line of work, and Chicana Service Center was kind of—we weren’t as dynamic a group. We were more of a work group. We were very quiet as we built our organization.

ESPINO:

You were going to take to the microphone and give big speeches about the work that you were doing? You were going to actually on the ground—

SANCHEZ:

Do it, yeah.

ESPINO:

Did you feel that that was Comisión’s role—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

—to be the spokespeople for you?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and they were talented in that way. They had the ability to do that.

ESPINO:

Did you feel that you had similar objectives, just different strategies, or that your objectives were very different?

SANCHEZ:

I think, in a way, they were different in the fact that we looked at empowerment as a way to help women sustain themselves. I think the Comisión looked at empowerment as a way to bring women up the ladder of industry, you know, the corporate ladder, be more that type of an organization.

00:13:17

ESPINO:

So are you saying that Comisión had a vision of upward mobility into professional ranks versus, say, getting a woman a job in, like, a typically male-dominated industry like firefighting or airplane mechanic? They wouldn’t see that as one of their goals?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know that it wasn’t their goal to empower women, but it wasn’t their priority, I think. They did get involved. Comisión did get involved with women who were being sterilized by the—by then I don’t remember if it was the county or city. I believe by then it was the County Health Department, because originally Los Angeles had its own health department and the county had theirs. They eventually thought that they were duplicating efforts, and so they merged, and I kind of worked with them on that, so I had some knowledge of it. So I think it was the County Health Department that they took on about the sterilization of women, which was wrong. You should have advice. You should have intelligent consent. You should know what you’re consenting to. I mean, they gave interviews to the Los Angeles Times and all these things. We weren’t that type of organization. We were kind of workers, the worker bees.

ESPINO:

At the time that you got involved—so you were already a member of Comisión Femenil or at least going to the meetings?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, I would go to a few meetings, but I didn’t have that much time and, I don’t know, it just didn’t grab me as much as the Chicana Service Action Center, the kind of work we did there. And Francisca and I were very close, so it was, I guess, a dual factor, my closeness with Francisca, my interest in women who needed to work, and the women in Comisión were a slightly younger group of women. We had that background from way—went back to MAPA, that grassroots. They were more glamorous. Yolanda was married to Art Torres, you know. They were college-educated, whereas the women we worked with were women who were working-class women.

00:16:20

ESPINO:

Did Gloria Molina have a degree, college, bachelors?

SANCHEZ:

No, but she—very brilliant woman, very bright woman. That didn’t stop her.

ESPINO:

So she gave the appearance of having a college education, even though—I mean, I’m not sure if she had, like, two years of East L.A. College. I don’t know.

SANCHEZ:

I don’t remember.

ESPINO:

But I don’t think she has a bachelor’s degree.

SANCHEZ:

No, but she’s extremely bright and very brave.

ESPINO:

Did you feel there was a generation gap between you, yourself, and people like Gloria and Yolanda from that next generation?

SANCHEZ:

There might have been. I don’t know that I thought about it in those ways, but I think it was there, yet we worked with Corinne and Corrine was a young woman, but she was able to handle us. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

And she was at the Chicana Service Action Center.

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

She was not with Comisión.

SANCHEZ:

She originally was a member of Comisión too.

ESPINO:

But I mean as far as those two—I’m imagining these two camps—

SANCHEZ:

The two groups, yeah.

ESPINO:

—of thought.

SANCHEZ:

She was our deputy director, so she was quite involved with—I mean, when you looked at the board, I can’t remember, but Connie Muñoz and I were close. We had been together for—known each other, again, from the old days, so maybe we were accustomed to working with each other. We weren’t—I don’t know. I don’t want to use words that I’ll regret later.

00:18:07

ESPINO:

And I feel like now at my age when I’m having a conversation with people in their twenties or thirties, there is a difference. It’s a generational thing.

SANCHEZ:

It’s a gap.

ESPINO:

They’re growing up in a—different values, priorities, expectations, and so sometimes I might be taken aback by things that are for them perfectly normal. So maybe there was something like that going on with these two young, strong women. But then what would be that point of contention? Was it simply control or was it direction of Chicana Service Action Center?

SANCHEZ:

Control.

ESPINO:

Did they seem pleased with the work that was going on there, what you were doing as far as the Manpower?

SANCHEZ:

They never expressed disappointment or anything. You know, they didn’t go and tell us, “Oh, you guys are doing it all wrong,” or anything like that. But they also looked at it, Comisión, like it was their property, you know, a part of their organization. We didn’t do that much—in Chicana Service Action Center, we didn’t do that political work. They did, Comisión did, was very political, though we would assist. I mean, we gave Ed Roybal the first banquet that had been given for him. But again, it was those ties, those old ties. Ed went back with us a long time. He gave us the building for the battered women’s shelter. We’d all known each other for many years. He wasn’t so much, I guess—this is going to sound weird—a mentor as he was a friend, a colleague. So, yes, I guess there was a generation gap, but I never stopped to think about it much.

00:20:25

ESPINO:

The women that you served, did they have issues with the women that you were serving and the—

SANCHEZ:

No, they didn’t have issues. Their priorities were just different, I think.

ESPINO:

And were you feeling like the autonomy you were seeking was going to take the organization in a different direction than Comisión wanted it to go? Would that make them feel threatened by your having autonomy?

SANCHEZ:

They might have. It’s hard to judge what the women in Comisión were thinking. Our thoughts were just that we wanted to run our programs, that we were very distinct from Comisión, and that we wanted to be able to help very, I don’t know, non-professional women. And I may live to regret these words, but I don’t know how else to explain it.

ESPINO:

Well, it’s interesting, because that’s been the critique of Comisión Femenil and of people like Gloria Molina. Other people have written about their role in Comisión and also just in the Chicano and Chicana Movement, and people from that period like Anna Nieto Gomez and—

SANCHEZ:

Anna Nieto Gomez was on our board.

ESPINO:

Of Chicana Service Action Center?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

00:22:08

ESPINO:

And Alicia Escalante would talk about how their goal was the professional women; it wasn’t all women, all Chicanas. So I don’t think you’re the first person to make that observation, so I think other people have said that, and I think they’ve said that themselves.

SANCHEZ:

Again, I think we kind of buried our hatchets, not that there ever was a hatchet, but there was a break there because of the fact that Comisión had really lent us their nonprofit status, and maybe there was a little feeling on Comisión’s part that we were ungrateful. It wasn’t that. It was never intended to stay—as far as the women in Chicana Service Action Center, never intended it to remain a part of Comisión. It was just a convenient—and we felt women’s organization, you know, that we could be compatible with, so why not?

ESPINO:

Did you think that you might want to, with Chicana Service Action, seek relationships with other women’s groups like NOW? I mean, did you feel like you wanted to build—

SANCHEZ:

Well, I think a lot of us had those—

ESPINO:

You already had done that?

SANCHEZ:

We already had those relationships, but that wasn’t what we wanted to stress.

ESPINO:

Well, I’m just trying to understand the—

SANCHEZ:

The dynamics.

00:23:40

ESPINO:

Yeah, and if maybe they felt like, ideologically speaking or politically speaking, Chicana Service Action Center was going to go down this different path that they never envisioned it to go down.

SANCHEZ:

The only path they didn’t envision us to go down is out of the organization. But then we were criticized. A couple of the members of our board, Anna, Corrine, took a trip to China and to Russia, and when they came back, you know, they were at first hard to get along with. Corrine will tell you herself. Sometimes she tells people, “We were dumb.” And there was criticism by Comisión and others that—I mean, they were highly political; one of them was married to a politician—that we shouldn’t be doing that, we would be called communists or something, and some of us had already been through that road as members of MAPA.

ESPINO:

You know, it’s interesting, because when you said that, I didn’t even think communism because I’m thinking in today’s terms, but back then—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, it meant something. You were in for criticism.

ESPINO:

And it’s true, because the police were watching many people in the movement and many people who were mainstream activists, not radicals, revolutionaries, so they were dangerous times.

SANCHEZ:

And some of us on that board had kind of a reputation for being activists, and so maybe our styles didn’t always—maybe they clashed with some of the women in Comisión. When we were worried that a woman shouldn’t have to pick up a box that weighed over twenty-five pounds, they were worried about getting someone into a corporate board of directors.

00:25:49

ESPINO:

How did you find your women? That’s such an interesting—

SANCHEZ:

They came to us. They came to us. We recruited them. We had small ads. We opened our doors and a lot of women—for instance, members of our staff knew women. We had no trouble finding women. Like I said, when we opened our battered women’s shelter, we had women calling from all across—people, I guess more social service people calling us asking us to house women. It was very traumatic for us. A lot of the members of our staff took a great risk in going and rescuing women who were battered, you know. They had to go into homes and wait for the husband to leave and then pack the women and take them out, especially if they had children. A couple of times the husbands came back and threw chairs at the women. And it was up to the board to, I guess, also give them courage, make them feel they were doing something worthwhile. And some of the members of our board did the same work. Yeah, I mean, they would go with them. We had women who wanted—we had to keep the address and the telephone number secret, and some of the women would try to call their husbands after a while, they were so brainwashed. A couple of women were the wives of activists that we had to take in. It was kind of traumatic when you knew you had worked with their husbands and that they weren’t that nice.

ESPINO:

Did you imagine that domestic violence was such a huge problem in the Mexican American community before that center opened, having grown up and been around?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, we did.

00:28:14

ESPINO:

You did know that?

