A four-block alley wedged between the heart of San Antonio’s West Side has been named after the Mexican American matriarchs who sold empanadas and tamales to get underserved and often stereotyped students to college.
Amelia Fuentes along with Isabel and Enrique Sanchez were political organizers, education advocates and parents of Lanier High School students whose life work surrounded supporting kids from the barrio.
Since the late 1960s, the Sanchezes advocated for direct contact with Westside school counselors and principals to get scholarship applications to students who otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to apply for them.
The Lanier Scholarship Fund has granted more than $200,000 to college-bound Lanier graduates over the past 20 years, including a Westside Ph.D. candidate who is now a teacher at Lanier High and a pregnant student who is now a therapist and still lives in the neighborhood.
The $2,663 street signs were added to the previously unnamed alley after Westside residents asked District 5 Councilwoman Teri Castillo to name the alley after the Fuentes Sanchez families. More people showed support and City Council approved naming the alley Fuentes Sanchez Lane.
The matriarchs — Amelia and Isabel — grew up on San Antonio’s Historic West Side, known as the “Mexican American side of town,” at a time when it didn’t have the same kind of infrastructure, including water, paved streets and electricity.
The neighborhood suffered from redlining by banks, further neglecting the community and people who lived there.
When Fuentes and Sanchez met in the 70s, one-third of residents were poor, and many children lived in single-parent households, most of whom worked domestic or service jobs in hotels and restaurants — pulling them away from issues happening in schools.
The Fuentes Sanchez matriarchs did what they could to advocate for the students and be a voice for parents at the school board meetings they couldn’t attend.
They were part of the parent-teacher organization and more community work surrounding the school, including being active in the neighborhood association up until they died.
“They were just invested in strengthening and building the community, and also breaking the stereotype that this community wasn’t a bunch of poor, worthless, lazy people, but quite the opposite— hardworking, very helpful to the city of San Antonio and society in general,” said Graciela Sanchez, executive director of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center and daughter of Isabel and Enrique Sanchez.
Today, the 78207 area has a median household income of $30,655 and 47% of its residents live in poverty. The percentage of adults attaining a high school diploma has increased to 61.9%.
Despite the poverty, lack of education, increased prevalence of diabetes and other health concerns, it’s the richest place in culture in San Antonio and welcoming to public housing in its backyard, Sanchez said.
“You don’t see that anywhere else in the city except the West Side,” she said. “It was ‘the Harlem’ — Where Harlem has the Black renaissance, for the Mexicanos, its Guadalupe Street … The Esperanza [Peace and Justice Center], San Anto Cultural Arts Center … have been doing a lot of work to continue to revive and continue to remember that history.”
Isabel Sanchez was 4-foot-11-inches with dark skin, suffered racism throughout her life. Regardless, she’s described by her daughter as powerful and courageous. She had a way about challenging administrators at the school or city level, “she would put her hands on their hands” and it was loving, Sanchez said.
“Her work was about the inequity in our city. She was born in 1923; There were no sidewalks, streets were dirt streets,” Sanchez said. “Her mother went door to door, getting signatures from the neighbors to go to the city to demand they put electricity in the neighborhood.”
“Hace el bien y no te fijes en quien,” Sanchez said. It’s a dicho (saying) her mother firmly believed in: “Do good and don’t bother who is watching or talking.”
Amelia Fuentes was okay with her home being a shelter for the teens in the neighborhood, her daughter Sylvia Benavidez said, and being a voice for parents. She was “always an activist,” she said.
“Any student could come in. If they were having trouble or were being pursued by anybody, they could run into our house and get help from my mother,” she said. “She would always say her blood was blue (for Lanier High School).”
Before they died in 2021 and 2024, the Fuentes Sanchez matriarchs heard testimonies of students who said they helped put them through college and buy personal necessities, like books, laptops and school supplies.
“It was to give the average student money for them to get excited about going to school, because they’d at least have some money to start with,” Benavidez said.
For decades, teachers and principals respected the Fuentes and Sanchez, until recent years that brought teacher turnover and more restrictions on who is allowed on campus. This created relationship barriers, affecting the number of students who had access to the scholarships, said Benavidez.
“Like they were intruding — I think that’s how they made my mother feel. It was her school, she could walk in anytime she wanted … but it became a little more difficult as they got older for them to be truly accepted at the school,” said Benavidez, adding the school should be receptive to parents who want to be involved.
Isabel Sanchez’s daughter, Letty Sanchez, said her mother’s last fight was breaking the systemIC barriers that made it difficult to have access to teachers and administrators.
The scholarships were put on pause in 2022 due to these challenges and being redirected to the San Antonio Area Foundation, but Sanchez said repairing one-on-one access with students will be important for the future of the kids who need the scholarships.
Putting a name to the unnamed alley will help area residents identify where they are which is easier for reporting emergencies, but city leaders should think about naming a bigger street or a school after them, Graciela Sanchez said.
“Bigger streets, schools and institutions are mostly named after men,” she said.
Cevallos Street honors the work of Mexican American labor hero Emma Tenayuca, designating it a memorial way, she said; soon, a portion of Robert B. Green Way downtown will honor bilingual journalist and civil rights activist Jovita Idár by dedicating a memorial way designation, too.
San Antonio residents and street name changes have been controversial and challenged in the past, including the renaming of Durango Boulevard to Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard in 2011 and Old Highway 90 to Enrique M. Barrera Parkway, which went back to Old Highway 90 in 2022.
“This wasn’t just two ladies who would bake cakes or whatever— It was the importance of their community, how they valued it and how those values were something they tried to instill in other people.
“Westsiders are not bad people, we are good people. We contribute to the city and we do a lot of the jobs other people will not do, and we make the best of our situation. They wanted students to take pride in that,” Letty Sanchez said.
