Meet Mario Salinas
Mario Salinas is proud 4th generation Houstonian. Mario’s great-grandparents moved here from Victoria, Texas and made Houston their home. Mario has always thought it’s been great to have roots in a great city that’s growing. We always hear stories of people moving here from not only other parts of the country, but other parts of the world. He says that’s the sign of a vibrant city.
Mario met his wife 10 years ago through a mutual friend. She had just moved here from North Carolina. So of course, Mario being “Mr. Houston” said to her “Hey, I would love to show you around town.” Mario loves to take people on tours of the area he grew up in (Spring Branch) because he believes you can see the difference in how people live on one side of I-10 than on the other side. The north side is working class families that live in apartments - which is the side he grew up on. Then, on the south side, you have one of the wealthiest zip codes of the country, and maybe even the world, the Memorial Villages. It’s not uncommon for people to buy multimillion-dollar homes there just to tear them down and build another one. Mario loves showing people that Houston is a city of great wealth and opportunity, but also great segregation, not just by ethnicity but also income and wealth. During their first date, Mario’s tour included city hall, where he worked at the time. Mario did a good job showing her he was a city ambassador but also showing her he had a deep understanding of how things work around town. They continued to date and got married 5 years ago in the Northwest part of town and had a daughter 3 years ago.
Mario grew up knowing people on both sides of I-10. He was even friends with someone who got a brand-new BMW as their first car in high school. This person and his sibling got into a physical altercation over taking out the BMW, while the other sibling got stuck with the Jaguar (also known as an old person’s car) and didn’t want to be seen in a $80,000 old person’s car in 1998. Mario grew up being exposed to both sides of the socioeconomic spectrum and that made him have a better understanding of how wide the opportunity gap is. A lot of people buy into these common stories and themes about why things are the way they are that we are exposed to, because they don’t understand how the other side lives. He understands that most moms and dads can’t call into the office as a partner of the firm or practice and proclaim that “I’m going to be late and attend a PTA meeting or school fundraiser.” because each hour is an opportunity to earn money to keep the lights on and food on the table. Mario grew up seeing the bigger picture and having that understanding. Now, as a dad and as a mom, he and his wife, think about what is the Houston they want to expose their daughter to? The answer is they want her to feel at home at any part of town she finds herself in, and be able to interact and not think “I’m not in the right place” or “No one that looks like me is here.” He knows she will find herself in situations like that but wants her to be equipped to be where she needs to be. He knows there will come a day where somebody looks at his daughter and makes an assumption that she is a newcomer or outsider based upon the tone of her skin, but that’s why they want her to be able to proudly say, “I’m a 5th generation Houstonian, and guess what? People moving here is a good thing, it shows we are a vibrant city that people want to call home.”
During Mario’s time at city hall, the thing that stood out the most for him is having the opportunity to go on “ride a longs” with HPD and HFD and see what the day-to-day work is. Mario believes everyone should do that because there’s so much misunderstanding and distrust between the public and law enforcement. It’s important to have a greater understanding and see where the points to focus on are. Mario believes law enforcement should live in the communities that they patrol day in and day out, where they may go to the same church as a person they interact with, or know where their kids go to school because their kids go there as well. They may know that the man having a mental health episode is someone’s uncle, seeing them as people, as neighbors. If you have no real connection with the people you are tasked with patrolling and protecting, then it’s easy for law enforcement say, “Let me do whatever I need to do to go home to my family,” and oftentimes they live in the suburbs and come into the city “deal with people” and then go home to “the real world.” During one ride along, Mario asked the older patrol officer, “What’s one thing you want me to tell [then] Mayor White?” and the officer responded, “We need more mental health counseling.” That officer continued to talk about HPD and how often officers see things or do things while on duty but they can only discuss it with other officers because they don’t want to tell their spouses or family the things they saw. Consequently, the suicide rate among retirees is high and they often take the lives of loved ones and then they take their own, because after retirement, that support system between officers is gone after retirement. There is a lot of PTSD going on there. Being there gave Mario a bigger understanding of that.
