They told us the history books were complete. They were not.
Most of us walked through twelve years of school and never heard the names of the people who fought, in courtrooms and city councils and newspaper columns, so that a Latina could vote, run for office, and be counted as a full citizen. That history was here the whole time. We just were not handed it.
Dr. Sarah Zenaida Gould is the Executive Director of the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute, MACRI, the only national museum dedicated to preserving and sharing Mexican American civil rights history. A historian who has spent two decades in museums, she sat down with Anjelica inside MACRI in San Antonio, the city she calls the cradle of the movement, during Fiesta on the Texas Road Trip.
In this conversation you learn why San Antonio holds this history, how Mexican Americans fought for the vote, and how to find your voice in a room that was not built to hear it.
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San Antonio celebrated its tricentennial in 2018, older than the United States, and Mexican American civil rights leaders and landmark cases have come out of the city for generations. As Dr. Gould puts it, San Antonio is to Mexican American civil rights what Atlanta is to African American civil rights. The city sits at the forefront of the movement because so much of its leadership, litigation, and community organizing began there.
When the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910, tens of thousands of refugees fled north along the train line connecting San Antonio to the border. The city’s historic West Side, an area without the racial restrictions common elsewhere, became a receiving point. The Plan de San Luis Potosí, a declaration tied to the revolution, was written in a downtown San Antonio hotel. Many who came expecting to return home stayed for good.
Dr. Gould names a pattern many Latinas recognize: being raised not to be the problem, so we keep quiet even when speaking up is warranted. Her reframe is to stop reading self advocacy as complaining and start reading it as advocating, for yourself and often for your whole comunidad. Anjelica’s practice is concrete: in any room you are invited into, ask at least one question, so the people around you know where you stand.
The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised people of Mexican descent the same rights as any other citizen, but that promise was not honored evenly. In South Texas, voters faced intimidation and the threat of violence. In 1897 the case In re Rodriguez tested whether Ricardo Rodriguez, who had done everything the law required, could naturalize. Judge Thomas Maxey ruled that he could. The right had to be won, so Dr. Gould’s message is simple: do not squander it.
MACRI preserves and shares Mexican American civil rights history with the public through in person exhibits at its West Side visitor center, traveling exhibits, public programs, and online resources. Its virtual exhibits include CHISPAS, profiling forty San Antonio trailblazers, and ADELANTE!, a timeline of the movement. MACRI is planning the first national Mexican American civil rights museum, with a feasibility study already complete.
Anjelica Cazares: Hola, amiga, and welcome to the Latina Leadership Podcast, a podcast by Latinas for all women. Get ready, because today’s conversation is really special. Welcome to another episode of the Latina Leadership Podcast on the Texas Road Trip. First of all, I’m here in San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas. I didn’t know it was here during Fiesta, but I’m going to the parade tonight, so all is well. On today’s episode, I’m here at the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute. I’ve been in the space now for about two hours, and I’m completely amazed by it. I’m enamored. I’m in love that I’m in a historical building like this, dedicated to Mexican American culture. So let me ask: who are you, where are we, and what do you do?
Dr. Sarah Gould: Welcome. My name is Sarah, and I’m the Executive Director of the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute, or MACRI. I’m a historian, and I’m somebody who’s worked in museums for a couple of decades. I’ve been with this since the beginning. We were founded in 2019, and at that time I was working at a different museum, but I was on the founding board of MACRI. When the pandemic hit, I joined the staff. What do we do? We preserve and share Mexican American civil rights history with the public. We do that through exhibits like the one you see behind us, through public programs, and through online resources. It’s hard to get this kind of history growing up and going to school. These are things I did not really learn about until I went off to college. And even then, it took more education at the grad school level and my own personal interest to learn about these things. And yet this is history that’s been part of the United States for at least two centuries. We should know that we’re very deeply embedded in the history of this country, and that part of that history is advancing democracy and working toward civil rights goals.
Anjelica Cazares: I didn’t know there were towns and small cities here in Texas that are older than the United States itself.
