The Time of His Life
The moment has come for Henry Cisneros to make the hardest decision of all—what does he really want?
(Page 3 of 5)
Most San Antonians have—with various degrees of caution—bought into the dream, though at times Cisneros has appeared to be dragging the city into the future by the scruff of its neck. He is impatient and sometimes heedless. With no close and consistent group of advisers, he tends to hatch ideas in his own head, present them in brilliant bursts of enthusiasm, and then race off after his next inspiration. He seems guileless, but he is a crafty politician who is constantly sniffing the perimeters of his territory, alert to intruders. “He knows,” says one observer, “how to de-nut guys.”
Cisneros’ obsession with retrofitting San Antonio as a high-tech capital is fueled by his nightmare vision of the city as a place where Mexican Americans were kept down by low-paying industry, a backwater resistant to ambition and stagnant with unshared power. Some of his critics, though, contend that he has gotten carried away, that in his quest for research parks and tourist attractions and sports stadiums he has lost touch with the essential rhythms and needs of the city. They wonder why he can’t get as agitated about the need for decent public libraries as he can about a high-risk domed stadium, and they wish he would spend half the time fixing San Antonio that he spends hustling around the nation selling it.
“My fundamental objective has been stated forthrightly since I first ran for city council,” the mayor says in response. “Which was to raise incomes and help reduce the poverty percentage, to help the overall economy grow so that there’ll be enough resources to deal with the ethnic unfairness of the past. It’s a generational change—trying to create a more entrepreneurial climate in a city that’s been civil service and poor.”
It’s a measure of Henry Cisneros’ spectacular presence as mayor that the debate in San Antonio inevitably revolves not around whether he should be in office but around how best to use this splendid piece of human machinery. “People have their problems with Henry,” says one city official, “but if you said you could wave a magic wand and make him go away, nobody would take you up on it.”
“Lordy, lordy, lordy,” the mayor said. “It’s a beautiful evening. This is my favorite time of day.” We passed beneath the freeway overpass, following Commerce Street as it led into the heart of the West Side. To our right, the old Missouri-Pacific train station was in the process of being restored, and I noticed the Indian statue that had been missing from the building’s summit for years was now back, silhouetted against the fiery color bands of the evening sky.
The mayor pointed to construction projects and street improvements as we drove along, interrupting himself to make calls on the car’s cellular phone. He had spent a long afternoon in his office rehearsing for the Olympic presentation he was to make the next week in Colorado Springs and plotting strategy for the stadium bill, which had managed to pass the Senate that morning on a voice vote. Now, if there was only some way to get it through the House …
“A major city needs to be able to host major sporting events,” he explained when I told him I was having trouble understanding his passion for a stadium. “It makes all the difference in the world to think of one’s own city as a competitor in the mainstream. Look at Tampa. The fact that it came on-line as a major city has everything to do with the fact that it got the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. San Antonio is the largest city in the country without a stadium. If you go through the top thirty metropolitan areas”—he did—”you find that we’re the only city that can’t host major league sporting events. We’re the tenth-largest city in the country, and people think we’re the size of Tulsa or Charlotte! A couple of years ago, at an economic development conference, someone actually came up to me and asked if San Antonio had an airport!”
It was easy to understand how someone like Henry Cisneros, growing up in this part of San Antonio, could develop a longing to be a part of a big league city. Though the young Cisneros lived in a stable middle-class enclave, he was only blocks away from the open privies, flood-prone caliche streets, and rotting shacks that provided him with perhaps his most instructive lesson in the consequences of powerlessness.
But these streets—lined with icehouses and beauty salons, with taquerias and housing projects—were also the mayor’s emphatic home ground, and he was a proud tour guide as we passed the house where he had taken piano lessons, the junior high school track where he jogs at the rate of 7 minutes and 36 seconds a mile, the home of his boyhood friend Jesse Robledo—later killed in Vietnam—where he had first met Mary Alice at an eighth-grade graduation party.
