Manny Sanchez: managing partner of Sanchez & Daniels: proud & Mexican

Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful American Latino, June-July, 2003 by Nick Wilson

Few of the privileged Anglo university students, who looked down on Manny Sanchez when he went to his first college dance dressed in Cuban-heel black pointy shoes, suede coat, and shark-skin pants, would have imagined that one day they might end up begging to do business with his prestigious law firm.

When Sanchez was a child, his Mexican father, a former bracero worker, told him, "If I can come to a country where I don't know the language, and I didn't, and I can come to a culture that I don't know, and I didn't, and I didn't have an education. Then you who were born here, who have an education that I never had, who speak the language that I didn't know, and are familiar with the culture--it's the only one you know, the American culture--then you have no excuse but to succeed with all those benefits."

So how did a truck driver's son become a lawyer? Sanchez's role model was a TV lawyer, Perry Mason.

"This guy on TV wearing a suit was not blue collar like my father. He wasn't having to use his back or his muscles to make a living. I wanted to wear a suit and not have to rely on my brawn to make a living. And I saw that this guy always won."

People laughed at him when he said he wanted to be a lawyer, so he rose to the challenge.

"I'm driven by pride. I'm a very emotional man. If I say I'm going to do something, I'm too proud to fail," he said.

A turning point at high school was a guidance counsellor who told him that he was flunking school and would never make it to be a lawyer.

Leaving the office Sanchez said he dropped his cocky strut because he had no one to impress and thought, "Might he be right? Might I actually have to work to make something of myself, to be a lawyer?" "He scared me to death. I was trembling." He stopped blowing off the teachers and made it to college.

At Northern Illinois University Sanchez was one of about 15 Latinos out of some 15,000 students. At his first dance he "dressed like Saturday night in the neighborhood, and I think I'm looking sharp. And I went to that dance, and here are all these penny loafers, khaki pants, and plaid shirts; and I'm looked at like a freak. They wouldn't talk to me. I couldn't get to that dorm quick enough, and I thought, 'This isn't going to work, and I'm going to have to at least try and learn from at a appearance standpoint to assimilate.'"

Sanchez supported himself by cleaning toilets and sinks at a factory while he made it to Philadelphia University Law School.

On matriculating he worked for a law firm before setting up his own company, Sanchez & Daniels.

Back in 1987 he insisted on being the majority partner as he knew that in the future Hispanics would be the largest ethnic minority and that non-Hispanic people would want to do business with Latino firms. "I thanked my dad for being bona in Mexico and giving me my name, Manuel Sanchez, and the opportunities that gave me."

The firm is the largest minority-owned law firm in the United States with 37 lawyers and $7.3 million in revenue representing corporate America, mainly ha Chicago, and has Daimler Chrysler, Motorola, and McDonald's on the books.

Proud as ever, Sanchez is taking out dual US-Mexican citizenship. "When I go back to Mexico, I intend to stand in line with Mexicans and not with the tourists."