Arcadia Hernández López

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Written By Miguel Rodriguez

"Niños de San Antonio hablan en dos idiomas", San Antonio Express News, April 11, 1976, p. 7

“This place we called home was hardly livable, but we made do. It was a two-room structure in a horribly rundown condition in a row of similar dwellings. They were strung together to save space, so as to rent to more people. The corral, or complex, occupied about one-third of a square block, fronting on the first block of San Luis Street and hugging South Laredo on one corner and South Concho at the other corner...[the corral had] three flush toilets and two showers...When I started school, I used the opposite wall to write the words I was learning at school.”
— Arcadia H. López, "Barrio Teacher," p. 14

Bilingual Education Pioneer

1909–2007

Arcadia Hernández López devoted her life to teaching children on San Antonio’s Westside and, in the process, transformed the field of bilingual education. She was born in Sabinas Hidalgo, Nuevo León, Mexico, on December 21, 1909. Her parents, Francisco R. Hernández and Arcadia Garza Hernández, fled the violence of the Mexican Revolution and arrived in San Antonio in 1913. 

As a child López struggled with English-only classes, describing her experience as “being lost in a jungle where I did not understand the teachers and the teachers did not understand me.” However, she persisted in her studies, graduating from Navarro Elementary and then Main Avenue High School. She went to Our Lady of the Lake University and graduated with a degree in education and mathematics in 1934. She then completed her Masters degree in Education at the University of Texas at Austin in 1938. She returned to the Westside, teaching at Navarro Academy and Barkley Elementary for thirty-three years. She married Johnny Deleon López in 1942, and divorced him in 1968. The couple did not have any children.

In 1964 López would begin her work as one of the city’s first bilingual educators. She began participating in an experimental program teaching some of her normal lessons in Spanish. Her Spanish-speaking students were so successful that the San Antonio Independent School District invited her to oversee bilingual programs for the whole district. She continued this work for thirteen years, creating innovative lessons, audiocassette tapes and films. This work would impact hundreds of other bilingual educators, who had few resources or materials to draw from during this time.

“If I have influenced a person or two to continue their struggle for self-fulfillment, if a few can say truthfully, ‘I am a better person because of her,’ then I will have lived a worthwhile life.”
— Arcadia López, interviewed by Maria Nora Olivarez

López earned her doctorate in Education from Nova University (now Nova Southeastern University) in 1976. After her retirement from SAISD in 1980, she joined Our Lady of the Lake University as director of the bilingual training program for four years. She also consulted with other school districts and education agencies, authored bilingual education textbooks, and petitioned the federal government to adopt nationwide bilingual education guidelines. 

López received many awards for her pioneering work in bilingual education, including the 1980 Woman of the Year Award from Ladies LULAC, the 1993 Ford Salute to Education, the San Antonio Light’s 1990 Woman of the Year, the Headliner Award from the San Antonio Chapter of Women in Communications, and a lifetime achievement award from the San Antonio Association of Bilingual Educators. She was inducted into the San Antonio Women’s Hall of Fame in 1989. 

Toward the end of her life, López told her story in the book Barrio Teacher, published in 1992 by Arte Público Press. In this autobiography she talked about the struggles of her family as they fled the Mexican Revolution, her childhood living in the Westside during the Depression, and struggling with the language barriers of the education system. López died on January 16, 2007, and donated $700,000 to the Department of Bilingual-Bicultural Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio to establish the Dr. Arcadia López Endowed Scholarship for undergraduate and post-baccalaureate students pursuing certification degrees in bilingual education.

Arcadia López at her desk, ca. 1983. Arcadia Lopez Papers, MS 324, Courtesy of the University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections

 
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