Cisneros
3:29 PM CST, Thursday, July 16th, 1987
San Antonio, TX
San Antonio, TX Mayor Henry Gabriel Cisneros (D) was born on June 11th, 1947 as the eldest child of George & Elvira (nee Munguia) Cisneros, in a neighborhood that bordered the city's predominantly Mexican west side barrio (now the city's inner west side). Cisneros was named after his mother's youngest brother who developed Hodgkin's disease at the age of 14 & asked from his deathbed that his sister give his name to her son. He is descended on his father's side from early Spanish settlers in NM. His expatriate mother was the daughter of Romulo Munguia, a renowned Mexican dissident journalist, printer & intellectual, & Carolina Malpica Munguia, an educator, radio personality & longtime activist, who fled their native country in 1926 due to the Mexican Revolution & oppressive regime of Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz.
Cisneros' father, who came from a family of small farmers & migrant workers who had settled in CO after losing their Spanish land grant during the Great Depression, was a federal civil servant & later an Army colonel who met Elvira Munguia while he was stationed in San Antonio. As his parents survived great adversity & advanced through life with an unfailing belief in hard work, education merit leading to a better life, Cisneros along with his two brothers & two sisters were raised in a highly structured environment that put emphasis on scholarly studies & the arts.
Cisneros received a Catholic school education, first at the Church of the Little Flower, followed by attendance at Central Catholic Marianist High School in San Antonio. He entered Texas A&M University in 1964 & quickly became a student leader with the MSC Student Conference on National Affairs. In his sophomore year, he switched his major from aeronautical engineering to city management. In 1967, through MSC SCONA, Cisneros was selected to attend the annual Student Conference on United States Affairs at West Point, where he first learned that US cities were in serious trouble. Relating what he heard to the problems of his largely poor hometown, the meeting, plus a visit to NYC, NY St., was a personal & professional turning point for him.
Graduating from Texas A&M University with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1968, he went on to earn a Master of Arts in Urban & Regional Planning in 1970. He earned an additional Master's in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1973, studied urban economics & did doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974, & received a Doctor of Public Administration from George Washington University in 1976. He also served as an infantry officer in the MA Army National Guard while attending MIT.
In 1969, Cisneros married his high school sweetheart, Mary Alice Perez. They have two daughters: Teresa & Mercedes & one son: John Paul.
When Cisneros arrived back home, he discovered the old order, stagnant political arena in San Antonio was falling apart & now experiencing a growing socio-ethnic discontent. Since the 1950s, the Anglo-dominated Good Government League (GGL) had run the city where council members were elected at-large & the majority came from wealthy zip codes in the Anglo populated North Side. The Mexican American community believed they had been neglected for too far long by a government who paid more attention to city growth in their own residential area than grievances about drainage & infrastructure in lower-valued real estate. The GGL tried to offset this by assuring one member from both West & East Sides & recruited Hispanics in their slates for City Council. Displaying his gift for working within the system, Cisneros ran as a city council candidate of the GGL.
After a whirlwind campaign & eight months since returning to San Antonio, Cisneros at the age of 27, was elected the youngest city councilman in the city's history in 1975, the same year his second daughter Mercedes Christina was born. (Cisneros was the youngest city councilman at the time until Chip Haas' election in 2003 at the age of 26). Now entrenched in city politics, Cisneros assumed a hands-on approach to governing that he promised in his campaign. He set himself on a plan to know all he could about life in the city firsthand by emptying garbage cans to learn the problems of the sanitation department, walking a beat with a police officer & administering first aid with ambulance attendants. Cisneros also visited families in public housing units, & promised that their problems would no longer be ignored.
As a city council member, Cisneros took assorted populist positions on such issues as dealing with labor, water, education, & housing, among others. All the while, he endeared himself to the Latino community, especially in the city's predominantly Mexican American poor neighborhoods on the West Side, & where he resided.
Because of the GGL's continued authority, the city council was still roundly criticized for not being representative. During the civil rights furor of the 1960s, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, which required racial groups be given direct representation by political districts to assure the election of a member. Significantly, in a split vote on the city council on whether to accept a Justice Department order to establish an election plan that would provide more access to the Latino community with direct representation, or challenge the order in court, Cisneros voted to accept the order. San Antonio thus moved to single-member directly represented districts in 1977. This led to the beginning of the end for the GGL & all efforts to rationalize all-city rule.
Cisneros was reelected twice more to the city council in 1977 & 1979 as a representative of San Antonio City Council District 1.
During his time on the San Antonio City Council, Cisneros formed a relationship with Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), a powerful grassroots Latino advocacy group founded in 1973 whose focus was to push for development funding into the city's Latino communities. His attention to the needs for infrastructure to the lower income Mexican American neighborhoods further elevated Cisneros' standing in the Latino community. Yet at the same time, Cisneros also looked forward to building a greater San Antonio & the socially redeeming power that comes with economic growth. As a city councilman from 1975 to 1979, Cisneros had an ability to form a political bridge between the pro-growth business interests & an underrepresented Mexican American community. He "enjoyed the resources & visbility of the GGL establishment without being confined to its agenda," & "built an image of an articulate, smooth, Harvard & MIT educated man." Cisneros also was a local grown home boy who "cared about the problems of the common person."
He announced his campaign for Mayor of San Antonio as an independent candidate in 1981. His campaigning of hopeful visions for the future of the city was able to unite the wealthy conservatives of San Antonio & the increasingly vocal Mexican American community. On April 4th, 1981, Cisneros became, at the age of 33, the second Latino Mayor of a major US city, & the first Mexican American Mayor of San Antonio since 1842 when Juan Seguin resigned as mayor. He was elected with 62% of the citywide vote. At the time of his election, San Antonio was the tenth largest city in the US.
Cisneros was reelected to three more terms as Mayor by overwhelming margins, including an unprecedented 94.2% of the vote in 1983, a 73% margin of victory in 1985 & 67% in 1987. His popularity didn't rest with San Antonio's Latino community alone, but with all ethnic groups in the area. In 1982, he was selected as one of the "Ten Outstanding Young Men of America" by the US Jaycees, in addition to receiving a prestigious Jefferson Award for "Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years or Under." His campaign for Mayor & subsequent election gained the attention of national media, who made Cisneros the symbol of the growing Latino population in the United States. According to Richard Garcia, "Cisneros, above all, exemplified the rise of the Mexican American generation & the search for...its identity." He was positively profiled by such national publications as the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Esquire & The New Yorker. US News & World Report listed him (along with then-AR Governor (& future President) Bill Clinton (D)) as one of the "Ten Rising Stars of American Politics," & a 60 Minutes profile introduced him to a televised national audience.
In his eight years as Mayor of the Alamo City, Cisneros attracted national attention for his success in developing new economic growth in the city's business sector, & with his diplomatic skills to 'promote cooperation' among the city's various ethnic groups. He exercised a developmental expansion strategy that led the city to unprecedented levels of economic & cultural growths. Cisneros brought federal monies to San Antonio that further developed the downtown business district. He courted Fortune 500 companies & technology firms to set up shop locally to create jobs, enlarge the city's reserves with local business taxes, & to cement San Antonio's reputation as a leading city for technology, skilled work & economic output. His efforts brought additional investments to San Antonio, such as luring SeaWorld & Fiesta Texas, two major theme park tourist attractions. In his signature accomplishment, Cisneros convinced the city's residents to vote for the city-financed construction of the Alamodome (which is still in use to this day).
