Sanchez, R. P. (Bob)

Roberto P. (Bob) Sanchez, trial lawyer, civil rights attorney and political activist, was born on August 20, 1927 in Laredo, Texas. His father, Trinidad P. Sanchez Santos, who worked as a taxi driver in Laredo, and his mother, Catalina Guerra Peña Sanchez, were born in Mexico, in the states of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas, respectively. Sanchez attended high school at St. Joseph Academy in Laredo, where he was captain of the varsity basketball team and was named to the Hall of Fame as Most Loyal Student. Soon after graduation he volunteered for the U.S. Navy during World War II, where he served primarily in the Office of U.S. Naval Intelligence in Washington, DC. He attended the University of Texas at Austin on the GI Bill, and earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in 1950. In 1953, Sanchez graduated from the South Texas Law School in Houston with a J.D. degree. He moved to McAllen, Texas shortly after and has practiced law there for over fifty years. Sanchez is a trial attorney, and also worked as the chief consulting attorney for the Mexican consulate at McAllen. He was the head counsel in several Mexican American civil rights cases. He was lead attorney for the Elsa-Edcouch High School case in 1968, successfully representing a group of Hispanic students expelled for participating in a walk-out to protest discriminatory practices at their school. In addition, Sanchez was one of the founding attorneys of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and of Texas Rural Legal Aid.

Sanchez was a charter member of the American GI Forum (AGIF) from its inception in 1948, and has served as the organization's national legal advisor, and chairman of the Committee on Migratory Labor. AGIF is a national organization founded to assist Latino veterans who were denied the benefits owed to them by law. AGIF fought discrimination at school, work, and the ballot box, and sought to improve the welfare of Latinos living in poverty, particularly migrant farm workers. Dr. Hector P. García, founder of AGIF, was a close friend of Sanchez. Sanchez represented AGIF at the U.S. Senate in 1959, when he testified in front of the Subcommittee on Migratory Labor on the low wages and extremely poor living conditions of migrant farm workers. Sanchez also served on the United Farm Workers’ Texas Committee on Migrant Farm Workers. In 1968, he was one of the organizers of the Southwest Council of La Raza, an advocacy group for Mexican Americans. The group changed its name to National Council of La Raza in 1973 and expanded its focus to include all Latinos living in the U.S. Sanchez is a board member emeritus of NCLR.

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