About a dozen public school buildings in Texas and California have been named after Latino scholar George Sanchez, but an associate professor at Texas A&M University said many in Sanchez's home state of New Mexico barely know his name.

Sanchez is rarely mentioned in discussions about the civil rights movement and desegregation, even though his writings were cited in key cases on those issues.

But Carlos Blanton hopes his new biography will put the scholar on the map for not just for students of Mexican-American history, but for dozens of other topics Sanchez influenced.

Blanton, an associate professor of history at A&M, released his book, George I. Sanchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration early this month. He hopes the book will help Sanchez land in his proper place in history.

Born in Albuquerque in 1906, Sanchez worked as a teacher in New Mexico before becoming one of the nation's top scholars on education. He earned degrees from the University of New Mexico, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California at Berkeley, and fought against standardized tests, segregation and discrimination against Hispanic children...