SANCHEZ:

We did. And again, that was not one of Comisión’s priorities. Most of the women probably scared their husbands, you know. They didn’t—

ESPINO:

Yeah, it’s a whole different—it’s such a complicated dynamic and it’s not something that we talk about very much because we’re trying—like even the case that you mentioned, the sterilization case that you mentioned that Comisión played a role in, they wanted to find plaintiffs for the lawsuit who were married, who were documented, who possibly worked, who were not on public assistance, so you’re trying to paint this picture of our community in order to gain acceptance. So I imagine that’s what Comisión—trying to focus on boards and high-profile jobs and appointments versus this very touchy—

SANCHEZ:

Political, you know, taking part of in campaigns. And maybe a lot of us in Chicana Service Action Center had done that already, been there, done that when it was tough, when it was really tough, when we didn’t have either the support, the community support, or the funds. You couldn’t go to a corporation and get voter registration funds. You couldn’t do a lot of things. They just wouldn’t participate. And I think that organizations usually reflect their membership.

00:30:24

ESPINO:

Did you feel like—I’ve heard Gloria Molina say that, looking back, she felt like it was paternalistic. I don’t know if she used that word “paternalistic,” but that she felt like she was going to come and save these people, save these women. Did you feel that, that Chicana Action Service Center was doing that, saving—

SANCHEZ:

No. Well, we felt we wanted to help them, but I don’t think we had—our vision was not that we were up here and they were down there, maybe because we were grassroots workers. These young women never had been. I think Gloria typed, used to come in and volunteer and type some things when we had campaigns and MAPA had campaigns because she was a good typist. But there was a difference, a generation gap, a background gap, an exposure gap, just like now. You know, they made that movie about Cesar Chavez. I’m just glad they made it. We all had a different experience with Cesar. I helped raise funds for Cesar. Cesar would stay in my home when he came to town, and the reason was because I had a big home, and he had an entourage with him with a lot of people, and people would show up wanting to talk to him. I used to tell him, “Go to bed.” He could hardly talk sometimes, but he would keep—

ESPINO:

Receiving people?

SANCHEZ:

Receiving people, yeah.

ESPINO:

Wow. So are you saying that you—have you seen the movie?

SANCHEZ:

No, I haven’t. I don’t know if I want to.

ESPINO:

Why?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t want to criticize. My experience, like a lot of other people’s experiences, are different. Marshall Ganz wrote an article and he was very disappointed in the movie, but it’s all in who you were, where you were at the time, what your role was that you relate to. So this is a short part of his life by people who more or less did not have an intimate relationship with Cesar. Those of us that worked, you know, trying to organize and trying to help raise funds and housing people and feeding and all these things, boycotting and haranguing elected officials, have a different sense. Maybe we’re like the organizing generation. There was a lot of criticism of Cesar.

00:33:10

ESPINO:

Back then?

SANCHEZ:

No, but when things started to change, very hard to be an organizing organization and then to be an institutional organization. So there are going to be problems with it, like they say they show Cesar alone a lot. I don’t recall ever—and I had a close relationship with him—his ever being alone. I think that was one of the problems. He was always surrounded by people wanting things, decision-making. Helen was a strong person and supported him and everything, but she had a family to raise too. You know, I can’t see that she would even, from what Marshall Ganz says, try to have to urge, have to urge Cesar to do anything. So a lot of the women at Comisión didn’t have that experience, but a lot of us did who were at Chicana Service Action Center.

ESPINO:

There were certain things—in just thinking about some of your answers to other questions or some of your statements, there were things you have long accepted and have moved on about gender and politics and all of those things, so maybe they were coming of age at a whole different time. Like you said, there was something happen—was it you who said there was something that changed in the seventies as far as women’s rights?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

00:35:24

ESPINO:

You said that women started demanding more equality for themselves and leadership roles and things like that.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. And they didn’t have some of the background that we did, and I’m not faulting them for it. It’s just a different generation. The reason I started talking about Cesar was that my daughter went to see the movie and she said there were only three people in the theater. That would never, ever have happened during my time, but it’s like I guess he’s not an inspiration. That would never happen with a Martin Luther King film. So I think I’d rather keep my experiences at a different level. I don’t want to be angry about the fact that there were only three people. How can that be? You know, how can it be that some of the young journalists that we talk to have no—well, they know he had a grape boycotting of the UFW and Dolores Huerta, but in a way they don’t relate. Their parents weren’t farm workers. They’ve never been in a field.

ESPINO:

And I also feel like, just coming from a historical perspective, that historians have done a really good job of telling the truth but, in effect, making us feel like, well, he wasn’t that great of a hero—

SANCHEZ:

He was.

ESPINO:

—because he did this. So then you grow up thinking, “Well, is he a hero? What about Dolores?” It’s confusing.

SANCHEZ:

Dolores Huerta was a part, and I’m not minimizing her role. What I’m saying is that about the film, and I think they say that Dolores Huerta would come in and out of the film. She was always there. She was always out on a boycott, in fact. You know, sometimes the people in Keene would kind of—because she had a lot of children—would kind of grumble at the fact that she was gone a lot. She was out organizing.

00:37:56

ESPINO:

It’s an interesting question, and I feel like what you’re saying is that back in the—would you say the sixties?

SANCHEZ:

And the early seventies. The early seventies there was still—

ESPINO:

There was a sort of a loyalty to some things, that you would just do it. Today there’s not that loyalty.

SANCHEZ:

No, there isn’t.

ESPINO:

Chicanos, even professors, are not going to go see that film because they don’t have—because of all the criticism, the negative—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and why does it always have to be negative? Having gone through that, having a lot of people hit me over the head because AKA Pablo (phonetic) was not, you know, a college professor with a wife who was a doctor or something, they were just ordinary working people, I understand. I know, and yet I want to go just so that they’ll say that people did come. So I may go this weekend if it’s still there. I don’t know that it’ll still be showing.

ESPINO:

I enjoyed it very much.

SANCHEZ:

You did?

ESPINO:

I really did.

SANCHEZ:

Good.

ESPINO:

Yeah, I really enjoyed it, and I take it as a work of fiction, not a documentary.

SANCHEZ:

No, it’s not a documentary or even a short biography, because there isn’t that experience.

00:39:16

ESPINO:

They had a different objective, I’m sure.

SANCHEZ:

They haven’t, you know, marched through the dust in Delano. They haven’t had to cross a bridge in a fire truck. They haven’t had to have Jerry Brown come and send the state police to guard Cesar, you know. And I guess it would be a movie that would be three hours long, or four hours.

ESPINO:

Right. It would have to be an epic.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, like Roots.

ESPINO:

Yeah, like you would have to take it in segments.

SANCHEZ:

And I’m surprised that it hasn’t been done, that really it hasn’t been done.

ESPINO:

Yeah, I think you’re right.

SANCHEZ:

Because that’s the kind of, you know, the kind of work that it would take to really show the fear of the ranchers, “Moe” Jordain being jailed all beat up, you know, from being run off the road and coming out horribly scarred but still a brilliant lawyer, you know, working on the short-handled hoe, Chris Hartmeyer trying to gather all the religious efforts, Marshall Ganz and Jessica Govea also always pushing, pushing, pushing, you know, sleeping on the floor sometimes. And I think those things, no one’s done it, and it’s so sad, because it is our roots.

ESPINO:

And when you talk to people who came of age around that period, it had a huge impact on the direction that their life took after that, after that activism, and not even just Chicanos, Mexican Americans, but a lot of Jewish people—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

00:41:36

ESPINO:

—Anglos.

SANCHEZ:

The Filipinos, the fact that there was great anger at the immigrants because they were afraid of losing their jobs, their roots weren’t here. They came to make money to send home. This wasn’t home, I guess, and so they didn’t want to, at first, cooperate with the union, and Cesar and everybody took it very hard because we felt that we had welcomed the immigrants. We had housed them, we had fed them, and for them not to understand what it was all about and how it was for their own good was difficult, but we mended those fences. And sometimes I don’t talk too much about it. I’m not sure if it’s because it hurts or because it frustrates me that people don’t understand.

ESPINO:

His role or—

SANCHEZ:

His role. How he was the first organizer in our community to really organize everyone, that it was anathema to us to go to a banquet and have grapes on the table. You know, it just shouldn’t be done. And to this day some people react, but I wonder if they know why. The grape boycott, to organize a national boycott, no one’s been able to do it since.

ESPINO:

That’s right.

00:44:30

SANCHEZ:

So either to try to downplay his importance or his dedication or to minimize it is sad to me. But I remember going to a meeting about a banquet with Comisión, and I guess—I don’t remember who said, “Well, make sure there’s no grapes on the table,” and they looked at us like, “Is that all you care about?”

I remember being very upset with the Teamsters when they started to organize and take the ranchers’, growers’ part because they wanted to organize. They were going to go in and, I guess, benefit on the farm workers’ backs, you know, on the UFW’s back. They gave Mo Jourdane—makes me even cry. They had an award for Mo Jourdane not long ago, and that should be part of the record, you know. And there were people who really were very prominent people who took to heart.

ESPINO:

Yeah, the Kennedys.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. So we had an experience in the Chicana Service Action Center of having done that, many of us.

ESPINO:

The UFW, you mean. The boycott.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, our boycott. We were labor people.

ESPINO:

The Mexican farm worker.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

The peasant, so to speak, or the most exploited, poor, impoverished.

SANCHEZ:

Right. Yeah.

ESPINO:

Trying to help them get some dignity. But, yes, it wasn’t about getting the farm worker on any boards or—

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

—into school so that they could move out of—

SANCHEZ:

I guess we were—you might call us fundamentalists. We felt that if we could empower our people to have jobs, to have good-paying jobs, to have businesses, small businesses that employed people, to have good teachers for students, these things would eventually get our people on boards. They would eventually—we would eventually have more elected officials.

00:47:25

ESPINO:

As the generations grew and education was achieved by the second and third generations.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

But do you feel like—I understand the importance of—well, everyone I talk to speaks about how important Cesar Chavez was for their political formation, but then something happened—it feels like something—even in my own upbringing, something happened where people started to criticize him more, and that started to feel—like almost in the same way that the grape boycott mobilized us all. Even to this day it’s hard to eat grapes without thinking about the farm workers. But then something filtered down, too, about Cesar and that he kind of—the way he was managing the movement—

SANCHEZ:

That’s what I mean.

