RENAMING OF R.E. LEE CENTER TABLED; WE NOMINATE HENRY

"During the last TSC board meeting Thursday, July 30, the TSC board members – through Zoom video – entertained an action item "on the naming or renaming of buildings, facilities and spaces; including the Robert E. Lee Youth Center."
By Juan Montoya

Henry Sanchez Jr, was elected to  served in the Texas House of representatives for then-District 47-2 (Brownsville, Cameron County, now District 37) in the mid-1960s and served for four sessions from 1967 to 1975.

After he was beaten by Brownsville attorney Rene Oliveira, he started a textile manufacturing enterprise in Guatemala and dabbled in the then-booming real-estate market with his friend and Houston developer  Floyd Dillinger. But he never wandered too far from his home in Brownsville and his children, especially from his grand kids from his daughter Sonya.

Then, in 1991, Oliveira and Eddie Lucio Jr., Texas Senator District 27, passed bills that established the "partnership" between the University of Texas System and Texas Southmost College hailed by a cadre of local business and political leaders as the vision of the future.

Oliveira also filed legislation which allowed then state to sell the TSC president's house to new TSC president Julieta Garcia, an unprecedented action that had never been allowed before. The college had pumped $100,000s into refurbishing the home in the Rio Viejo area.

It was sold for just a little over $100,000, a fraction of its real value, which Garcia was able to purchase through a friendly loan by then-IBC President – and her former school mate – the now-late Fred Rusteberg.   

1991 was a landmark year, the year the community college agreed to pay the UT System to establish UT-Brownsville-TSC, a so-called "community university," on the TSC campus in Brownsville. UTB rented the buildings from the college and received some $55 million a year in "transfers" from the community college.

I still remember Henry walking into the county barn in 1993 where I worked as an administrative assistant for the Pct. 1 commissioner of Cameron County. He seemed perturbed and handed me the bill that had been passed in Austin sponsored by his successor Oliviera establishing the "partnership" between TSC and the UT System.

"There's no money in it," he said, rubbing his left thumb, a result of a fungus infection he contracted in Guatemala. "It's all coming from the taxes of the college district. We're going to get screwed."

That was when he started the news weekly (Crossroads) to campaign against the TSC-UTB partnership. He asked me to join him in putting the weekly together and funded it himself. He was our only ad salesman as well as our marketing director. He was a tireless worker. When we got the new edition from the printer, he and his wife Maria Alicia Tijerina Sanchez would distribute it in the Rio Viejo subdivision aboard their robin-egg blue Cadillac.

Henry's call to end the partnership just two years after its beginning in 1991 was starting to make  inroads with a growing number of adherents but shook up the proponents and supporters, many of them influential people like IBC's Rusteberg, the Oliveira clan, one of who was on Juliet's TSC board (David, an attorney), and the upper crust of the local status quo like the Cardenas family.

They lobbied local businesses not to advertise in the Crossroads and Henry often had to foot the bill to put out the next edition. But just as he had served four years in the U.S. Air Force, won a Golden Gloves championship in amateur boxing, and won the "Iron Man" award when he played offense and defense for the University of Colorado Buffaloes, Henry was a persistent sort.

(At right, Henry works out on the heavy bag at the gym while attending TSC on the GI Bill.)

The graduation rate of UTB-TSC over four years was 16 percent and tuition was charged at the university - not community college - level. Henry had been right. We were getting screwed.

Over the 21 or so years of the partnership, TSC "transferred" more than $1 billion to UTB.

Henry's campaign for an independent TSC to return to its original mission of providing an affordable first rung for local students to learn a craft or continue on higher education ended suddenly February 25, 1995 when he and his friend Dillinger invited me to the family condominium in South Padre Island.

That evening – after visiting SombreroFest – Henry had grilled a redfish in the condo balcony and we sat down to eat. After dinner he sat down with a drink in his hand and we asked him if he wanted to go out to one of the clubs to hear some music. He sat on an easy chair and said he was going to relax for a while.

He lowered his head and snored loudly twice. Dillinger instantly knew something was wrong and rushed to his side. Henry never woke up from his sudden sleep. Apparently, he had suffered a ruptured aorta without knowing it and just went to sleep sitting on the chair. He died peacefully.

His wife Maria Alicia Tijerina Sanchez joined him in 2004. Both are at rest in the mausoleum at the Funeraria del Angel Buena Vista and Buena Vista Burial Park, 125 McDavitt Blvd.
Many years later after Henry passed – in 2010 – Julieta and her supporters in the community pushed for legislation spomsored by Oliveira in the House and Lucio in the Senate to transfer all of the assets to the UT System except for the bond debt accrued under Garcia and her pliant boards. If passed, the legislation would have done away with the little community college that had been nourished with the blood, sweat and tears of the district's resident for more than 80 years. TSC would disappear only after the bond debt had been paid by the district's taxpayers.

But by then the community – like Henry in 1993 – had realized the mistake of subsidizing the oil-and-gas-wealthy UT System through property taxes paid by the residents of the district located in the poorest community in the county. During the previous election they had elected Adela Garza, Kiko Rendon,Trey Mendez and Rene Torres to the board and effectively ended her control of the board's majority and her plan to end the existence of TSC.

It would be 2011 after UTB-TSC president Julieta Garcia lost control of the TSC board that the district regained its independence.

Today, after an epic struggle to return control of TSC to its elected board, lowering tuition three times, and enjoying a robust enrollment, the newly independent and accredited TSC has once again returned to its original mission.

During the last TSC board meeting Thursday, July 30, the TSC board members – through Zoom video – entertained an action item "on the naming or renaming of buildings, facilities and spaces; including the Robert E. Lee Youth Center."

One of the names that has been proposed is the author and professor of Ethnology at the University of Texas-Austin Americo Paredes. Paredes was born in Brownsville but has spent most of his adult life in academia in Austin. Some members objected and said that they were opposed to naming anybody who was not from the community.

The motion that was passed was to send the draft policy back to committee to be reconsidered.

I propose that the youth center be named after Henry Sanchez who literally sacrificed his life to return TSC to the hands of those who created and sustained it through thick and thin to give their children an opportunity to get an education, the people of this district.