Dr. Sarah Gould: Absolutely. San Antonio celebrated its tricentennial back in 2018. This year, the United States is celebrating its 250th. So we’re a little bit older. It has matured, it has experience. The movement of what is actually happening here, in terms of civil rights and the Mexican American culture, is at the forefront of a lot of what’s going to happen in the United States.
Anjelica Cazares: Oh my goodness.
Dr. Sarah Gould: We always say that San Antonio is the cradle of Mexican American civil rights, and that’s not to dismiss or ignore what other communities have done. But truly, when you look at it from a historical lens, it’s just one thing after another that has happened here, or leaders who have come out of here. A comparison we sometimes make is that San Antonio is to Mexican American civil rights what Atlanta is to African American civil rights. A hub of activity. And in terms of leadership, you see a lot of leaders coming out of San Antonio, including women.
Anjelica Cazares: Yes, I’ve seen a lot of that. There’s a lot of expertise that comes out of here. Founders, amazing people who do amazing things, come from the San Antonio area, because it understands what has transpired before and after the United States, even now, during this really heightened time. Are you from San Antonio?
Dr. Sarah Gould: I’m not. No, I grew up in Houston for the most part.
Anjelica Cazares: I know myself, too. I grew up in Houston for the most part.
Dr. Sarah Gould: When we would come on family vacation to San Antonio, which is kind of a Texas thing, I always loved this city. Then I had the opportunity to come here after grad school.
Anjelica Cazares: When you’re a Texan, you’re a San Antonian. It mimics a lot of what Houston is, but I do feel the culture much more here. There’s a warmth here. Last night I was walking from the hotel to a Denny’s, late at night, trying to get it together and go eat. Mind you, this was like 11:45 at night. And I felt comfortable enough to walk it, because the lady serving me at Denny’s, it comes from such a place that I understand. So you were telling me about the history of the area that MACRI is currently sitting on.
Dr. Sarah Gould: Yes. We’re located in the historic West Side of San Antonio, just west of downtown. If you come to San Antonio for all the fun stuff downtown, it’s super easy to get to the West Side. We’re just a straight shot from downtown. Historically, this is the heart and soul of Mexican American San Antonio. This was an area where there were no racial restrictions, so there were a lot of Mexican Americans here. It was a very mixed neighborhood. African Americans, Chinese Americans. We have in San Antonio this history of Chinese immigrants that dates way back. Because this area didn’t have those racial restrictions, it was very mixed. When the Mexican Revolution broke out, you had tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the fighting. We’re right on the train line that connects San Antonio to the border, so we received a lot of folks. We had all these economic ties to Mexico, and a lot of people had family that still lived on the other side. It was a natural stopping point. This neighborhood became the receiving area, right down the street from the train that would take you to the border. Those folks, for the most part, thought, this will blow over, I’ll get to go back home. Who knew the war would last a decade? At that point, people were settled.
Anjelica Cazares: People listening are going to ask, which revolution? Because Mexico has had several main characters.
Dr. Sarah Gould: The Mexican Revolution happened in 1910.
Anjelica Cazares: Okay. I’m a historian, so I’m just like, which one. Are we talking Pancho Villa, or are we talking…
Dr. Sarah Gould: Yeah, yeah. So that puts me in a space. It’s this one. And San Antonio played a huge role in the revolution. The Plan de San Luis Potosí, which was the declaration for war, was written at a hotel in downtown San Antonio. When folks needed to refresh their weapons, or they just needed a break from the war, they would come here. They kind of jokingly say we were the northernmost outpost of the revolution.
Anjelica Cazares: How funny. So you have generational. When we talk about generational, a lot of times we like to refer to it because it identifies quickly where you’re at in terms of how much you understand what it is to be Mexican American within the culture here. I was lucky enough that I lived just east of downtown Houston, so I had a lot of individuals who had been part of what’s happening here in San Antonio coming to the schools and talking to me about what it was to be Mexican American and what it was going to look like for me as I grow older into this community. But when we talk about generational, San Antonio is the place of generational Mexican Americans. We’re talking about when borders moved across people.