ESPINO:

In the end, like in the eighties.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, because it’s very difficult to make the transition from organizer—some people never do, from organizer to being an established organization that does things, like MAOF and all these. But I think a lot of the reasons that all these groups were able to organize and to have programs and money and revenue from grants and things was because of the work that Cesar did. The exposure, the exposure a lot of us got, it’s like the Manpower programs, you know. Where on earth would people like Dionicio Morales or Francisca or a lot of other people, Tony Rios, have gotten the experience to handle large sums of money if it wasn’t for the Manpower programs, the money that came in?

00:49:34

ESPINO:

And you think that was Cesar Chavez’s advocacy or—

SANCHEZ:

Well, I think a lot of it was the attention he brought to our people. The organizing skills that many people got, they didn’t all stay with the farm workers. They left, you know. They started other groups and stuff, but that gave them a sense of how to do it. I always think of—a lot of people say, “Ah, those—.” What do they call them, poverty pimps? I knew a man who used to call them that, the people that run organizations. But the first pioneers in that, it gave them tremendous experience. They would have had to work in a corporation for twenty-five years to be able to rise to the level of president of an organization. These guys here today, Casaro de la Rocha, oh, I don’t know who else, the guy that runs TELACU, David Lizárraga, all of these people, they could not have built organizations with that kind of power and that kind of money coming in if it weren’t for the organizing experience that people brought to their organizations.

ESPINO:

Do you think that on top of—well, the whole climate was different, but the idea that there was these poverty funds, the War on Poverty, and Manpower, do you think that—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

—helped to transform the city?

00:51:29

SANCHEZ:

Transform our community, in a way. Like I said, it gave everyone the opportunity to handle large sums of money, large organizations that people in private industry don’t normally have. They might not like that I’m saying that, but it’s the truth.

ESPINO:

Do you think that it was—because when I interviewed Esteban Torres, he talked about what his vision was for TELACU and then what it later became after David took over and how it changed. But I’m also thinking about—and it’s not just within the Latino community or the Mexican, it’s within all the communities that receive this funding, that there was some kind of seduction about having all this money and then the power that came along with it and the temptation to fudge here and there for your own gain. Did you see that happening back then with some of those organizations?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. For instance, I recall that it used—because we had no background until these guys went to college and took business courses and things, when they would say, “Okay, well—,” you’d tell them, “I need some money for this or that,” I would hear, and then the corporate person would tell you, “Okay, well, give me a proposal. And they would say, “Hmm.” We weren’t accustomed to minutiae, to putting a proposal together, to experience and expertise, and we had to go to other people until we learned it. And even now to get a final report, a lot of people don’t like to give final reports on what they did with somebody’s money. Just lately a guy that worked in Sacramento—I was shocked—through an organization he got a grant to do certain things, and he was angry when this organization asked him for a final report. “I don’t have to explain to you.” I did it, but we were always used to accountability because, you know, number one, we didn’t have government funds. It was usually community money. But maybe it’s progress. It’s progress that we’ve got huge organizations now able to run as an institution. We didn’t have those before.

00:54:22

ESPINO:

This is probably a silly question, but was it good to have that influx of money coming into the community?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, I do. I believe that because I don’t know how else they would have gotten that expertise. Like I said, you have to work for a corporation for a long time before you make it to vice president, one of the twenty vice presidents, you know, with your own little budget.

ESPINO:

So thinking about these organizations that were started with Manpower, like the Mexican American Opportunity Foundation was one—

SANCHEZ:

MAOF.

ESPINO:

—TELACU was another, and then the Chicana Service Action Center also had Manpower.

SANCHEZ:

And they still do, yeah. They’re still in existence. They still work. They have CalWORKs. They run CalWORKs.

ESPINO:

Do you feel that the idea behind the whole War on Poverty and the Manpower program, do you think that those objectives were met?

00:56:29

SANCHEZ:

I do think they were. I just feel that, like you said, there’s a certain seduction in being able to do things that others weren’t having the money to do it, trying to emulate what we originally criticized. It can kind of coopt you. You can lose your way. That’s unfortunate, and maybe it happens to every group. I don’t know. The thousand-dollar suits and, you know, boarding a plane and sitting in first class. There’s seduction in that and you can lose your way. It’s very easy to lose your way. In Spanish we have dicen que el que nunca tuvo y llega tener, hasta loco se quiere volver.

ESPINO:

Yeah, I think that’s so true. And I thought you were going to say—when you mentioned those women from the Chicana Service Action Center who went to Russia and China, I thought you were going to say on the Manpower funds, using Manpower funds.

SANCHEZ:

No, they used their own funds. See, that’s another thing. We never quibbled. We were always really straight on how we used our money, which wasn’t always true of other organizations—

ESPINO:

Oh, absolutely.

SANCHEZ:

—and it made us somewhat of outsiders too.

ESPINO:

Did people fall into place as far as who was going to do what based on their—like, for example, you said you were drawn to the Chicana Service Action Center because of the work that they were doing. Was that true of all the other people there?

SANCHEZ:

I think so.

ESPINO:

You all had some sort of similar vision about what you wanted to achieve?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. It was why I, a little Chicana, thanks to Gloria Molina, got a commission that really, in a way, scared the hell out of me because sometimes it was frustrating not to have these people understand where we’re coming from. In a way, a lot of people would say about these funds that they were just spoiling people, they weren’t being useful. And then coming home and transitioning, trying to help the community transition, trying to develop protocols and ways of transferring from GTPA to CETA, from one way of doing Manpower to another and having Jerry Brown tell you, “Well, you’ve been on the commission. Now you can do this.”

00:58:51

ESPINO:

That’s a lot of responsibility, because you’re dealing with people’s lives and their futures. It’s not just a number on a piece of paper.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, the commission dealt with problems with the unemployment compensation and Social Security and the amounts of money that are now coming true, that are now being enacted.

ESPINO:

You mean now like today now?

SANCHEZ:

Today. Extending benefits, and people complain about the fact that they can’t get an answer from the Department of Development Employment. It’s because there’s a recession. They build up personnel and everything, right? And then the recession’s over and they don’t have work for these people, so they have to let them go. Then another recession comes and you have to slowly build up, and people don’t understand because they’re desperate, you know. They’re desperate for funds. And that was some of the things you grappled with. How can you take 15.1 percent of a person’s salary? And people bitch about it, but then it may be the salvation of a lot of other people.

ESPINO:

Right, right. Do you feel like—was that the first time that you actually had contact with more of the Chicano Movement generation through the Chicana Service Action Center, like an organization where you actually had more regular contact? Because MAPA stayed pretty much your generation, and then some of the other things like the (unclear)—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, because originally I had worked within the ILGWU, and so, yeah, it was probably the first not only contact, but working contact. We would gear up and down for MAPA. If there’s an election, we gear up like EDD. It’s not in the core people. You always have a core group of people, then we would kind of—everybody would go their own way except for the core group of people. Then there’d be another election and we’d have to gear up again. But we always stayed with MAPA. There were some of us who were diehards.

01:01:38

ESPINO:

Do you feel like your role with Comisión and Chicana Service Action Center was part of that just continuing legacy or do you feel like that was a whole different kind of new activism or new—

SANCHEZ:

No, I think it was a continuing legacy that it kind of builds the—oh, what am I trying to say? Let me think. We’re kind of the shoulders that they stood on to keep building, you know, the foundation, and they strengthened the foundation, and first it has one floor and then it has another and then it has three floors, you know. But I think we built a foundation.

ESPINO:

Where do you think that organization had its greatest impact?

SANCHEZ:

Which one?

ESPINO:

The Chicana Service Action Center. Do you think that it was transforming lives?

SANCHEZ:

Well, really, the ability to build an organization that could transform lives, that there were women who built up expertise that were willing to dedicate themselves to transforming other people’s lives, that we could have a staff, that it wasn’t all volunteer work. You know what I mean?

01:03:20

ESPINO:

When I think about that period, I think about all the rhetoric of the time and revolution and social change and that kind of thing. Do you think that there was something revolutionary about what was happening there or was it—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

Can you explain how you view that?

SANCHEZ:

It was revolutionary in the fact that we were willing to take risks, we were willing to do things publicly, we were willing to confront people, systems that our people were never really accustomed to doing or even comfortable with. It was that kind of revolution that came. We could go out and ask movie stars to do things, you know, and generally confront politicians where only a few people were able to do that before. It was the second generation of confrontation with a purpose, organization that was building institutionally. I don’t think we’d ever really had that. Tony Rios was one of the first CIOs. We didn’t have that kind of institution.

ESPINO:

How about confidence?

SANCHEZ:

Confidence? I told you I had a terrible time giving a speech. I wanted to throw up. I was sick all night. The confidence not to feel dumb, not to falter under others’ displeasure, not to feel like you could articulate things. We’d always been made to feel that, “Ah, we don’t understand you,” blah, blah, blah, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah, it was a revolution. It was a revolution of our young people breaking out of the familial mold, going on and taking their own road in many instances, feeling that they wanted to do things we weren’t always comfortable with, their parents weren’t always comfortable with.

ESPINO:

Did you feel Francisca Flores was a mentor or a peer?

SANCHEZ:

Both. A mentor to a lot of us and a peer, too, because we kind of discussed things.

01:06:39

ESPINO:

She came to you for advice—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

—and to consult?

SANCHEZ:

I remember during my divorce she was very upset that she was one of the last to know, because I didn’t know how to tell her.

ESPINO:

Did she have a relationship with your ex?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

That must have been hard.

SANCHEZ:

But she understood, you know. She didn’t—like a lot of other people, she didn’t judge. There was that closeness with us.