His parents still live in the house on Monterey Street where Henry and his two sisters and two brothers grew up. George Cisneros, Henry’s father, was an Air Force reserve officer at Randolph Air Force Base until his retirement several years ago after a severe stroke. He’s a quiet, industrious man who, when I met him, was rereading a college textbook on the history of western civilization and following news events on a world map hung on the knotty-pine wall of his den. His wife, Elvira, is slim and graceful, though in clear possession of a formidable maternal will. She established an ambitious and highly structured agenda for her children, enforcing three hours of creative activity a day and color-coding their daily chores on a calendar. From their impeccably kept frame house on the wrong side of town the family sallied forth to hear the symphony and tour the museums; they visited stockyards and train stations, they held loud and lingering political discussions at dinnertime.
Henry was the eldest child. He was named after his mother’s youngest brother—”apparently just a saintly boy”—who developed Hodgkin’s disease at the age of fourteen and asked from his deathbed that his sister give his name to her son. Of the four children, Henry was the most shy, but he had the intensity and industry of a born leader. “He knew from an early age,” his brother George recalls, “that the rest of the family used him as a role model. He was the first grandson of the Munguias.”
George remembers seeing a photograph of his mother and her brothers as children, just after their mother had taken them across the Rio Grande to join Romulo Munguia in the United States. Their heads had been shaved to prove that they did not have lice—otherwise the Immigration and Naturalization Service would have doused them with kerosene—and the humiliating image still enrages George. Henry’s reaction to such perceived incidents of racism is more circumspect. He appears to have taken his father’s advice—”Play by the rules, and beat them at their own game”—and applied it to his own life with such exquisite skill that the scars are barely detectable.
“The worst place I could have selected to go to college as an Hispanic in the sixties,” he recalled, “was A&M. Sometimes I got angry, but I had friends who went to other schools who came away worse than angry—having been put in their place. At A&M there is no place for you except the one you make for yourself.”
The mayor instructed his driver to take us by his own house, a few blocks away on West Houston Street. Known by those with a sarcastic turn of mind as “the log cabin,” the two-bedroom frame house used to belong to Cisneros’ grandfather Romulo Munguia. Young Henry came here to mow the yard and to listen to his grandfather’s insider reminiscences of the Mexican Revolution. He and Mary Alice and their two children had lived here since 1978, though with the new baby coming they had temporarily moved out so that the house could be enlarged.
“What do you think, Mr. Gonzalez?” Cisneros called to a neighbor, one of several who consider it their civic duty to keep a watchful eye on the mayor’s property, as the Lincoln pulled up to the curb. “It’s coming along, isn’t it?”
Cisneros left his jacket in the car and led me through the gutted shell of the house. Little but the walls of the old structure remained, and a big addition on the back doubled the house’s original size.
“This’ll be my study,” Cisneros said as we made our way in the darkness, bumping into sawhorses and stray pieces of lumber. “I made do all these years with just a little study off the living room. Then here’s the kitchen for Mary Alice.
“Wait’ll you see the upstairs.” We climbed a set of bare plywood steps and entered a high-ceilinged rear bedroom with an artful window topped with a semicircle of glass. “The girls have a tremendous, tremendous room. The girls are set. It was originally supposed to be our bedroom, but we wanted to be close to the baby, so we took the one downstairs.”
Cisneros looked up with satisfaction at the fancy window, which let in just barely enough light at this late hour to illuminate the outlines of the room.
“Economically,” he confessed, “I’m just as stupid as hell. This is a poorer neighborhood now than it was when I was growing up—there’s so much out-migration to the North Side. I’m putting a hundred thousand dollars into this house, and I know I’m never going to get my money out of it. But we’ve made this decision, for reasons that transcend logic, economics—or politics, for that matter.”
I was not quite naive enough to believe that Cisneros’ decision to stay in the West Side—here where women were known to carry his picture in their purses, along with their holy cards—transcended politics entirely. Still, his choice of residence was clearly more than a gesture. He was sincerely rooted to this place, by blood ties and by some fundamental character trait that made him wary and hesitant about material success.
My Library