Dr. Sarah Gould: Absolutely. Here in San Antonio, we have people, it’s just wild when you think about it, who are like tenth generation Mexican American. There are so many people in town who are descendants of the people who lived at the Spanish missions. They are both indigenous and Mexican in many cases, because of the intermixing that happened after the missions. Part of why we’ve retained our Mexican feel here in San Antonio is that, yes, we have those families who are from way back, but we’ve always received new arrivals. So our sense of being Mexican gets refreshed every generation. We retain those ties. Economics, for sure. A lot of business here in San Antonio is impacted by what’s happening in Mexico, and vice versa. We have a really tight economic relationship to Mexico. They’re very important trade partners for us. Just think about it: if you go down to Market Square and you’re having a good time, eating and shopping, a lot of those things you’re buying are from Mexico. You’re buying them here, and that money is going into the pockets of the artisans who made them in Mexico, too. San Antonio tends to be very accessible to most areas around Texas. So what happens in Mexico impacts us. Our Mexican community here is a combination of people from way back who trace their families to the founding of San Antonio, and people who are first gen.
Anjelica Cazares: As I’m doing this road trip, I was in Roma, Texas, right on the border. It’s one of the border towns. It still has its historical buildings, its architecture. I walked up to a building that was right on the sand, and I looked up at these tiny doorways, and it looks like my grandmother’s house in Mexico, where the frames are exactly the way it looks. I can almost smell it. I can almost smell the burning leña. So when we talk about history, sometimes there’s a tendency to differentiate from each other, because we love our identity. And so there’s that cross of, oh, well, you’re from over there, I don’t know if you understand it here. Even when I talk to people from South America who were educated out there and come here, they’re like, well, this is the way. And I’m like, that’s not kind of the history of what’s happened. This is what’s happened. How does an institution like this deal with conversations like that?
Dr. Sarah Gould: It’s very interesting. When MACRI first started, and especially after I joined the staff as executive director, I went out and was telling people, I’ve changed jobs, I’m at this new place, explaining what we do. I had some people say to me, oh, Sarah, my family is not like that, my family never marched in the streets. And I’m thinking, this person’s family, they’re like civil rights icons, but they don’t necessarily see themselves that way. Different generations and different experiences in the United States have shaped people’s understanding of who they are and how they fit into different boxes. What I learned is that I see a lot of people as involved in civil rights, but I have a very broad understanding of civil rights. Some people, when they hear civil rights, think of a very particular thing. For some of them, it’s marching in the streets or protesting. It’s not necessarily, well, my grandfather started this small business that employed a lot of people and helped elevate Mexican Americans, whether through food or writing or intellectual thought, like a newspaper. There are so many ways to show up for civil rights. It doesn’t have to be marching in the streets. Here in our visitor center, we have the desk and law books that belonged to a lawyer named Alonso Perales. He was an orphan from Alice, Texas. He was in World War One, in the army. Through a series of events, he was able to become a lawyer and set up shop downtown in San Antonio. He wrote the constitution, the bylaws, for LULAC. So he was the intellectual founder of LULAC, essentially. He was constantly advocating for people like me. He had a column in the paper where he wrote in Spanish about your rights, how to know what your rights were. He would ask people to send him letters to let him know if they’d been discriminated against, because he was trying to document all of these cases. This was a man who was always in a suit, always had a tight look. This was not some radical. This was a lawyer, a very polished professional. But he was doing civil rights work. He literally founded LULAC. There are so many ways to be a civil rights person, so many ways to be a Latino, so many ways to be a Mexican American. It’s interesting when you have people, for example here in San Antonio, who are, I don’t know if you want to call them expats, but they’re from Mexico, they have money, and they have not experienced the kinds of civil rights struggles that Mexican Americans who have been here for a few generations have. They came here with privilege. They owned businesses, they’re successful, and that’s wonderful. But there’s a bridge we have to build there, because whether they like it or not, they’re now going to be seen as Mexican American. I think that happens in places like San Antonio every few generations. Go back to the revolution for a minute. You had refugees of various class statuses coming. People who had worked on farms, people who had run successful businesses, politicians who were suddenly on the outs and had to leave. All kinds of class statuses, and they lived in different parts of town. They weren’t always unified. That’s just how people are. There’s a lot of work we need to do. What we encounter at MACRI is that oftentimes people have no idea, unless they have some kind of family connection, how much work Mexican Americans have done for civil rights. We’ve been involved in so many court cases, so many efforts to expand educational access, economic opportunity, housing, having to break down racial deed restrictions, which were very common up until the fifties and sixties. Here in San Antonio, for the longest time, we had what were called at large city council districts, which meant that when you ran for city council, you ran for the whole city. It made it very hard for people of color to win elections. It was only through a long struggle that we got single member districts. Now a city council person is elected to represent a particular neighborhood, so the people in that neighborhood can elect somebody who is like them and lives in the same neighborhood.