ESPINO:

Was that a shock to the larger Chicano and Mexican American—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, a shock and anger, a source of anger. We were not supposed to do that. We were supposed to be there for the community.

ESPINO:

As a unit.

SANCHEZ:

As a unit. A lot of people took sides.

ESPINO:

No, shouldn’t say that.

SANCHEZ:

Yes, they took sides.

ESPINO:

Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.

01:07:57

SANCHEZ:

Ah, well. I’m one of those people who has never really been afraid to say what I think or do. But it was disappointing too. That was such a great disappointment that a lot of people took sides and a lot of people, like some of the members of Comisión, went where they thought the money was.

ESPINO:

Well, who was telling me—it was Rosalio yesterday. We were talking, and he was just telling me all the campaigns that your family, before your divorce, would—just organizations that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the fundraising of you when you were married to Joe.

SANCHEZ:

And so many people minimized the fact that Jonathan and I have built people, that we have defended them, that we have been here when no one else was when the Times was attacking them. When Jonathan, as a Republican, went against this feeling sometimes that he didn’t agree and still supported a lot of things that were mostly Democratic because of our people were Democrats that we had to struggle. We came into being during the recession prior to this one. It was a bad one.

ESPINO:

The mid-seventies, yeah, I remember that.

SANCHEZ:

1979.

ESPINO:

Late seventies, uh-huh. Right.

SANCHEZ:

That he had to go out and do jobs to support the newspaper that everybody came to us wanting something but never contributing.

ESPINO:

Okay, so you’re saying that people compare your marriage to Joe to your marriage today and what you did when you were married to him and what you did—

01:10:24

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and they don’t understand the importance of what a newspaper can do. See, to them it was important to buy a table. They didn’t understand that half that money went to a hotel, to the thing of just putting on an event, but that what we said people listened to, and they listened to it across the country and in Washington, and the people could go into libraries. Most of the libraries in Los Angeles carried our newspapers, that when the Times criticized him, it was we who had the voice. Wasn’t anybody else?

The radio stations were for entertainment, and La Opinión was yesterday’s Times, but they served their role. I don’t ever want to say that La Opinión didn’t serve a very critical role, but that it was English and it was people who understood the system who the system listened to, who when the paper wrote an article about someone, it just didn’t disappear into thin air, you know, that we carried their social life. We carried stories about their events, about their banquets and things.

ESPINO:

Very local, local, local coverage.

SANCHEZ:

And they kind of minimized that because they were—like I said, they were interested in the money.

ESPINO:

So the paper came about at the time of your divorce?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

You both didn’t agree to purchase it and work together on it?

SANCHEZ:

He wanted to purchase it, but he was a very political person who wanted to use it—I wanted to use it as a—and that was one of the things that cracked it besides some personal things—to give our community a voice, not to give myself a voice, not to give myself stature.

01:12:15

ESPINO:

Were you hoping to cover all sides of issues and not just—

SANCHEZ:

And we tried to do, we tried to do that because I figure people have the information, they’re smart enough to make a judgment call, they’re smart enough to make a decision. If they don’t hear the other side, they—in fact, who was it? Was it Bobo (phonetic)? Oh, one of Cesar’s children or grandchildren said—I don’t know if you remember when they were criticizing the fact that one of the granddaughters, she married somebody named Gonzales, had a job with the foundation and she was being paid.

ESPINO:

One of the Cesar Chavez granddaughters?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

I don’t remember.

SANCHEZ:

There was a big—

ESPINO:

But I’ve heard that story—

SANCHEZ:

—which the Times started.

ESPINO:

—for other—well, no, people.

SANCHEZ:

We were the only ones that said, “Well, why shouldn’t she be paid? Everybody else is being paid.” We were the only people that came to her defense, who understood what it was all about. We sometimes have to carry news we don’t like, but we do it, but it isn’t something that we go out to dig and try to catch people doing. If it comes up, we’re going to call it as we see it, but we’re not out to get anybody. We don’t care if we win Pulitzer Prize or not. That’s not our motive. And a lot of people don’t know that it was Jon who forced and harangued Wilson into giving the bilingual funds to people, to organizations like MAOF and Hermandad. A very different type. He doesn’t go around saying, “Well, I did it.”

01:14:34

ESPINO:

Right.

SANCHEZ:

It was the work of the organization started by Jonathan, myself, and some other publishers when they were trying to—they felt it would knock us out of existence if they started to tax newspapers, and the people that wanted to tax the newspapers were after the Times, being ignorant of the fact that they were going to kill us.

ESPINO:

Right. It’s almost like the whole idea of the minimum wage, and that’s controversial because for the small business owner—

SANCHEZ:

It was the California Hispanic Newspapers Publishers, the CHPA that went all the way to Sacramento and made them repeal that part about free-circulation newspapers. That’s all our community had.

ESPINO:

Do you think that if your divorce would take place in today’s world, that you would still see that division of—or do you think it was—

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know.

ESPINO:

—because of the time that it happened?

SANCHEZ:

I think it was the time. I think it was the time.

ESPINO:

That people they felt they had to choose between these two powerful individuals?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and they didn’t want to, like I said, choose the person who they thought was poor. I wasn’t poor in ideas. I wasn’t poor in my ability to work and make money. And I think they had a sense that Joe was the one who had made all the money.

ESPINO:

Do you think they thought he was the one who had all the ideas as well—

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm.

01:16:49

ESPINO:

—and all the connections? That must have been hard for you.

SANCHEZ:

It was very hard. It was very, very hard. It was very hard. And yet there were some people who—and it was very hard to have women who I thought were supportive taking the other side or at least not being equal in how they felt.

ESPINO:

Somebody told me a recent story and I can’t remember who it was. It wasn’t on an interview, but it sounds similar and it’s regarding Gloria Molina and Alatorre, and some people felt like they had—because Alatorre had been close with a lot of people in those early days, an ally, and so then when that election—or I can’t remember if it’s when she wanted to run and he didn’t support her or if it was against each other. I can’t remember. I should know that.

SANCHEZ:

No, he told her (unclear). Richard’s a wonderful person and he’s always been very respectful of women, but he kind of separated his political work from his personal feelings, you know, and he felt that Gloria wouldn’t win, that it wasn’t her time. And that was a terrible thing to say. I didn’t make a judgment that way. I supported Polanco, but not because I didn’t think Gloria was capable or could. I supported him because he was the first one that asked me and nobody had asked me, and so I said okay, and I never go back on my word. I never go back. It hurt a lot and Gloria was very angry, and for many years she didn’t forgive me, even though I was supportive later on, and the newspaper came to her defense and explained somewhat and endorsed her, and in endorsing her, gave an explanation of why we thought she was the best candidate. But it took years for her to forgive me.

01:19:26

ESPINO:

Well, it was that same kind of thing where this person was saying that Gloria took it as a betrayal, but she had this long history with this person and she couldn’t—she had to choose one or the other. Very difficult situation.

SANCHEZ:

And Gloria wound up in the right spot and Polanco wound up in—if we have many people in the legislature, it’s Polanco’s work, though he gets little thanks for it because, I don’t know, the new crop—there used to be a saying in politics, “If you don’t pay back, don’t come back.”

ESPINO:

I love that.

SANCHEZ:

But now it’s everyone’s out for themselves, and I’m willing to say it up front.

ESPINO:

Do you see that as a generational thing today with people? You mentioned before, in an interview before, that some of the children of activists of the movement could care less about it.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. In fact, they kind of resented the movement because they thought that we devoted too much time to it. I have children who are still very political in their thinking and some that don’t want to hear it and a couple who don’t think that you give back, but the rest do, that you always give back. You just don’t hog up everything for yourself.

ESPINO:

Is there anything that you can see from your coverage of contemporary issues something similar to what you witnessed in those early days with MAPA and later on with the Comisión and some of the Chicano Movement, Chicana Service Action Center activism?

SANCHEZ:

No.

01:21:27

ESPINO:

So the Immigrant Rights Movement of today and the Dreamers—

SANCHEZ:

It’s mainly run by immigrants. Organizations do take some part, but there isn’t that kind of organizational effort. “Oh, yeah, I’ll send you a couple of bucks and I’ll go to a banquet,” or, “I’ll give a speech,” or something, but it’s not that integrated, I don’t think. And, in fact, I hear a lot of resentment. “We didn’t just arrive yesterday. We didn’t all come with five cents in our pocket. We’re not all foreigners. We’ve been here for many years, for generations. Why are we all looked at that way?”

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

“We all speak perfect English. Why so much effort on the part of the immigrants and not for the rest of the community?” I hear that a lot, and sometimes I feel it myself when certain things come up.

ESPINO:

You can see that the struggles of people who are already here get ignored because the attention is so prominently placed on that issue. It’s unfortunate, and it feels like that’s a repetition in history when you think about the black and Chicano, like fighting over those War on Poverty funds. Both are deserving, but when you only have this little bit of—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, you’re going to fight over them. You’re going to fight over them. And now it’s the feeling that we never—in fact, I had someone yesterday tell me something which I found—“Well, it’s not the Chicanos who have the big dropout rate. Why is the dropout rate so bad in L.A.? Why are the streets so dirty? We always had them clean.” Why this, why that? That resentment of recent immigrants because she—it was a she—she said, “We’re never going to get ahead. We’re always going to be taking one step forward and one step back with every new wave that comes.” Oh, it came up because of that article in the Times about the UCLA—was it UCLA that unveiled a study that talks about Los Angeles as being poor, disorganized, badly run?

01:24:57

ESPINO:

I think I might have seen something about that. I’m going to look at it.

SANCHEZ:

You need to read it, yeah. And she said it’s true.

ESPINO:

But isn’t that also what Mayor Garcetti was saying, that he’s seen that and that’s why he’s turning over some of the leadership?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but he has a different attitude.

