Citizenship teacher Ed Sanchez knows how government works
– and he wants it to work for everyone
In a modest room that smells of dry-erase markers, equipped only with a pen, a workbook and a bottle of water, Ed Sanchez is delivering the American dream.
Three students follow, rapt, as he quizzes them. In eager Spanish, they answer: Nancy Pelosi. Thomas Jefferson. Red, white and blue.
To most U.S.-born fifth-graders, it’s the dull stuff of civics class. To Sanchez’s students, it’s a ticket to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – to citizenship in their adopted country. At her second class, an elderly woman can already name the president, vice-president and California’s governor; another rattles off the 13 original colonies, triumphant.
In a single day, Sanchez ricochets between American dreams and American realities. He teaches citizenship courses at the Gilroy Family Resource Center in English and Spanish, quoting Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine, then hacks away at bureaucracy on behalf of his students. He helps one obtain a beautician’s license, smooths the way through small claims court for another. Sanchez knows the system, and he’s determined to make it work for everyone.
“Without him a lot of people would be getting ripped off,” said Luz Avila, director of the Gilroy Citizenship Educational Project, founded by Sanchez. “When clients come in, looking for him, they call him ‘the gentleman that’s always willing to help.’ He’ll drop whatever he’s doing. If a client needs to get to San Jose and has no way of getting there, he’ll take them, even on weekends. He’ll meet people on Saturdays. If they have to work late, he’ll wait for them late at night.”
Sanchez says he’s just doing his job.
“We are all required to make America what it’s supposed to be,” he later declared, sipping a hot chocolate at Panera Bread in Gilroy. “America is wonderful. We’re just trying to perfect it.”
A Gilroy kid full of questions
As a child, Sanchez and his nine siblings bounced from one school to the next, one abandoned house to the next, willed by the seasons of cherries, garlic and peppers, which they harvested as field workers. When the crops disappeared, the Sanchez family did, too. By first grade, Ed Sanchez had gone to four schools in Santa Clara County, before settling in Gilroy. At school, he was forbidden to speak Spanish; at home, he wasn’t allowed to speak English. To use the school restroom, he had to prod his older sister to ask permission in English. If she was absent, he wet himself, unable to ask.
Now, Sanchez says, he asks too many questions. “That’s my downfall,” he jokes.
He asks why banks charge higher rates to undocumented immigrants; whether Mexico has prospered under the North American Free Trade Agreement. His car bears two identical bumper stickers, from Republican Pete McCloskey’s quixotic 1972 campaign to unseat Nixon: “McCloskey – Restore Ethics to Congress.” Sometimes, he asks simply, “Why?” or “Why not?”
On the cusp of his college graduation, a coworker joked that, whatever job he sprung for (armed with his Spanish degree) he was too short to be a Sheriff’s deputy. Sanchez called his bluff, and applied to be a bailiff. His first job was transporting three prisoners, Gilroy men he once knew as wayward boys. To most bailiffs, it was a dead-end job, he recalled, shuttling prisoners from court to prison, from prison to court. But Sanchez kept asking questions. He consumed legal texts the way others read novels, and discussed the law with county judges. And somehow, the so-called dead-end job led to a rare and remarkable gig as Community Relations Officer.
Juggling radicals and
the establishment
Sanchez’s former partner, Don Tamm, describes the job as a balancing act. As Community Relations Officers, the two met with 1960s-era activists of every stripe, to hear their concerns and connect them with government services. When high-profile hellraisers were threatened, they kept them safe; when protests broke out, they walked alongside the marchers, ensuring order. Among radicals, they represented the establishment; in the establishment, they were linked with the radicals.
“We were not the most popular people,” Tamm recalled. “Lots of people were afraid of government. We might meet with a radical group one day, and then, the same night, eat with high establishment officials, who had very different opinions. We kept a lot of things to ourselves.”
Tamm fondly calls Sanchez “Eddie,” his friend on the tightrope. Walking it, the two gained a bird’s-eye view of Santa Clara County, in the midst of a tumultuous era. They were changed by the people they met, and their work, in turn, changed people. Acting on Sheriff Charles Prelsnik’s idea, they helped prod the Center for Employment Training into being. The vocational program has since trained more than 110,000 people, including Ernie Lopez, owner of Ernie’s Plumbing in Gilroy.
“Those teachers took the time,” said Lopez, remembering his training more than 30 years ago. “I learned the fundamentals that I hadn’t learned in school.” And Sanchez, who he met through the program, didn’t let Lopez’s low self-esteem sink him. “He always said, ‘You can do it. Just keep going. Keep doing what you’re doing.'”