Anjelica Cazares: And that took decades to straighten out, because most of the people in San Antonio were being represented by people who lived in a whole other part of town. Hello, Houston. Houston also has at large council, and that gerrymandering, I’m represented by somebody from who knows where. It gets really funky.
Dr. Sarah Gould: You’re right. It’s who we would like to represent us versus who we elected.
Anjelica Cazares: It’s like kickball. Usually there’s a captain, a captain we’re familiar with. If we don’t even know you, how do you know us? So it gets really tricky. As we’re having these conversations to help understand each other, it’s not like, okay, we had a conversation, we solved it. It’s an ongoing conversation. If I want to have a conversation with somebody and I’m walking into the room, it’s really hard to advocate for myself, because I tend to not want to stir the pot. Now, even when I speak, I think people are like, oh my God, here she goes again. And I’m like, no, just listen, hold on, wait a second. I don’t want to be that person, but I also don’t want to walk away. I’ll give you an example. I have a nonprofit, and we were going for funds for civics, for voting. It got really complicated, because it was everybody in the same room, and we had to advocate for our amounts: how much we wanted and why we deserved it. A lot of Hispanics did not raise their voice in that room. And when I did, there was a lot of, well, what did you, how are you. I’m advocating not only for myself, but now I’m standing for everybody. And I’m like, why don’t you speak up? I don’t want to be the one. I’m already doing the work without getting paid, already investing the way I need to invest. We don’t run the same circle, so you’re just looking at me today, but I’m in my community as much as you’re in yours. I’m here. So when I advocate for myself, I find myself in tricky conversations. My question is, when we do have conversations like that, there’s the casual listen, don’t talk as much, hear other people speak, and when you’re ready to say something, make sure you stand on what you’re saying without insulting people. But how do we even start that? What question do I ask? How do I get them to understand me, or how can I understand them, especially among the Hispanic, Latino, Latinx, Latina community?
Dr. Sarah Gould: There are so many beautiful things about our culture. There are also some things we need to work on. And this may honestly have come out of some kind of survival instinct, but oftentimes we’ve been raised not to be the problem. So we keep our mouths shut, when, if it were your child, you would say, speak up for yourself. And yet we don’t always speak up for ourselves. At the same time, when we do, we worry that people are going to be like, oh, she just complains. So we need to figure out how to stop thinking that speaking up for yourself is complaining, and that you are, in fact, advocating, for yourself and for your community in many cases. That’s not something to be afraid of. When we have these conversations, we’re making ourselves vulnerable to criticism. But I hope we can build understanding in ourselves, to listen without judgment, let it settle in our brains, and think about what this person is saying. Give ourselves the space to ask, is there anything in there that I agree with? Is there anything that requires me to say, well, what about this, maybe there’s something that’s not being seen yet, some other experience that might add to the conversation. We need to be willing to listen, to put our judgment aside for a minute and let the idea sink in. I know it’s hard. Sometimes it’s hard to just quiet your brain and your ideas for the five minutes it takes to listen to the other person.