ESPINO:

He’s not looking at it as an immigrant problem or some Chicano problem.

SANCHEZ:

He’s not looking at it as a problem without a solution.

ESPINO:

That study reads as if it’s a problem of Chicanos?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, of the future here.

ESPINO:

Of the demographic change?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Bad government. Well, who’s running our government right now, the city government? Who’s the City Council? Who are the pupils in schools?

ESPINO:

Well, I often wonder that myself, because when you talk about people who were active in the walkouts and your activism and then you see the leadership did change, people did get into positions of power, became lawyers, became doctors, and yet we still are in crisis. And I think you said this also before, that if you ask about what the issues were then and now, you would see many of the same things.

SANCHEZ:

They’re almost the same things.

01:26:36

ESPINO:

Do you ever think about why that is? Or what’s your perspective? I mean, just thinking—

SANCHEZ:

I think part of it is because we’ve had to welcome a large influx. We’ve always had an influx, but I don’t think it was as large as it’s been when all the problems in Mexico, you know, the—

ESPINO:

The drug war?

SANCHEZ:

Not only the drug but the—

ESPINO:

Economic?

SANCHEZ:

The economic problems. People are going to go where they—and they come with one thought in mind: to support themselves. They don’t have maybe the luxury. They don’t have the exposure. The streets are messy, but it’s because they’re maybe overused. This person was saying they’re messy because our people are messy, they throw everything on the floor, they don’t know how to use a trashcan. And maybe there’s some truth in it. Exposure, you know. If you never had a vacuum cleaner, well, you might dust once a week or something, but you don’t pick up all that dust, right? A dishwasher makes a lot of difference in getting all the dishes done. Sometimes maybe you and your husband are working and you just don’t get to the dishes or something.

ESPINO:

It’s hard to find those points of solidarity, it seems.

01:28:36

SANCHEZ:

There’s no shortcut, I think. There’s no shortcut to education. There’s no shortcut to acculturation. There’s just no shortcut. Takes time. I think we’re a lot better off. I don’t like when I hear people say that there’s been no progress. Then what have we been fighting for all these years? For nothing? But I don’t think that’s true.

ESPINO:

And I think also it’s hard to see your reality within the context of the whole United States—

SANCHEZ:

Yes, yes.

ESPINO:

—because you think, oh, it’s just because I’m in Los Angeles and there’s this demographic, when I think it’s—

SANCHEZ:

Well, there is, but there are other demographics other places.

ESPINO:

Yes, and the economic crisis, that it affects everybody, so when you see the schools are overcrowded and that sort of thing, people attribute it to a failure of a movement, but I think it could be many, many, many, many issues. Well, I just want to read you a couple of things before stop.

SANCHEZ:

Just let me say one thing.

ESPINO:

Yes.

SANCHEZ:

Jonathan and I and Gloria, we sometimes feel like what are we doing here? Why are we killing ourselves? And then something will happen, and then it renews your spirit and you’re more determined than ever. It’s hard to have to go out to work to give other people exposure, you know. I remember when we first got the newspapers. Frank Muñoz had a daughter who wanted to do dubbing, you know, Spanish dubbing on English—

ESPINO:

TV?

SANCHEZ:

On English advertisements, ads, you know.

01:30:18

ESPINO:

For TV?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and for radio, I guess. And so he sent her over and he said, “Can you teach her how to do it?” And Jonathan and I just looked at each other. Or one of the Rodriguez brothers came over and said, “How dare you put that big ad and then cut down on the story you wrote on us?” No sense. And yet there have been people like Richard Alatorre who have helped as much as they could and gone way beyond.

ESPINO:

You consider writing this newspaper part of your social activism?

SANCHEZ:

Mm-hmm. I think now it’s the only part of my social activism. I wonder what would happen if we didn’t publish. (unclear) we just don’t publish anymore, if we just all go home and say, “Oh, you know, we’re tired”? Who’s going to tell our stories and who’s going to refute some of the things that go on? Who’s going to give our candidates endorsements that they deserve but aren’t getting? Who’s going to train some of the—we’ve had a lot of people go through this training here.

ESPINO:

And they go on to other media outlets?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

Has anybody gone on to the L.A. Times?

SANCHEZ:

No. Well, the L.A. Times has tried to steal people.

ESPINO:

That’s flattering.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, in a way. It’s a kind of a backhanded compliment. They’ve gone to news services, other newspapers. They’ve written books, they’ve become authors. Luis Rodriguez, you know.

01:32:41

ESPINO:

He started here? I didn’t know that. I haven’t read his biography or anything, so maybe it’s there, but I didn’t know.

SANCHEZ:

Roberto Rodríguez.

ESPINO:

Oh, really?

SANCHEZ:

He worked here.

ESPINO:

And then is he the one who’s in Arizona now?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

And his wife is also a writer?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

Wow. That’s impressive.

SANCHEZ:

We’ve had other people that have gone to the San Bernardino Sun. They’ve gone other places. They’ve become attorneys who have an understanding and have gone into legal organizations, you know, for the poor, done work pro bono, understand more about what’s going into the community. But not even only for Latinos; for Asians, for Hindus, because we think it’s important they understand us. One of the young women who worked for us here is now a writer for City News Service, CNS.

ESPINO:

That’s a wonderful service for the community, but also, like you’re saying, the training ground to get your hands wet or feet wet or whatever that expression is into journalism.

SANCHEZ:

A lot of them have gotten their first byline here. We had a Hindu young woman who wrote her first article in Spanish and got a byline.

ESPINO:

She spoke Spanish?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

01:34:22

ESPINO:

Did she learn while on the job or she already knew when she came?

SANCHEZ:

She already knew Spanish, but she couldn’t put an article together, you know.

ESPINO:

Do you work with any of the high schools, internship-type things?

SANCHEZ:

It’s very hard because the kids have their school newspaper.

ESPINO:

That’s right.

SANCHEZ:

We do give summer internships. We’ve had young people come through here. Mainly, though, it’s usually, like, a lot of kids from ELAC, though we stopped because Jean Stapleton—

ESPINO:

Oh, the actress?

SANCHEZ:

No, she taught journalism at ELAC. Jean—I can’t remember her name. Anyway, she called us one time very upset that we edited some of the students that she sent to us, their work, and that we said this was edited by our managing editor. So we decided not to, because you have to edit.

ESPINO:

She didn’t want you to edit their work?

SANCHEZ:

So we just—it’s too much effort, but we still do get quite a few interns, CORE interns from—we had an intern from Stanford. We’ve had all kinds of interns. Then they get their feet wet.

ESPINO:

Right. And it’s a coverage that seems to be a dying kind of coverage when you think about mainstream media like the L.A. Times or even what’s happening on the Internet.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. On the Internet you’re not quite sure if all the facts are correct, and in newspapers they’ve cut down so much that they’re highly dependent on wire services. We are, too, but we’ve sent people to the wire services, and we do rewrites and we do, if a story we feel merits it, take it further.

01:36:54

ESPINO:

How many reporters do you have on staff?

SANCHEZ:

Two on staff and about six who do work outside, because we don’t have the facility or the budget.

ESPINO:

So like for a special project or special assignment?

SANCHEZ:

We’ll ask someone to do an article on something.

ESPINO:

Say, for example, this bus accident that recently happened. Would you cover that through wires or would you send somebody?

SANCHEZ:

Probably through wires because we don’t have the budget to send somebody over there.

ESPINO:

Considering you cover such a huge geographic space, how do you determine what you’re going to cover, what issues will appear in the paper?

SANCHEZ:

Actually, they’re issues of the day. There may be an issue with LAUSD that has nothing to do with MUSD, or there may be an issue with MUSD that has nothing to do with LAUSD, so we’ll pick what’s the most important, because we start out with a stack this big and it goes the end of the week.

ESPINO:

You mean Montebello School District, Montebello Unified? Okay, MUSD.

SANCHEZ:

Because we cover their school district too.

01:38:24

ESPINO:

So that would be like one institution, so to speak, that you always are going to make sure you know what’s happening, and that’s the school district.

SANCHEZ:

Yes, because of the communities we serve.

ESPINO:

What would be some other big entities like that? Like labor? Do you cover, for example, big SEIU or AFL?

SANCHEZ:

No. And then if we feel it’s important, if the issue is important enough that it surpasses everything else because we have so much to cover, City Council meetings, county, Board of Supervisors. And it’s a matter of culling down sometimes. You don’t have as much space.

ESPINO:

And do you always have something? Because I’m looking at some of the pages you have here, and it looks like you have slice of life, almost. Is that something you have on a regular basis?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, we’re highly local. The lives of the people from the communities we serve we circulate in, that takes priority, some of the history of our community. If you look back, you’re going to see issues of importance in our back issues and stuff of what people were doing, thinking. A lot of the mainstream media will cover issues, but they never tell you what happened. You know, they’ll cover that issue, but you’ll never know what the result of a conference was or what the result of a prosecution was or whatever, or a board meeting was. There’s a board meeting that’s going to be in, they’re going to discuss this, and they do on TV, but they’ve got a larger area to cover that they don’t always get to everything or they get too much here and not enough of what’s going on in other parts.

01:40:49

ESPINO:

And what is your specific role now? When you first started, what was your role? And then you can tell me what you—has it changed over time? Because I imagine it would change—

SANCHEZ:

I wanted an opportunity to answer a lot of the criticisms that mainstream media lobbed at our people, at our community. I also wanted to highlight groups and people in our community who I thought were never covered, who were doing great things and no one knew about it. And I wanted us to be a regular newspaper. I didn’t want us to be a tab. I didn’t want us to be a scandal sheet or an arts sheet or any of that. I wanted us to be a newspaper of general circulation run by Latinos adequately, competently. That was my goal. Through the years it’s changed a lot. Like I say, we’ve formed a foundation which gives stipends, small stipends, not big ones, to young people who come in as interns. So that’s a new—we had the first Letters to Santa Claus program anywhere in Los Angeles, in Los Angeles County. It started when these—we got some letters one Christmas. We were doing our Christmas issue and there were a few letters and I thought they were cute, so we decided to publish them, and our Christmas issue came out two weeks before Christmas, and so we published them. The next week we had a flood of letters.

