Former gang tough Manny Sanchez fights to keep Latino kids from skipping college.(Chicago Tribune)

Byline: Tracy Dell'Angela

Manny Sanchez strides to the podium to deliver what has become his motivational stump speech, his up-by-the-bootstraps biography that manages to be both charmingly self-deprecating and shamelessly self-aggrandizing.

It goes something like this: Scrappy son of a Mexican migrant worker dodges the dangers of his city `hood. Makes good on a childhood dream of becoming a big-shot lawyer with high-octane connections. Wants to use those connections to shape the next generation of Latinos into a well-educated and powerful force in American society.

But Sanchez is a little off his game on this Sunday afternoon in the dimly lit auditorium of a high school in Bensenville, Ill. With his $2,000 Italian suit, Sanchez is a facing an audience of working-class immigrants, parents who want their kids to go to college but aren't quite sure how to get them there or keep them there. And he must reach them by speaking Spanish, a language he doesn't speak with his usual confidence and flair.

Sanchez is used to hearing a string of accolades follow his name: founder of one of the nation's largest minority-owned law firms; first Latino to chair the board of an Illinois state university; winner of an international humanitarian award. But the build-up at Fenton High School is deliberately modest. Here, Sanchez is introduced as the father of a teacher and the son of a bracero from Toluca, Mexico, who sacrificed to send his second-born son to an Ivy League law school.

"Levante sus suenos (lift their dreams)," Sanchez tells the parents, watching their eyes like any savvy $275-an-hour trial lawyer trying to sell his message to an audience of wary strangers. "It is important that you are not satisfied to have your children graduating from high school. They must go to a four-year university. We have to make our children study. We have to help ourselves."

Sanchez might be more comfortable pitching this idea to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich than to a Bensenville factory worker, but he also realizes this is where he must plant the seeds for that crop of Latino professionals he hopes to nurture. Sanchez knows from experience that the key to improving the educational prospects of U.S.-born Latino students _ the fastest growing and lowest-achieving minority population nationwide _ lies within these families.