Anjelica Cazares: It is really hard, because when we’re at a time crunch, like, okay, we’ve got 30 minutes, that’s not going to work. But two things came out of what you said. One, I advocate for people, this is my theory, to speak at least once wherever you’re at. Ask a question that you feel needs to be addressed, or that you want to emphasize, so that everybody knows where you stand. Because if everybody asks one question, there can be a consensus about where the conversation should go. And second, always show up to the conversation. When you’re invited, take up the offer, attend, and be there. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, it’s going to be difficult to listen. And lastly, this is hard because civics is personal. So when you have people telling you, well, don’t take it personal, I’m like, but it is. Try to maintain as neutral a tone as possible when talking about civics, because it’s so personal. We’ve all been directly affected. My mom has always been a voter. I’ve always seen her go vote. As soon as she became a citizen, whatever she needed to do, she did. This is just what we do. Did you vote? Yeah, I’m going to go vote right now, mom. It’s personal to me. She’s a naturalized citizen. So when I tell you civics is part of my identity, it’s just part of what I do, like getting my car checked. But we have others who don’t, and trying to convince them to partake in their civic right. This is a privilege. This is a right you have that is not granted to everybody.
Dr. Sarah Gould: And not only that, but Mexican Americans had to fight to ensure we would have the right to vote. Historically, I’m sorry, I’m a historian, so I love this. When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo occurred, in 1848, the US border moved. Now, Texas had already declared independence from Mexico in 1836, we were an independent state for a brief moment. But the idea, at least, was that with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, all people of Mexican descent who now found themselves in the United States were supposed to be granted the same rights, from the Constitution, as anybody else. The challenge is that some people of Mexican descent were deemed to be Native American by the US. We’re not federally recognized as a tribe, but they just deemed us to be Native American. At that time, Native Americans did not have full rights of citizenship. And that tended to have to do with light skinned privilege. You might be seen as not exactly white, but okay, you can vote. What happened is that a lot of people of Mexican descent in places like South Texas, down in the Valley, found themselves getting pressured to vote a certain way in order to keep particular people happy. There were a lot of threats of violence. There were lynchings in South Texas up through 1910. It went on and on. This mostly happened in the Valley. There would be pressure to go and vote for this person, otherwise you’re going to have trouble. In other cases, it was hard for Mexican Americans to demonstrate, I do have the right to vote. Here in San Antonio, if you’re going to Fiesta or just visiting, if you go across the street from the Alamo, there’s a federal courthouse. On the ground floor it’s a post office, so you can go inside, and they have some cool old murals. But on the corner, you’ll see a historical marker for a court case called In re Rodriguez, which was argued on the second floor, where the courtroom was. This was a dark skinned Mexican man, Ricardo Rodriguez, who crossed the border and did the right paperwork. He had documentation when he crossed. He had been here for ten years, which was the required amount of time to apply for naturalization. He decided he wanted to naturalize. He fills out the paperwork, and it becomes a test case, because they were trying to test: can somebody like this actually become a naturalized citizen? According to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and honestly according to our other naturalization laws, there were a lot of restrictive laws around people of Asian descent, but he was not Asian. It took the judge a year to make his decision on this case, because he knew whatever he decided was going to be controversial. His name was Judge Thomas Maxey. He ultimately decided the law says this guy can naturalize, there’s nothing to stop it. He looked indigenous, like a lot of Mexicans do, but he had done all the right things. I’m just saying this to say we had to go through all of these things in order to prove that we’re just as qualified as anybody else to vote. So don’t squander that.
Anjelica Cazares: Yes, that is true. A lot has happened for us to be able to vote. If you’re of voting age, look, there are several elections that might happen within the year. If you can just vote once a year when elections come up, whether that’s city, state, federal, national, whatever it is, just go in. It’s like renewing your passport or your driver’s license.
Dr. Sarah Gould: And I’m going to tell you, it’s actually really fun. It’s kind of like picking your fantasy football team, because you get to do a little bit of research on everybody you’re going to vote for. You’re picking your team, and then you vote for them. They might not win, but it’s the same in football. Pick your team.
Anjelica Cazares: You’re right. And then you do the countdown, you wonder if they’re going to win. You’d be surprised how many people win by like forty or fifty votes. Because not a lot of people go out and vote. So what would you tell individuals who have yet to experience voting in their local elections?
