Sonora

Vicenta Sanchez Lopez

By Mary Mejia

In 1938, Vicenta Sanchez Lopez became the first Mexican American woman to graduate from her high school in her predominantly Anglo home town of Sonora, Texas, about 200 miles west of Austin. Just one year earlier, the first Mexican American man graduated from Sonora High School.

From the 1920s to the 1940s, she said, Anglos controlled Sonora and discriminated against minorities.

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