Tomas Avila Sanchez

Tomas Avila Sanchez (1826-1882), soldier, sheriff and public official, was on the Los Angeles County, California, Board of Supervisors and was a member of the Los Angeles Common Council, the legislative branch of the city.

Sanchez was baptized José Tomas Tadeo Sanchez y Avila as the son of Pedro Antonio Jose Sanchez (1806-1837) and Maria Ascension Josefa Avila (1809-1847). His grandfather, Vicente Anastacio Sanchez (1785–1846), was mayor of Los Angeles in 1831-1832 and 1845 and the grantee of Rancho La Cienega o Paso de la Tijera.

In 1867, Sanchez married Maria Sepulveda (daughter of Fernando Sepulveda and Maria Josefa Dominguez) and lived in an adobe home on Rancho San Rafael.

He died at the age of 56 in 1882, leaving his wife, nineteen sons and two daughters.

Sanchez was the tax collector for Los Angeles in 1843, during the period of Mexican government of California. He served as a soldier in the Mexican forces during the Mexican-American War, in which he was a lancer in the Battle of San Pasqual. Sanchez remained in the area after the war and remained active in politics under the new California government as a Democrat.

Los Angeles pioneer historian Harris Newmark recalled in his Sixty Years in Southern California that Sanchez was one of the "prominent Mexican politicians" who made "flowery stump speeches" to a group of "docile though illegal voters, most of whom were Indians," who had been literally corraled by backers of Thomas H. Workman who was running for county clerk and who swung them over to vote for the Democratic candidate instead of for Workman. "These were the methods then in vogue," Newmark wrote.

Sanchez's Los Angeles County biography states that in the 1850s Sanchez "was a staunch Democrat and strongly favored" the Confederacy.

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