Dr. Sarah Gould: Oh my gosh, it’s fun. You get to do a little research to find out who’s running and what they’re running for, because in our day to day lives, we don’t know, what does the General Land Office do? What does the railroad commissioner do? You can easily find all that information online. The League of Women Voters comes out with a guide, nonpartisan. You find out about your local election, you pick your team, and you go to wherever you’re voting. Here, in Bexar County, during most elections they no longer make us go to a specific voting place. You can go to whatever voting place you want, so you can find out, is there a line here or there? Honestly, there’s rarely a line, unless it’s the big presidential election. And then you see people from your neighborhood in the line, so it’s kind of a social moment. You do have to put your phone away if they’re strict about that, but they’ll let you take out a piece of paper if you can’t remember all the people you want to vote for. You show them your driver’s license, they give you a little sticker, ask you to sign something, and then you get to use this little machine. It’s kind of fun.
Anjelica Cazares: For me, it is. I like to see if the person I voted for actually won, or how much they lost by, what they were standing on. But it hurts, because I’m listening to you and thinking, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to start hosting voting parties. Once you go down and vote, you come over, you have your little sticker, and we’ll put your name up on a board or something. You get to decide something interactive. A voting party. Something where people can celebrate that we have the privilege of our civil rights, not in a way that feels heavy, because civil rights have been feeling really heavy lately.
Dr. Sarah Gould: It has been feeling heavy lately, and that’s a challenge, because I feel my job is to build bridges, to people, to knowledge. I want to make it fun to learn about civil rights history. I want to make it engaging, empowering. I don’t want it to be like, oh no, this is awful. It’s not awful. Things don’t always go the way you think they should, but honestly that just tells us why we need civil rights. It has been a little heavy. The fact that we focus mostly on the past, on history, gives us the opportunity to also highlight, yes, there have been setbacks, but there have also been amazing leaders, amazing accomplishments. When we work together, we can make things happen for the greater good. We can put the community at the center of the work we do. I hope we can always find moments of empowering information about the past that help us see a path for the future.
Anjelica Cazares: For my last question, what would you tell people who want to get involved in this space, whether in their own community, you know, Chicago has done an amazing job, New York has done an amazing job. They want to get involved in their community. Where should they go? What’s the first place I should go, or what website should I visit, if I’m interested in participating more in my civics?
Dr. Sarah Gould: I’ve got a couple of things. One, if you’re interested in Mexican American civil rights history, I highly recommend you check out our website. We have a couple of virtual exhibits. One called CHISPAS, which is about Mexican American civil rights trailblazers from San Antonio. And another called ADELANTE!, which is a timeline of Mexican American civil rights history. We have exhibits here in person, and the exhibits we create are made to be portable, so they can go on the road to other places. If you want to bring an exhibit to your community, let us know. We also do an annual symposium, in person in San Antonio, but we also livestream it. That’ll be at the end of May, May 29th and 30th. Our symposium is the one time of year when we really focus on what’s happening with civil rights right now. Most of the time it’s history. This year I’m really excited for Friday night. We’re going to kick things off with Cristela Alonzo talking about her trailblazing career as the first Latina to write and star in a sitcom, and why it matters that we have these stories written by and represented by Latinas on the screen. She’ll be in conversation with Congressman Joaquin Castro on Friday night. Then Saturday we have a full day, starting with Carmen Perez-Jordan, the CEO of The Gathering for Justice. Some of you might remember her from a few years ago, the Women’s March on Washington. She was one of the tri chairs of the march. She’s an amazing speaker. Then we have the current chair of the US Commission on Civil Rights, Rochelle Garza, who’s a Latina. She’ll be giving the opening keynote. Then we’ll take a little break for lunch, and come back with Henry Jiménez, who is the CEO of an organization in Minnesota called Propel Nonprofits. They help nonprofits with economic development. This last year was a particularly challenging year for nonprofits helping the Latino community, so he’s going to be talking about Latino economic prosperity in the age of ICE. After that, we’ve got Mark Hugo Lopez. For those of you who like