María Antonietta Berriozábal
María Antonietta Berriozábal campaigns for Mayor, 1991. Courtesy of María Antonietta Berriozábal
“There are going to be many times in your life where the only thing you have is your voice. Use it.... there has got to be that person that is not afraid, even though everybody thinks they are crazy, you go out there and you say it.”
Community, Environment, and Housing Activist
1941–PResent
María Antonietta Berriozábal has a long distinguished career in municipal politics, and has devoted her life to serving her community. She was the first Latina to serve on the San Antonio City Council, and her mayoral run received national attention. She continues to advocate for environmental justice, human rights, labor, housing, and other issues that impact the Westside.
Berriozábal was born in Laredo in 1941. When she was ten months old, her family moved to San Antonio. She attended the Catholic schools Christ the King and Providence High School. When she graduated she began working for the Salvation Army. She also began taking college courses and completed her degree in political science in 1979 from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her connection to politics began when she started working for John Daniels, chair of the Democratic Party in Bexar County. She worked as a legal secretary for HemisFair '68, and subsequently for Bexar County Judge Blair Reeves. In this work she learned about city politics and about the divisions within the city.
After she graduated from UTSA, her first job was running the district office of the Census in San Antonio in 1980. She worked to support Henry Cisneros in his successful campaign to become mayor of San Antonio, and then she decided to run for City Council and won with 55% of the vote in 1981.
During her ten years on the city council, she consistently advocated for her community, even when her stance was unpopular, voting against the Alamodome, the Applewhite Reservoir Project, Six Flags Fiesta Texas tax abatements and years of rezoning over the Edwards Aquifer. In 1991 she ran for Mayor, and although she lost in a close runoff, her campaign garnered national attention. She founded Hispana Unidas, served as a delegate to the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference in Beijing and was appointed U.S. representative to the Inter-American Commission on Women.
Berriozábal wrote her 2012 memoir, María, Daughter of Immigrants, to tell the story of her parents, Apolinar Rodríguez and Sixta Arredondo Rodríguez, whose families fled the Mexican Revolution to settle in the Rio Grande Valley. She continues to meet with politicians, clergy, young activists and neighbors, often at her dining room table. And she continues to fight for social justice. In 2010, Berriozábal was jailed with 15 college students and community activists during a protest at Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s office in support of the DREAM Act.
Berriozábal has also continued to advocate for social justice issues. In 2018 she organized a civil rights conference at Our Lady of the Lake University to mark the 50th Anniversary that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights met at the university to examine the challenges Mexican-Americans of the Southwest faced. She also served on the mayor’s Housing Policy Taskforce. In May 2019, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Our Lady of the Lake University.
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