Letter from San Antonio
The Good Wife
How is Mary Alice Cisneros emerging from Henry’s shadow? By following in his footsteps.
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Henry grew up only a few streets away. He and Mary Alice met during a baseball game when he was 14 and she was 12. The way Henry has always told the story, he noticed Mary Alice because she struck out at bat. “I don’t remember it that way,” Mary Alice told me. “But I humor him.” They started dating two years later and were married on June 1, 1969, in a traditional Catholic ceremony, when she was 19 and he was 21. In only a few years, Henry was the most visible Mexican American leader in America.
Perhaps it was inevitable that his public life would take its toll at home. If there is a surprise, it’s that by all outward appearances, their reconciliation is real and that Mary Alice has a shot at a public life of her own. Every Sunday for the past three years, Rudy Rodriguez, a deacon at Mary Alice’s church, Sacred Heart Parish, has asked her a one-word question: “¿Cuándo?” He meant, When would she make the run for city council? For three years Mary Alice gave Rodriguez the same answer. “Not yet.” John Paul was still enrolled at Health Careers High School, a prestigious magnet school, and she did not feel free to run. Henry felt the timing wasn’t right either. He was on the road much of the time building City View.
But when John Paul graduated from high school last June, Mary Alice again broached the council race with Henry. “I had a discussion with him and then let it rest,” said Mary Alice, making it clear that he was reluctant. He told her what it would take—lots of time and work—and he warned her that she would have to face questions about his past. Later, they talked about the race again, and according to Mary Alice, they both decided the time was right.
IT’S INTERESTING TO WATCH HENRY, who once held the future of Texas politics in his hands, adjust to life on the sidelines. Like Bill Clinton, he’s still a sought-after speaker and a national player in the Democratic party. Private statewide polls show that his approval ratings in Texas are higher than any other Mexican American politician’s. Not a week goes by that someone doesn’t ask if he’s going to run for governor. “I always say no,” Henry said. “But who knows.” For the meantime, though, the family’s political prospects rest squarely on the small shoulders of Mary Alice. Henry told me that when he was mayor, she always did his best constituent service. People would come to their house at all hours of the night, looking for help with their problems. “She never turned them away,” he said. “She is a better listener than I am. If she is working on a project, she stays focused and keeps at it until it’s solved.”
It’s a trait she likely gets from her mother. A good example is American Sunrise, which Mary Alice and Henry started in 2002 to revitalize the area around their house on Houston Street. In the past five years, the nonprofit corporation has acquired about twenty dilapidated houses in that one square mile, renovated them, and helped poor families find low-interest loans to buy them. Across the alley from the Cisneros home, in a brightly colored yellow-and-blue house, is an American Sunrise learning center, where 37 children come after school for tutoring.
Mary Alice has accepted some of the responsibility for securing funding for these projects, and the details of the work are very similar to what she did as a child in her mother’s store. American Sunrise purchased its first house in 2004 for $57,500. The house was in deplorable shape; seventeen day laborers were squatting in it, treating it as a campsite. Mary Alice helped supervise the renovation, which cost $42,000. Roberto and Patricia Herrera, who were living in a shack on Jesus Alley with their three children, were chosen from a group of several needy families as prospective home-owners. Roberto had a job as a surveyor for a local builder and was able to qualify for a loan arranged through American Sunrise. In 2005 the Herreras purchased the house for $77,000.
“Whenever I needed anything, Mary Alice was there,” said Patricia, standing in her kitchen surrounded by her new appliances. “She helped me by translating the loan application form from English to Spanish while I was filling it out. She even helped me move in.”
To Mary Alice, running for the city council is an extension of this work and a continuation of her mother’s legacy. In a certain sense, she has re-created her mother’s life. Her campaign office is the equivalent of her mother’s store. “Neither Henry’s parents nor mine ever left this neighborhood,” she said. “Because of them we have not lost respect for our community’s basic needs.”
One generation later, fewer families are making this choice. On the West Side, Mary Alice and Henry are an anomaly—educated, upper-middle-class Latinos who never left the barrio for more-affluent neighborhoods where the schools were better. In their large backyard, the Cisneroses have planted eight trees with small plaques bearing the names of their three children, their two sons-in-law, and their three grandchildren. Odds are, none of these children will ever live on the West Side. “There’s a downside to giving your children national educational opportunities and showing them the wider world,” Henry told me. “They seize those opportunities—and leave you behind.”
In early February, Mary Alice had her first fundraiser at Mi Tierra restaurant, a political institution on the edge of downtown. Politics has a way of lifting individuals out of themselves, and this particular evening had exactly that kind of enlarging effect on Mary Alice. For the occasion, she chose a red suit, bright as an apple. As she mingled with a noisy crowd of city and county politicians over a heavy table of standard San Antonio appetizers—chips, guacamole, queso, and fresh salsa—she exuded an easy, effusive charm. By now, Henry was well schooled in how to behave as a political spouse. “You may all call me biased,” he said, in his warm, throaty voice. “But I believe we have a special person running for District One. I know what that job is like, and believe me, Mary Alice is ready to serve.”
Up stepped Mary Alice to the microphone. Though she lacks Henry’s natural oratorical gifts, her tone was confident. “As you can see, there’s been a bit of a change in the Cisneros household,” she said, a laugh line that found its mark. Then she reminded everyone that the time that a council member has in office in San Antonio is short, no more than four years because of term limits, and told them she would focus on “three kinds of infrastructure.”
“First,” she told the crowd, “physical infrastructure—fixing streets, improving drainage, preserving parks.” She lifted a lithe arm and pointed to photos of the neighborhood projected on a screen behind her. Then she moved on to jobs, what she called “the infrastructure of opportunity.” Finally, she talked about progress, “the infrastructure of human capital.”
It was unmistakably a page straight out of the Henry Cisneros playbook. Mary Alice may get her compassion and attention to detail from her mother, but her political course was charted a long time ago by Henry—and she wasn’t the only Henry imitator in the room. His ideas, coupled with his ability to win Anglo votes, have been hugely inspirational to the generation of Latino politicians who have followed him, including former mayor Ed Garza and the Castro twins—Julian, a council member who ran for mayor and lost in 2005, and his brother, Joaquin, a state representative since 2003. How far Mary Alice goes by following in Henry’s footsteps, however, remains to be seen. “She’s strong and smart and has the advantage of her husband’s name,” Garza told me, speculating that in four years she could run for mayor and be easily elected. When I asked her about her future prospects, Mary Alice seemed a little dazed. “I’m taking this one step at a time,” she said.
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