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 father was an Afro Mexican father and a mixed race mother.
He graduated from Phyllis Wheatley High School, an African American segregated school. 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 associate degrees, an Associate in Applied Science-Engineering Technology and Liberal Arts, and received his Bachelor of Art Degree in English from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1987. He married the beautiful Edwina Lacy, of Chicago, Illinois, on July 9, 1988, out of which were born Elena Patrice and Angela Christine. Mario Marcel Salas organized most of the Black Student Unions on San Antonio college campuses, was co-founder of the Barbara Jordan Community Center in San Antonio, and along with former SNCC member Rick Greene, negotiated the Martin Luther King State holiday with former Speaker of the Texas House Gib Lewis. Salas writes for several African American newspapers and was the chief negotiator for the first cable television franchise in San Antonio Mario Marcel Salas became an Educator for the San Antonio Independent School District and received his Master of Education Degree in 1999, from Our Lady of the Lake University. 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, entitled Frankenstein: The Dawning and the Passing, which contains dozens of hidden political points and references. In June of 2001 Mario entered UTSA to work on his second Masters in Political Science which he acquired. He completed a Master’s thesis on the history of African American paternal structures in San Antonio from 1937-2001. Since that time he also teaches for the Alamo Community College District as an English professor and as a full time tenure track professor in Government. He was the vice-president of the Judson Independent School District Board of Trustees in 2004 while 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. 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 similiar 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.