ESPINO:

Oh, that’s sweet.

01:43:57

SANCHEZ:

And so we managed to get ourselves together, raise money, harangued a few of our friends that were corporate officers to give us money to buy toys, and we went out, our staff went out and gave them out. The next year it got worse, more people, and we really had a hard time because we couldn’t take money. We’re a newspaper, for God sakes, so we had to form a foundation. And someone—I’m not going to say a friend; get him into trouble—someone at the IRS gave us 501(c)(3)—what do they call it—status almost overnight, and so we started, but it kept getting bigger and bigger.

other groups, the Hollenbeck people started having them. Everybody starting having—all the elected officials started to have their own, so we just thought, “Well, we’re a newspaper.” Oh, and the Letters to Santa was very specific. You had to write a letter to Santa and it had to come in the mail and you had to follow certain guidelines. You had to work for your Christmas gift. A lot of times that was the only Christmas gift, when we first started, that kids got.

ESPINO:

But what about if they ask for iPods or iPads?

SANCHEZ:

We just couldn’t. But at first we got—

ESPINO:

So you wouldn’t give to everybody who sent a letter?

SANCHEZ:

Yes, something.

ESPINO:

You did give them something. Maybe not what they had asked for.

01:45:44

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. And some kids we did give—I mean, we got letters from kids who wanted stockings for their grandma, who wanted a job for their father, whose little sister wasn’t going to get a toy, from a couple whose son was in the hospital with leukemia. And we answered those letters and they got what they wanted. We worked with the county to help us house homeless families for the holidays till they could get a job. We went around and around asking everybody, “Do you have a job?” So we did all kinds of things. We went to the general hospital where this kid was dying, and his parents were shocked to take him some toys, and we did that for a few years, but it just got too heavy.

So then Martha, a teacher out of Rio Hondo, said, “I would like to take on this reading of the letters for my class. I want them to see.” And then all of a sudden, she organized the whole thing and she took it over. But it came to a point where it wasn’t needed as much. Everybody was doing it.

ESPINO:

You built the infrastructure—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

—and then she was just able to—

SANCHEZ:

And then she stopped doing it because she says, “There’s too many groups now.” So it got harder to raise money because everybody was raising money for their toy.

ESPINO:

I see.

SANCHEZ:

For their toy program. So we just thought—we gave to a lot of organizations. We gave them toys to give to their clients. You know that CHiPs for Toys—

ESPINO:

Yeah.

SANCHEZ:

—that the Highway Patrol has every Christmas? It started with us. The first group of Chicano Highway Patrolmen out of the East L.A. station, and we got together and they went to Salvation Army and had a toy distribution. That’s how that got started. I don’t know how a black guy is not credited with starting it, but that’s how it started.

01:47:18

ESPINO:

So what other groups do you work with mostly?

SANCHEZ:

Well, we work with mostly community organizations. I’m trying to think of what their name is now. These people who—Latino media.

ESPINO:

Hispanic News Media Association? No.

SANCHEZ:

No. Well, we worked with them when they started.

ESPINO:

Are you part of that organization?

SANCHEZ:

Not really, because we’re publishers. We’ve sent kids and we’ve paid for stuff, but we’re not really a part of it because that’s for news people, people who cover the news.

ESPINO:

You mean actual journalists?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. No, the people that rate the television and the movie started in our offices. When I was with Norman Lear, we started the first—we had the first banquet that is—now I forget what the name of it is. They give awards to people who make worthwhile movies. Helen Hernandez was very responsible for that. Helen Hernandez has always been one of my favorite people because she worked for Embassy, but she also works very hard to help other organizations, and she always—she was the first Latina to come to me and say, “What do I need—what can I help you with?” And a woman named Minnie Lopez Baffo (phonetic) who used to work for Southern California Gas. They came and offered their help, not ask me to cover or to buy a table.

ESPINO:

And how did they help? I’m a little confused. Are you self-sufficient—

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

01:49:47

ESPINO:

—or is it soft money too?

SANCHEZ:

No. There is no soft money. It all comes from advertising. I told you we’re a newspaper of general circulation. We are not a nonprofit organization. We originally funded our foundation.

ESPINO:

Those Santa Claus letters.

SANCHEZ:

Well, it’s the Eastern Group Foundation. Did a lot of other things, like I said, trained, and now we just really have internships.

ESPINO:

Okay. So in addition to the newspaper, the Eastern Group Publications, you have the Eastern Group Foundation.

SANCHEZ:

Because we didn’t have a way of receiving money for the Letters to Santa, but like I said, too many organizations now have Letters to Santa. But aside from the Times and the big newspapers, there are no community training programs for journalists, especially Latinos—

ESPINO:

That’s true.

SANCHEZ:

—to cover the Latino community.

ESPINO:

So how would these individuals help you? Do they help with the foundation work or do they help with the actual part of the news?

SANCHEZ:

They go out on assignments with someone.

ESPINO:

You mean they actually report?

SANCHEZ:

Our interns? Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

No, no, I mean the—because you were talking about these two, Helen—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, no. Helen—

01:51:12

ESPINO:

Who came to you saying, “What can I do? How can I help?”

SANCHEZ:

She got us a contract with—was it the Cancer Association so we could make some money. Minnie Lopez Baffo used her whole budget to place advertisements.

ESPINO:

Oh, okay.

SANCHEZ:

I always remember that some of the Comisión people, I’d taken over the newspaper for about three months, and they came and asked me for a table, and I said, “Well, I’ll see,” and they harangued me. They even called me at home and forced me to give them money, even though I didn’t know how I was going to pay my rent the next month.

ESPINO:

Because you had split with your—

SANCHEZ:

And then they asked me not to go to the banquet because he was going to be there.

ESPINO:

Was it an amicable split? I’m assuming from what you’re saying—

SANCHEZ:

Sort of amicable. We had four children, you know. Always try to be civilized. He wasn’t civilized at first, but then he figured it’s better to be civilized. Because my mother and father were divorced, and my mother and father never, ever put either me or my sisters in the middle of anything. They never argued in front of us. They always called and reminded us when it was the other’s birthday. They were always very careful not to put us in the middle. So I had that background, but my ex didn’t. So I always told my kids, “You know, it’s your father’s birthday. Do this.” I never—because I wasn’t—that wasn’t my experience.

01:53:19

ESPINO:

How do you think, then, people were so divided if it was amicable and you both tried to have this balance for your children? Why would people take sides?

SANCHEZ:

Because we were splitting up a community asset, the community funding source. That’s why some of them weren’t very happy.

ESPINO:

They thought it was going to have a negative impact on the—

SANCHEZ:

On them.

ESPINO:

—work that they did or the issues that they cared about.

SANCHEZ:

Dionicio Morales was always a gentleman. Richard held a public hearing with California Lottery to force them to advertise with us. I love Richard Alatorre. He isn’t always the smoothest guy, but he’s always respectful of women, very cognizant that sometimes people need to be supported. He makes money, yeah, but the others make money, but they don’t put back. Richard does. And Art Torres. Art Torres was supportive. We came to a break because we wanted to change—we do a lot of work what is called public notice. You know, if you’re a newspaper of general circulation, you have the right to publish public notices that governments have to post, and it’s become outdated. The lines become outdated because one of the statutes says—the state statutes says that you have to publish with a newspaper that publishes in your area. We cover a lot of cities and so does everybody else, but nobody publishes in the cities and nobody actually prints in them because a lot of the people that print in newspapers have gone out of business. So we wanted him to change one word: “or.” You could publish a public notice in a newspaper of circulation that either met those requirements or the newspaper with the largest circulation in that area. The Times and the Daily News took us on, and he failed to show up for the hearing, and after that we came to a break. We’ve kind of mended, but he left Jonathan dangling there because he was trying to help all the other newspapers, all the other Latino newspapers, which were general circulation, but who didn’t always print where they circulated.

01:56:34

ESPINO:

How greatly was that going to help you?

SANCHEZ:

A lot.

ESPINO:

Financially or—

SANCHEZ:

Financially. And also it helped the communities.

ESPINO:

And it’s a public service, yes.

01:57:46

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, because if you don’t know some government is going to do something where you live, they’re going to dig up the street or something and you’re not going to be able to get into your business, it’s going to have an economic impact. Or they’re going to dig up the street and you can’t get out to go to work. Or they’re going to close a park for six months that your child plays at or goes to, or the library or whatever. Or they’re going to change the amount you have to pay for a license there. It has an impact on you. Nobody published those notices. We were the first ones who pushed and pushed and pushed. The law used to be that all you had to do was post the notice on the door of the Council hearing room, or they put it into the L.A. Times. How many of our people read the L.A. Times? And I’m not talking only Latinos; I’m talking about everybody. We go to their door, we’re free.

So we battled with the people that placed those ads, we battled with the agencies, and then they would come back with us, “Well, you know, you’re not printing in that place.” But we had the largest circulation in Commerce, we had the largest circulation Bell Gardens, we had the largest circulation in Montebello, and they would put it in the Times. So we just needed that one little word, and he couldn’t take it. He couldn’t take the pressure.

ESPINO:

So you think he purposely didn’t show up?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

It wasn’t that an oversight, he forgot—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no.

ESPINO:

—or had something else more pressing.

SANCHEZ:

And Richard told me—no, it wasn’t Richard. It was Willie Brown who—we went to Sacramento for something else and we were seeing—he says, “Do you know, Jonathan that every squawk box in every office was on during that hearing? Everybody was listening to it.” See, Jonathan is a very prominent Republican, but he doesn’t flaunt it. He doesn’t say anything. He can pick up the phone and talk to any of them. But he can pick up the phone and talk to any of the other people, too, of the Democrats.