It wasn’t until Mario joined a national organization aimed at increasing Latino voter turnout as Deputy Texas Director in 2014 that he got into voter registration seriously and gave people tools to change their thinking. When Mario first came on, the organization was hanging by a thread in Houston. They had a small number of high school student volunteers that would help but they were still understaffed, and turnover was chronic. Mario thought they should tap into the energy young people have but the connection should be genuine, something beyond a sales pitch to meet short term goals to feed a grant. Mario just wanted them to understand they have the tools to be impactful in their own small worlds, to make greater change. Mario worked with a Rice University student that was doing a Capstone project at the Rice Center for Civic Leadership. The student, Daniel Cortez, envisioned one day where students can come from all over Houston and interact with local officials, inform them about civics and register them to vote. The decision was made to make it even bigger. One day turned into three and they were able to give them tools to go back to their own high schools to engage their own fellow students there. Of course, as with anything new, there were hiccups. During their first cohort they learned what worked and what didn’t work. It was great for Mario because he was able to have access to local schools and government and economics classes where he could go in and present to them or they got all of the seniors into the auditorium and present to all of them at one. And that’s where Mario really started to refine his “Story of Self,” which is how you tell your story of who you are, and why you are trying to persuade people to act. Coined by Marshall Ganz, a former longtime United Farm Workers organizer and now Harvard professor, Ganz worked with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to get their message out to the workers. Ganz later framed this work from an academic point of view. Most organizers know these tools so Mario was able to use public narrative and have honest interactions, even in large settings. Mario starts off his “Story of Self” with “I was born on a warm August night in a downtown hospital, St. Joseph’s, in the heart of this town. A few hours later, I was found dead in the nursery with no heartbeat, not breathing, blue from the lack of oxygen. Thankfully the doctors were able to bring me back but they told my parents I wouldn’t be able to walk nor talk.” Mario shares his story very truthfully and these students, who’ve never met him before, why he stutters. Most people have never met someone who does so they are wondering what’s going on with this guy. Mario explains how he overcomes hurdles. You can see it not only in his posture and how he walks, but he uses his honesty and openness to connect with the students, as they all have hurdles, some visible, most hidden, that they have battled, or are currently battling. He touches on the themes of sacrifices, made by parents or grandparents, so the students can have better opportunities.
Mario relays that everyone has a voice that deserves to be heard, and everyone has a voice that deserves to be understood. Civic Engagement is a way to get their voices out there. He is honest about the fact that voting isn’t going to solve everything, but it is one tool that will help. He tells the students that now is their chance to fill out the voter registration form, and pick up that tool, and carry that into adulthood. Mario isn’t there to tell them who to vote for or discuss political parties, but he is there to tell them he knows they have gone through things that form how they see things. Young people and people of color are often taught our stories aren’t important or we aren’t so-called experts. So who are we to talk and speak out? We are experts because we deal with different situations every day. We know our lives, our families, and our communities. Civic engagement helps make better communities and better cities, better states, and a better nation for everyone.
In 2016, Mario was recognized for making an impact among first time voters by being recognized as one of the VDVRs with most registrations in all of Harris County. Mario loves doing this work because it gives purpose to the journey he has gone through, his hurdles, his daily struggle as someone who stutters. If his struggle can give purpose and encourage others to share their stories, then all of his own struggles will have been worth it.
Here we are now years later and Mario is asked to give lectures to Rice students to discuss the “Story of Self” in a way that moves others to take action. He enjoys doing this.
A few years ago, a friend of Mario asked him “why do you care so strongly about all of this stuff?” and stated it in a way like “why do you like to stir things up?” His friend thought Mario would quote MLK or Malcom X. Instead, Mario quoted Steven Kleinberg from Rice University. Kleinberg points out that if you want to be in a city that’s growing, that people want to live then you want to make sure that those who call Houston home have access to quality education, healthcare and infrastructure. We really need to focus on these underserved communities because, if not, we risk creating permanent underclass here, and we don’t want to live in a city where we have a large group of people who are stuck, with only a small number of people with access to opportunities. That’s not healthy for any of us. Everything Mario does is rooted in the fact that he calls this town home. What are the real world practical things that we need to do to make this place a city that is worth calling home, not only for us but for future Houstonians.
