Sarah Zenaida Gould, executive director of the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute, with items from the institutes growing archive, Friday, Sept. 3, 2021. She has served as the interim director for just over a year but was named the permanent director recently.
Jerry Lara / San Antonio Express-NewsSAN ANTONIO — It was 2019 and the small staff of the newly formed Mexican American Civil Rights Institute was getting comfortable in its first base of operations at Our Lady of the Lake University.
The ambitious upstart had had no trouble launching itself, at least it looked that way.
Its founders had made a convincing case for MACRI and its members hired an experienced professional in executive director Sarah Zenaida Gould, a public historian and curatorial researcher.
MACRI made plans for a life on a campus where so many other Mexican American groups got their start. It planned to grow holistically from the city’s West Side, where so many Mexican American civil rights leaders and organizations were born or nurtured.
Then the coronavirus pandemic forced its staff to go home to work on developing a series of online programs. Those began to stack up.
Its virtual programs, available on YouTube, reached more than 50,000 viewers, 54 percent of them from outside San Antonio.
The organization, new and pliable, was able to grow virtually and nationally before growing physically and locally.
That’s about to change.
MACRI is circling back to its initial goal to establish a headquarters, or what Gould calls “a starter home.”
It’s now under renovation but when completed in May, a craftsman-style bungalow built in the 1930s will become MACRI’s visitor center.
It’s a place Gould said will “give the public a taste of what an in-person experience could look like while we continue to put the pieces in place for a permanent museum and archive.”
The casita at the corner of Buena Vista Street and Navidad will join a burgeoning West Side corridor where its landlord Henry Cisneros works on his multi-faceted financial-investment and infrastructure-related businesses.
MACRI’s renovation site is part of what looks like a one-man West Side redevelopment plan.
Cisneros, a former mayor of San Antonio and former housing secretary in the Clinton administration, operates across the street on the Navidad side at “The Shop,” the renovated site of the historic Munguia Printers, where several generations of his maternal Munguia family operated their famed print shop.
The MACRI visitor center has its own Munguia connection. It was the home of Cisneros’ late cousin Ruben Munguia Jr., who came back from the Vietnam War to devote his life to the family business.
Cisneros and his wife, former City Councilwoman Mary Alice Cisneros, live a few blocks away, where they’ve also bought and renovated several structures that house a cadre of businesses and nonprofits that have a shared vision of the West Side.
MACRI sees itself growing there because of its civil rights history, Gould said, “but also because we want to be part of how locals and visitors see the West Side.”
“Henry Cisneros is the person who has consistently said, ‘San Antonio is to Mexican American civil rights what Atlanta is to African American civil rights,’ and he is absolutely correct,” she said.
“San Antonio has long been understood as the Mexican American cultural capital of the United States, but it is also the place that gave birth to dozens of Mexican American civil rights organizations dating back to the 19th century, many of which had national reach.”
San Antonio also served as a “critical training ground of even more Mexican American civil rights leaders,” Gould added.
It will take a few years to raise the money needed for MACRI’s museum and archive building, which its leaders envision as a national destination for the learning of Mexican American civil rights movements.
Before that happens, a little house on Buena Vista Street will have to do.
By year’s end, MACRI will debut a traveling exhibit on Alonso Perales and prepare it to travel across the country.
Gould knows many people don’t know who Perales was.
The intellectual founder of LULAC, the oldest Latino civil rights organization in the country, is the subject of a new Arte Publico Press biography, “Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales,” by Cynthia E. Orozco.
He was a lawyer, public intellectual and U.S. diplomat who served in 13 diplomatic missions throughout Latin America.
He lived in San Antonio and was “one of the most educated Latinos in the United States before 1960,” Orozco wrote in a Handbook of Texas entry.
Gould and Cisneros rattled off many more civil rights leaders who deserve study, whose stories must be archived and for whom exhibits should be mounted and toured.
If all goes as planned, MACRI Visitor’s Center will inch closer to the Perales exhibit in time for its fourth anniversary May 29.
eayala@express-news.net
