Mario Marcel Salas
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Mario Marcel Salas. (born July 30, 1949 in San Antonio, Texas) is a civil rights leader, author and politician. His parents were an Afro-Mexican father and a mixed race mother.
He graduated from Phyllis Wheatley High School, an African American segregated school.[citation needed] It was soon after high school that he joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and became a civil rights worker for over 30 years. He entered San Antonio College and graduated with two Associates degrees, in Applied Science-Engineering Technology and Liberal Arts. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) in 1987. He married Edwina Lacy, of Chicago, Illinois, on July 9, 1988, to whom were born Elena Patrice and Angela Christine.
Salas organized most of the Black Student Unions on San Antonio college campuses, and was co-founder of the Barbara Jordan Community Center in San Antonio. Along with former SNCC member Rick Greene and former Speaker of the Texas House Gib Lewis, he negotiated the Martin Luther King, Jr. state holiday.[citation needed] Salas writes for several African American newspapers, and was the chief negotiator for the first cable television franchise in San Antonio.[citation needed]
Salas became an educator for the San Antonio Independent School District, and received his Master of Education degree from Our Lady of the Lake University in 1999. It was during 1997 that he was elected to the City Council District 2, of the City of San Antonio and served two full terms. He wrote a novel in 2000, titled Frankenstein: The Dawning and the Passing, which contains dozens of hidden political points and references. In June of 2001 Salas entered UTSA to work on his second Masters in Political Science, which he acquired after completing his thesis on "The History of African American Paternal Structures in San Antonio from 1937-2001." Since then he has taught English for the Alamo Community College District, and is a full-time tenure track professor in Government. He was elected the vice-president of the Judson Independent School District Board of Trustees in 2004, serving a three-year term. Salas also teaches International Conflicts and the Politics of Mexico as an adjunct professor at UTSA.
Salas has been critical of the Iraq War and has formulated a concept he calls the colonial matrix.[citation needed] Under this theory, Salas claims that the racist colonial structures that were in place when America was settled are still operating in a "morphed form." His theory is similar to Frantz Fanon's understanding of colonialism, but Salas maintains that colonialism's unwritten rules are constantly working in the background even when a society has been liberated. This makes racial colonial structures a feature that only morphs to maintain systems that evolved from colonist designs.
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