María, Daughter of Immigrants by María Antonietta Berriozábal, afterwords by Antonia I. Castañeda and Josephine Méndez-Negrete (review)

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Toward the end of her highly readable memoir, María, Daughter of Immigrants, María Antonietta Berriozábal, San Antonio’s first Mexican American female City Council member, quotes the advice her mother gave her one day: “Be a good person. Help others.”

Berriozábal, known as one of the most ethical late-twentieth century public leaders of Texas, heeded those words long before her mother uttered them. Her in-depth and engaging account of her life provides rich details about how she grew into a public servant dedicated to social equality and environmental protection, the two major issues behind which she threw her commitment to doing the right thing, regardless of the personal and political consequences she endured.

She begins her account with the arrival of her mother’s and father’s families in Texas in the early 1900s, their settlement in Lockhart, and their travails as Mexican immigrants subjected to the racism of the day. After Sixta Arredondo and Apolinar Rodríguez married, they moved first to Laredo and then to San Antonio. There Berriozábal came of age, determining at the age of fourteen that her “mission” was to help her parents lift the family out of poverty by becoming educated and ensuring that her siblings followed suit. She would later discover a larger mission to serve: her Westside community and the citizens of San Antonio.

Early on, she absorbed a key lesson and a memorable experience that guided her most important quests as a public official: From her parents, she learned to treat everyone fairly; at her grandparents’ water well in Lockhart, she relished the joy of drinking clean water.

She writes that in 1980, after years of working in grassroots organizations on San Antonio’s Westside, she sought out other women activists to run for the council seat vacated by Henry Cisneros. “Why not you, María,” came back their reply, and so she was launched into a ten-year career as a reform-minded public servant in one of Texas’s major cities. Berriozábal recalls that she lost many council votes due to her strong stance against development that served narrow economic interests, and because of her continuous opposition to urban sprawl at the expense of the inner city and the fragile Edwards Aquifer, the city’s major water source. She took her credentials as a reformer into her campaign for mayor, narrowly losing to Nelson Wolff in May of 1991.

This defeat did not end Berriozábal’s public service work. She has continued to fight against encroachment of the city’s natural resources; she served as a delegate to the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women and as the U.S. Representative to the Inter-American Commission on Women for the Organization of American States. More recently, she has actively supported the Dream Act activists of a new generation.

Berriozábal’s firsthand account of her struggles and triumphs is vital reading for anyone interested in the political history...