01:59:18

ESPINO:

That’s a unique quality to have, to be able to have friends, especially in this climate, on both sides.

SANCHEZ:

Yes, and he’s articulate and able to deal with them on their terms, which I can’t always do because they get all nervous about I’m a woman. It really happens, it really happens. He can get down and dirty with them.

ESPINO:

You get nervous because you don’t want to get down and dirty or because—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. No, they get nervous with me, trying to deal with me down and dirty. And, of course, I’m a notorious Democrat, so the Republicans don’t always cater to me. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

Right.

SANCHEZ:

But he has that ability. But I remember that Willie Brown said, “Every squawk box in every—.” And in my office, because the hearing kept going and going on the air, and Jon was sitting there alone.

ESPINO:

Waiting? He didn’t know Art Torres wasn’t going to show up?

SANCHEZ:

Well, he figured it out, but he wouldn’t leave. And they held the hearing and all this testimony and all these people saying, “Oh, you’re just trying to make money.” Says, “You are too.” And so they called him the—what? What did Willie Brown say they called him in his office? What is that bunny that the batteries—what is it, the—

ESPINO:

Duracell?

SANCHEZ:

No, it’s the other one. I don’t know. It’s a battery. He was very famous, the “something” bunny.

02:01:05

ESPINO:

Keeps going and going and going.

SANCHEZ:

Going and going.

ESPINO:

I thought it was Duracell. No?

SANCHEZ:

No. But anyway, they said that they kept calling him that bunny. He’s still there. He made them all stay and turn him down, and they were nervous because they knew we could take them on and we could tell them (unclear). So our newspaper has been involved in a lot of not only movements, but even for industry.

ESPINO:

Right, right. Has Felix Gutierrez ever written about—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah.

ESPINO:

Okay.

SANCHEZ:

Our problem with Felix Gutierrez is that he writes very long, long papers. He doesn’t understand—

ESPINO:

Academic.

SANCHEZ:

—that we’re a small newspaper and we can’t print a thirty-eight-hundred-word article. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

He wants these papers to be published in the—because I know he’s a professor or—I think he’s still teaching. I don’t know if he’s retired.

SANCHEZ:

No, he’ll send us things, but I think he’s—he hasn’t sent any lately. I think he’s mad because we couldn’t publish one because it’s too long, and when we told him to edit it, he said, “I can’t.” He’s the one that every time he sees me, he says, “Dolores, you’ve got to come to San Bernardino. They’re picking on me. They’re always picking on me.” (Laughs)

ESPINO:

San Bernardino?

SANCHEZ:

I guess that’s where he lives or something. I don’t know.

ESPINO:

I think he lives in Oakland.

SANCHEZ:

Oakland now, or he used to live in San Bernardino.

02:02:47

ESPINO:

He used to? Oh, okay.

SANCHEZ:

It was so funny. And we worked with the Chicano News Media Association.

ESPINO:

Are they still around? They’re not active like they were before.

SANCHEZ:

Not as active as they were.

ESPINO:

And they came about during that period of the seventies, correct? Were you involved with them from the very beginning? So you never imagined yourself as a reporter?

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

Always as the managing editor?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and as the publisher.

ESPINO:

And then did you hire the first reporters? How did you find them, or did you just—

SANCHEZ:

They found me.

ESPINO:

—kind of absorb? Like what, just word of mouth or did you put out an ad or—

SANCHEZ:

No, I didn’t have to do anything. Everybody knew that I’d taken over the newspaper. No, they found me, and they still do, only now I have Gloria they have to deal with.

02:03:55

ESPINO:

And she’s doing now what you did when you first started.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, she’s the managing editor.

ESPINO:

Do you think after when she’s maybe twenty years from now, thirty years from now, will one of your grandchildren—

SANCHEZ:

I don’t know. None of them have shown any interest. None of them. Well, Gloria didn’t show any interest the first ten years.

ESPINO:

She did not? How did she come around?

SANCHEZ:

We got a contract from the state. We did the first print novela that the state ever put out in Spanish, the first one. Now La Opinión throws them out by the dozen. And she came to help me put that together, and she stayed. One day the people that bought La Opinión came over and were talking to us, and then—I didn’t say anything, and then she got up and she said, “Are you telling us that you want to buy us? We’re not for sale.” (Laughs)

ESPINO:

That surprised you?

SANCHEZ:

Shocked me, and Jonathan too.

ESPINO:

That must have been a great moment.

SANCHEZ:

It was a great moment, was a wonderful moment. And she’s as dedicated as anybody could be.

ESPINO:

Yeah, very smart.

SANCHEZ:

And very smart.

ESPINO:

Organized.

SANCHEZ:

It was fortunate that her—she had two majors, one of them was journalism.

02:05:32

ESPINO:

So she did have an interest.

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, but not in this paper. I don’t know.

ESPINO:

Right. But I mean in the idea of covering a community and the issues involved in what it takes to do that.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

ESPINO:

And what was her other degree in?

SANCHEZ:

Marketing. Business.

ESPINO:

Does she help with that aspect of it—

SANCHEZ:

Some—

ESPINO:

—or do you have somebody separate?

SANCHEZ:

—but she’s pretty busy. Jonathan is in charge of the bottom line.

ESPINO:

Is that like advertising, etc.?

SANCHEZ:

And he came on as the art director. He was an art director.

ESPINO:

Is that how you met him, through the paper?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. He was an art director. He worked for agencies, you know, ad agencies. He used to photograph the Miss Americas and the Miss Universes, the Miss Israel.

ESPINO:

Tough job. (Laughs)

SANCHEZ:

He came from the slicks. That’s what I told him. At first I used to tease him about, “Yeah, you came from the slicks. What do you know about newspapers?”

ESPINO:

And then are your photographers also the reporters—

SANCHEZ:

Sometimes.

02:06:43

ESPINO:

—or do you pull those from the AP as well?

SANCHEZ:

Sometimes we’ll take from the AP, but we have a lot of community reporters, you know. We have what they call—they’re called stringers, and we have photographers who bring us—and we’ll buy it. Or Jonathan teaches them how to take photos. He teaches them photography, because it’s good if they can take a photo when they’re someplace because they know who the person or what the issue is and can take a photo that will really capture what the story’s going to be about, and it gives them good experience.

ESPINO:

Yes. Absolutely.

SANCHEZ:

One of the young women who worked for us now works for La Opinión.

ESPINO:

Is that hard for you when they leave or do you feel like you’re kind of that stepping—

SANCHEZ:

It’s kind of hard because you work so hard with them. I think sometimes they’ve taken people from us that weren’t ready, and I’ve tried to tell them. They think it’s self-interest, and when they find out that they’re heavily edited, they’re being taught, you know, they’re cub reporters, they lose their jobs because they’re not there yet.

ESPINO:

And do you do the editing of the pieces or did you in the beginning, or how did that work?

SANCHEZ:

In the beginning.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

I don’t have to do that anymore, but I do—

ESPINO:

That’s a lot of work.

SANCHEZ:

—all the proofreading because I know every article that goes in the paper.

02:08:27

ESPINO:

Wow. That’s still a lot of work. You proofread every single article, every single week?

SANCHEZ:

Spanish and English.

ESPINO:

You come out once a week, correct?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

ESPINO:

Spanish and English. Wow. That’s one of the big criticisms of the Times today, is the amount of errors—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, a lot of them.

ESPINO:

—in the paper.

SANCHEZ:

I proofread, Gloria proofreads. The paper’s proofread three times before it gets out of here.

ESPINO:

Yeah, that’s an important—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, because you know why? We’re subject to more criticism than the Times is.

ESPINO:

That’s true. Well, I don’t know. People hate the Times, at least from our community. I don’t know if you know my husband works for the Times. He writes for the Times.

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

You didn’t know that?

SANCHEZ:

No.

02:09:18

ESPINO:

I don’t advertise that. Hector Tobar.

SANCHEZ:

Hector’s your husband? I read him. Oh, okay.

ESPINO:

Yeah, he’s my husband. So we’ve been married probably now—it’ll be twenty-one years in August. So he’s been with the Times—ever since I’ve known him. We met at UC Santa Cruz when we were undergrads, so he’s been with the Times, and it’s been a bad ride these last fifteen years, but pays the bills. It’s really hard for him. He’s trying to leave now.

SANCHEZ:

There’s a lot of reporters who haven’t been able to work since they’ve been let go because everything shrank, a lot of newspapers disappeared, and we can’t afford to pay them what they were being paid. I feel for them.

ESPINO:

Yeah, it’s definitely a novel or a book or a movie or a documentary or something, what’s happened to the newspaper industry.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, it really is.

ESPINO:

Very tragic, empty. And the same thing happened when I was teaching elementary school when we had our first budget cut after the strike in the nineties, and then we had that huge budget cut and teachers were laid off and there were empty classrooms. It’s the same kind of thing like that, where you just are in this transition period of uncertainty and you’re—

SANCHEZ:

They really cut back.

ESPINO:

And you feel lucky that you even are surviving, that you’re not the one that got laid off.

SANCHEZ:

Right. So Hector Tobar is your husband.

ESPINO:

Yeah, he’s my husband.

SANCHEZ:

That’s great. Tell him I read him.

ESPINO:

Oh, good. He tries to do good work.

SANCHEZ:

He does good work.

02:11:15

ESPINO:

It’s not always easy because he doesn’t have the kind of autonomy that you would imagine, like you say about—

SANCHEZ:

Oh, I know, I know.

ESPINO:

And then he had that column for a while and they cancelled it.

SANCHEZ:

Oh, they did?

ESPINO:

They cancelled it, yeah. They said he was redundant, that he just wrote about the same thing all the time.