statistics and studies, Mark works at the Pew Research Center, and they’re the ones who come out with these really cool surveys. They’re the ones I use for a lot of my research. He’s the head of research for Hispanic and ethnic surveys that they do. I just had a prep call with him and learned that his family is originally from El Paso. He didn’t grow up in Texas himself, so I call him an honorary Texan. And then we’re going to close things out with playwright Josefina Lopez, from Real Women Have Curves. She’s going to wrap things up with some inspiring messaging, because we all need some inspiring messaging. But what else can you do? We have an election coming up, this fall’s midterm election. So you definitely want to make sure you’re registered to vote. You can go to your county website, put in your name and address, and it should tell you if your registration is up to date. Then do your research so you grow into knowing who represents your values. In addition to getting engaged and voting, you might also think about, and I say this as a historian, how your community is documenting the work it has done around civil rights and civic engagement. You could do a community oral history project, or a community day where people who have been leaders can talk about their journey to getting civically engaged. That might inspire other people to pick up their own journey. So essentially, it starts with you. When it comes to civic engagement, people tend to lean on each other to learn more. What’s happening, what’s your opinion on it, why do you think that, how did you get there. Sometimes minds even shift, and sometimes we double down, and that’s okay, because then I know I need to be more open to this, or that you can inspire others to do more in their community. I think that’s pretty amazing. It’s so important that we always remember that we all evolve. Even if last year we thought a certain way about something, this year it might be different. So you want to check in with yourself on where you’re feeling about something, and as you’re picking your candidates for the upcoming election, ask, are they in line with how my thinking has evolved?
Anjelica Cazares: Last question, and I’ll let you go, because it’s a Saturday, she has to go join Fiesta too. What is next for MACRI, and where can we find you?
Dr. Sarah Gould: Let me tell you. We were founded in 2019, and then a year later the pandemic happened, and we all lost track of our lives at that point. We transitioned back into in real life stuff in 2023, when we moved into our visitor center. We’ll be here for a while, but having said that, we’re planning for a bigger future. Our little visitor center is 3,000 square feet. So we’ve been thinking about a larger space in the future. We completed a site feasibility study with an architecture firm to try to identify where we would move one day. When you’re running a place like this, you’re trying to think ten, fifteen years out. So this will be a while in the making, but we are working toward building the first national Mexican American civil rights museum, here in San Antonio. We have so many visitors to San Antonio. We love visitors, come and visit us. One of the interesting things to me about San Antonio is that when you come here, it’s a very friendly city. We’ve got amazing food, entertainment, we’ve got you covered. But if you want to learn about the history of Mexican Americans, the people who make up the majority of the city, there aren’t a lot of places to learn about that history. So I’m really hoping we can put San Antonio on the map, not just for our amazing River Walk and friendly city, but also to learn about and feel empowered by our history here in this country.
Anjelica Cazares: Oh my God, I’m excited. I’m excited with what you guys are doing here, and congratulations. I think this is going to be a phenomenal thing for Texans especially, and especially for a lot of Latinas like me, who understand and enjoy the history of what it is to be Mexican American. Muchas gracias. And again, where can we find you?
Dr. Sarah Gould: You can find us at somosmacri.org, and on Instagram, Facebook, or even on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. We have a bunch of YouTube videos. If you need to find a school project, check out our YouTube channel, and check out our digital exhibits on our website. We’ve got some ideas for school projects on there.
Anjelica Cazares: Nice. And what if I want to come in person and just ask a question?
Dr. Sarah Gould: Yeah, you can also email us at info@somosmacri.org. There’s also a contact us form on the website if you have questions. We love to talk about history. I can talk about history all day. We just really want people to be proud of our contributions to this country, and to know that we are essential threads in the fabric of our nation.
Anjelica Cazares: For those out there, stay informed. Visit Somos MACRI on all social platforms. Any last words, anything I missed?
Dr. Sarah Gould: This is right behind us here.
Anjelica Cazares: Absolutely. All right, folks. And with that, we’ll see you next time. Bye bye.
