Henry Cisneros
Henry Gabriel Cisneros is an American politician and businessman. He served as the mayor of San Antonio, Texas, from 1981 to 1989, the second Latino mayor of a major American city and the city's first since 1842. A Democrat, Cisneros served as the 10th Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the administration of President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997. As HUD Secretary, Cisneros was credited with initiating the revitalization of many public housing developments and with formulating policies that contributed to achieving the nation's highest ever rate of home ownership. In his role as the President's chief representative to the cities, Cisneros personally worked in more than two hundred cities spread over all fifty states. His decision to leave the HUD position and not serve a second term was overshadowed by controversy involving payments to his former mistress.
Early career
Prior to his Cabinet position, Cisneros served four terms as the mayor of his hometown of San Antonio, from 1981 to 1989. As mayor, Cisneros worked to rebuild the city's economic base, recruited convention business, attracted high tech industries, increased the level of tourism, and worked to bring more jobs to San Antonio. Before his tenure as mayor, Cisneros was elected to three two-year terms on the city council, on which he served from 1975 to 1981.Throughout his career in politics and business, Cisneros has remained actively involved with housing development and urban revitalization. Cisneros is also an active advocate for the Latino community. He has and continues to serve on corporate boards, as well as chairing and serving on several non-profit boards to promote Latinos and the immigrant population. Cisneros has authored, edited, or collaborated on several books and is an in-demand public speaker.
After public office, Cisneros served as president and COO for the Spanish-language network Univision from 1997 to 2000 before forming American City Vista. There, he worked with the nation's leading homebuilders to create homes priced within the range of average families. That company evolved to become CityView where Cisneros is chairman. He is a partner in the minority owned investment banking firm Siebert Cisneros Shank & Co.
Cisneros co-chairs the Bipartisan Policy Center's Housing Commission and Immigration Task Force.
Personal life and family
The eldest child of George and Elvira Cisneros, Henry Gabriel Cisneros was born in San Antonio, Texas, in a neighborhood that bordered the city's predominantly Mexican west side barrio. Cisneros was named after his mother's youngest brother who developed Hodgkin's disease at the age of 14 and 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 New Mexico. His mother was the daughter of Rómulo Munguía, a relatively wealthy and well connected Mexican printer and intellectual, and Carolina Malpica Munguía, an educator, radio host, and community activist, who chose to leave Mexico in 1926 after the leftist Mexican Revolution and Cristero WarCisneros' father, who came from a family of small farmers who had settled in Colorado after losing their Spanish land grant during the Great Depression was a federal civil servant and later an Army colonel who met Elvira Munguia while he was stationed in San Antonio. As his parents survived great adversity and advanced through life with an unfailing belief in hard work, education and merit leading to a better life, Cisneros along with his two brothers and two sisters were raised in a highly structured environment that put emphasis on scholarly studies and the arts.
Education
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 and 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 U.S. cities were in serious trouble. Relating what he heard to the problems of his largely poor hometown, the meeting, plus a visit to New York City, was a personal and professional turning point for him. While at A&M, he served in the Corps of Cadets as a member of the Ross Volunteers and as combined band commander of the Fightin' Texas Aggie Band.Graduating from A&M with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1968, he went on to earn a Master of Arts in Urban and Regional Planning in 1970 from A&M as well. 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 and did doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974, and received a Doctor of Public Administration from George Washington University in 1976.
Cisneros served as an infantry officer in the Massachusetts Army National Guard while at MIT.
In 1969 Henry Cisneros married his high school sweetheart, Mary Alice Perez. They have two daughters, Teresa and Mercedes, and a son John Paul.
Early career
Cisneros' community-building career began in urban public service, setting in motion a focus he would maintain through his entire career to present. The summer after earning his undergraduate degree, he worked in the office of the City Manager of San Antonio. While earning his master's degree from Texas A&M, Cisneros worked in the office of the City Manager of Bryan, Texas, and later as the assistant director of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Model Cities program for urban revitalization in San Antonio.After completing his education at A&M in January 1970, Cisneros and his wife moved to Washington, D.C., where he became the assistant to the Executive Vice President of the National League of Cities. In 1971, the year his eldest daughter Teresa Angelica was born, Cisneros was honored as a White House Fellow and served as an assistant to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Elliot Richardson.
Upon earning a Ford Foundation Grant in 1972, Cisneros and his young family moved to Boston, where he earned his second master's degree at Harvard. During this time, he worked as a teaching assistant in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1974, after turning down a professorship at MIT, Cisneros chose to return to San Antonio. There, he assumed a teaching faculty position in the Public Administration program at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Political career beginnings
When Cisneros arrived back home, he discovered the stagnant old political order in San Antonio was falling apart and now experiencing a growing socio-ethnic discontent. Since the 1950s, the Anglo-dominated Good Government League had run the city where council members were elected at large and the majority came from wealthy ZIP codes in the Anglo populated north side. The Mexican American community believed they had been neglected for too long by a government who paid more attention to city growth in their own residential area than grievances about drainage and infrastructure in lower-valued real estate. The GGL tried to offset this by assuring one member from both west and east sides and 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, and eight months since returning to San Antonio, Cisneros at age 27 was elected the youngest city councilman in the city's history in 1975, the same year his second daughter Mercedes Christina was born. 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 and administering first aid with ambulance attendants. Cisneros also visited families in public housing units, and 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, and 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, and 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 signed into law in 1965 required that 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 and all efforts to rationalize all-city rule.
Cisneros was re-elected twice more to the city council in 1977 and 1979 as a representative of San Antonio Council District 1.
During his time on the city council, Cisneros formed a relationship with Communities Organized for Public Service, 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 and 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 and an underrepresented Mexican American community. He "enjoyed the resources and visibility of the GGL establishment without being confined to its agenda," and "built an image of an articulate, smooth, Harvard and MIT educated man." Cisneros also was a local grown home boy who "cared about the problems of the common person."
He served for six years on the City Council before being elected Mayor of San Antonio in 1981.