SANCHEZ:

They just don’t want to pay.

ESPINO:

They weren’t paying him any more than what they paid him—you know, he didn’t get a raise when he got the column.

SANCHEZ:

No? I didn’t know that. I thought they were—oh, terrible.

ESPINO:

Anyway, maybe I shouldn’t say all this on record, but—

SANCHEZ:

No, because we’re discussing the way media has changed. And, you know, there’s such a love of reading the newspapers online. I don’t know that it always exposes everybody to everything in a newspaper. They pick and choose, and that leaves a lot of knowledge and exposure that they could be getting. My sister has a Kindle, and she will only read a book on a Kindle. I said, “Well, what’s the difference?” She says, “Because I can carry around—.” Well, you can carry around a paperback.

02:12:42

ESPINO:

There’s no research that shows your brain does more when you read from a paper than when you read from a screen, so there might be some health benefits to—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, but she’s so in love with that Kindle. She has to have everything downloaded into it because I think she feels that she’s more current.

ESPINO:

More technologically savvy or—

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, yeah.

ESPINO:

Well, how do you feel about that for your—I mean the direction of your paper? Because my husband’s expected—now he’s in the arts and culture section. He’s a book critic. He’s not a beat reporter anymore and he’s not a columnist anymore, so he’s expected to be—maybe even—I don’t know if all the reporters at the L.A. Times are expected to Tweet, to blog—

SANCHEZ:

They are.

ESPINO:

—to Instagram, all of those things. How do you feel about that for your newspaper? Do you feel like that’s something you should be—

SANCHEZ:

Well, the girls are. They all have—

ESPINO:

They are doing that?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah, and we have an online version of our paper.

ESPINO:

But is it a mandate from you that they have to be on Twitter that they have to—

SANCHEZ:

No, they love being on it. They’re that generation. They’re young. But it’s difficult. They have to make time for all these things, and sometimes it takes up a lot of time. When they should be out covering, they’re over there answering or tweeting or whatever, and they lose track of time. I even hated email because the first thing they all did was sit down and read email for a half hour, maybe an hour.

02:14:15

ESPINO:

It is time-consuming.

SANCHEZ:

It’s very time-consuming, and I like them to be out there. I like them to know what’s going on out there. I ride around my circulation area all the time, just looking. I know where everything is, where everybody is, what’s going on. If the graffiti’s high or they’re digging up that street, I know because I ride around. I know if the circulation’s getting done. I’m notorious with my distributor.

ESPINO:

I’m going to pause it for a second. It’s been two hours. (Recorder turned off)

SANCHEZ:

You get me talking about the newspaper.

ESPINO:

I know. Me, too, because now we’re conversing and we’re not really—but anyway, I wanted to ask you before we end, because this seemed like it was an important thing to mention about when you were talking about the Chicana Service Action Center, and Marisela Chavez, I believe she interviewed you back in—

SANCHEZ:

I know, and I have not been very cooperative.

ESPINO:

But she does quote you.

SANCHEZ:

Oh, she does?

ESPINO:

Yeah, she does.

SANCHEZ:

I gave her the time, but then she sent me things and she wanted answers. I’m as bad as some people that don’t send you back something. I promise I will, because now I have Gloria on my back all the time.

02:15:37

ESPINO:

Yes. She can help with that.

SANCHEZ:

No, she makes me do it.

ESPINO:

Oh, good. Well, that’s what I mean. She can help. I don’t have to be the one to contact you. I’m pretty sure she quotes you. Maybe she doesn’t. She mentions you. She might not quote you, she does mention you, and I thought there was an interview with you.

SANCHEZ:

There was a long interview.

ESPINO:

I’m not seeing it here. But anyway, so what she says is—you know, talking about that one rift between the two, the Action Center and then the Comisión, she calls it a breakdown of sisterhood. Is that how you would see it, that difference in autonomy versus Comisión control?

SANCHEZ:

I think you could say it’s a breakdown, because we were all very proud of always being very supportive of each other, and all of a sudden we had this difference in goals and in expectations, and we didn’t want the break. I mean, we didn’t want there to be a break. We thought that we were transitioning and that that we would all be members of Comisión and that our relationship with Comisión would always be there.

ESPINO:

And that ended? Did that relationship end?

SANCHEZ:

For a while.

ESPINO:

You stopped going to meetings? You were no longer a member?

SANCHEZ:

Well, with me it ended because I got busy. I was driving back and forth to Washington. Corrine told me that she didn’t feel welcome.

02:17:52

ESPINO:

Do you think it was based on just that one issue or was this something that had been building in general, or was it just that one topic of who was going to control the Chicana Action Service Center?

SANCHEZ:

I think it was just that.

ESPINO:

Wow.

SANCHEZ:

That’s where the breaking point came. The people at Chicana Service Center were happy to be members of Comisión, were very attached to Comisión. I think it was painful when they nearly sat us out there door. It was painful to us that we—

ESPINO:

So essentially they said, “If you’re not going to agree to these terms, then we don’t want you as part of our organization”?

SANCHEZ:

No, they didn’t say that. They just weren’t very inclusive to us after that. They weren’t very welcoming for a while. Lilia Aceves made the break, too, with us. She came with Chicana Service Action Center.

ESPINO:

She quit or she resigned? Because she was one of the directors, I recall, the first, wasn’t she?

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Yeah, she quit.

ESPINO:

Yeah, she didn’t want to talk about it.

SANCHEZ:

It was kind of painful.

ESPINO:

Do you feel like those relationships were repaired afterwards?

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah. We’ve run a log of Yolanda’s articles.

ESPINO:

Do you think it had a fundamental impact on long-term goals, or it was like a little bump in the road?

SANCHEZ:

It was a big bump in the road.

02:19:50

ESPINO:

Were you able to recover or never really truly recover from that break as far as the organization itself?

SANCHEZ:

I don’t think that camaraderie really recovered that much.

ESPINO:

So like what she’s saying, the idea of sisterhood, the idea that you share these common goals and that you have each other’s back and that you, as women, are in this struggle together, you feel like that—

SANCHEZ:

Kind of was broken, broken to the point where they didn’t understand why Francisca wanted her stuff to go to Santa Barbara. They wanted it at UCLA. It was nothing against UCLA, had nothing to do with it, but none of them—Gloria nearly dropped her spoon. We were having lunch at the depot, you know, right here at the railroad depot.

ESPINO:

Traxx.

SANCHEZ:

At Traxx. We were having lunch and I talked about why. She said, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” And I said, “How come nobody asked me?” And she says, “Why should they ask you?” I said, “What do you mean, why should they ask me?” I was part of the backbone of Chicana Service Action Center. Chicana Service Action Center and I go way back from the beginning, and it was very critical to me that—maybe too critical, because of Francisca, that we follow her wishes.

ESPINO:

Right. Like having a will.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah.

02:22:21

ESPINO:

She didn’t write it down, though, correct?

SANCHEZ:

No.

ESPINO:

It was word of mouth. So if she would have written it down—

SANCHEZ:

Well, because it was understood in the people that were there. It was understood that that’s what would happen because that’s what Francisca wanted. But apparently it wasn’t understood by the women of Comisión, because it was mainly the women in Comisión.

ESPINO:

Who wanted it to go to UCLA? I remember that. They had some sort of presentation at UCLA that they were going to donate the papers, and then they didn’t. So they really took it pretty far, I think, if I remember correctly.

SANCHEZ:

Oh, yeah. And I think it was also because they were very presumptuous in making a decision without the input of the Chicana Service Action Center, of us, of the people who were the founders of CSAC that it was people that are running it now, but they weren’t the founders. And that’s what they wanted, the papers that belonged to founding the organization. They don’t care about it now. Sophia Esparza made a decision that was wrong. Sophia Esparza knows all our phone numbers.

ESPINO:

When she gave the papers to UCLA? There are some Comisión papers at UCLA in the Chicano Resource. Are those the ones you’re talking about, just in reference to Los Angeles?

SANCHEZ:

Yes.

02:24:21

ESPINO:

Or in reference to the Chicana Service Action Center?

SANCHEZ:

In reference to the Chicana Service Action Center, because she’s the executive director now.

ESPINO:

Oh, okay, instead of having that stuff go to Santa Barbara.

SANCHEZ:

Or at least—

ESPINO:

Consult with you all.

SANCHEZ:

Yeah. Have a little respect, have a little gratitude for your job, because if we hadn’t founded it, you wouldn’t be there. Even for our history, for the history of the Chicana Women’s Movement. You don’t just make decisions without at least consulting people who were the founding.

ESPINO:

Right, especially if they’re still around to be consulted. Well, do you have any final thoughts before we end, anything you want to say that we didn’t cover?

SANCHEZ:

No, I think I said it when I said this is where they can find me, I guess, until I—I hope I’m not like Joan Crawford and they find me in my office someday on the floor. (Laughs)

ESPINO:

Oh, no. Well, I guess you built this.

SANCHEZ:

Because a lot of people that I know are shocked that that I still come in.

02:26:06

ESPINO:

It’s pretty impressive, and that you’re still consistently working week by week on the editorial review of the paper. It’s fantastic. It’s been such an honor for me to sit here and listen to you. I thank you for your time.

SANCHEZ:

Well, thank you for caring, for thinking it’s important.

ESPINO:

It’s very important, and you’ve given me some, great, great, great stories and great one-liners. It’s fantastic. It’s been a great interview.

SANCHEZ:

And you can say that this interview ended on my having just celebrated my seventy-eighth birthday.

ESPINO:

Oh, congratulations. Happy birthday.

SANCHEZ:

Thank you.

ESPINO:

That’s wonderful. Yeah, we can say that. Okay, I’m going to stop it unless there’s something, one last—

SANCHEZ:

No. I’m talked out. (End of May 11, 2014 interview)