“Eddie accepted people for who they were,” said Tamm. “He gained their trust … I don’t know of anybody like him. in the worst of times, people liked him and trusted him. And they still do.”
Eventually, Sanchez left the job. The Vietnam War was raging abroad, and the anti-war movement was raging at home. Thousands marched in Oakland, their placards bobbing like butterflies on the streets. Sanchez watched as Oakland’s police chief tried to shut down one demonstration. “In the name of the
Sanchez was awash with questions, and the answers pulled him from the Sheriff’s office.
“I just decided,” he said simply, “that it wasn’t for me.”
A latter-day saint with a sense of humor
In Sanchez’ class, one student struggles to recall the name of a senator. Sanchez waits a beat, then mimes fisticuffs, punching the air. The answer: Barbara Boxer.
“There’s a little bit of the ham in me that loves teaching,” he confessed. “To be a teacher, you have to be dramatic.”
Yet this self-description doesn’t square with Sanchez’s simple self-presentation. His silvered hair is gelled into stiff swirls, the same color as his glasses; he wears a white buttoned shirt and khakis. Jesus peeks from his shirt-pocket, from the religious cards he carries next to his breast. Raised Catholic, Sanchez converted to the Church of Latter Day Saints in 1981, after asking one too many questions about the Trinity. In his quest for faith, he flagged down two teenage Mormons, door-knocking in his neighborhood. As he waved to them, he was brandishing two Mormon taboos, he recalled with a chuckle: a cigarette and a cup of coffee. He’s quit both vices since.
“It’s impossible to do any kind of work without having God on your side,” he said. “It’s inconsistent to think you can do it alone. I’ve always had help.”
After leaving the Sheriff’s office, Sanchez worked at the Santa Clara County Housing Authority for six years, leasing homes to qualified low-income tenants. He’d seen the need in Gilroy and countywide, and had experienced it himself. When he was a child, he recalled, his mother mixed a paste from flour and water, and pasted newspaper up on their walls, to block the wind. He sponsored art shows in the projects, inspired by the tenants’ work. Meanwhile, he reared four children, all Gilroy High School graduates. On their mother’s suggestion, the family took up clowning, and turned up button-nosed and bewigged at San Jose parades.
“He keeps me going, with laughter,” said Maria Isabel Guerrero, a Center for Employment Training student who Sanchez later adopted as his granddaughter. “On Mondays he’ll bring in donuts and joke, ‘I got up early and made them. All I needed to buy was the box.'”
Later, Sanchez lost a son to an accident, and the grief wrenched him from Santa Clara County. “I had to get away,” he said, “and so I went to Salinas.” There, a friend urged him to volunteer with a local citizenship project. The work appealed to him. As a teen, he’d watched his mother hunched over her citizenship lessons, trying to pass the government’s test. At age 95, she finally became a citizen.
“That stayed with me a long time,” Sanchez said.
Filling the holes he’s found
In 2000, he brought the program north, to Gilroy. When the Family Resource Center lost its old office, Sanchez held the program in a garage; today, immigrants make their way to the center’s Monterey Road office, boarding buses and trudging alongside the highway for their chance at citizenship. Luz Avila’s own mother gained citizenship, guided by Sanchez, in the program she now directs.
As Sanchez’s boss, Avila faces an unusual dilemma: How to keep him from working. Sanchez is slowing down, and has suffered bouts of illness, but the program hasn’t found the volunteers to replace him.
“If he’s not feeling well, he still comes in. We always push him to take time off, to go home, to relax. But he’s stubborn, and he won’t listen,” Avila said. “He thinks about the clients before himself.”
And the clients, in turn, think the world of Ed Sanchez. When he shops at Wal-Mart, he sets aside at least an hour. He’s bound to run into students, new and old: former strawberry pickers, barbers, mothers and elderly men, working or shopping in the mega-store’s aisles – students such as Pablo Hernandez, two weeks into Sanchez’s class, who moved to San Martin 16 years ago.
“He has lots of patience,” Hernandez said in Spanish. “His class means a better future for me.”
Asked why he does what he does, Sanchez leaned back in his chair, the hot chocolate sitting empty in front of him.
“When I was a kid, there were these cement trucks, pink in color, and on the back they said, ‘Find a Hole and Fill It,'” he recalled. The anecdote hung in the air, seeming strange, until he added, “These were the holes that I found.”
