April 15 this year isn’t Tax Day. In San Antonio it is something much, much better. The tax deadline is extended because April 15 is a Saturday. Instead San Antonio will, at long last, celebrate the full reopening of the Central Library with the annual San Antonio Book Festival.
The enchilada-red downtown landmark was shuttered first by the Covid-19 pandemic, then mostly cordoned off for a major interior renovation.
The Book Festival is a great way to celebrate the return of the Central Library, which officially reopened fully on April 1 after major renovations on the first and third floors. A thousand or so readers of all ages will swarm the building and its surroundings to hear and ask questions of a hundred or so authors, ranging from local favorites to national stars.
Some of us were concerned that the quality of the festival might suffer because Clay Smith, the person responsible for selecting books and authors, resigned a year and a half ago. A measure of his skills: He was lured away by the Library of Congress to become its “director of literary initiatives,” with primary responsibility for running its National Book Festival.
Smith is doing great, but so is the San Antonio Book Festival under the literary directorship of Anna Dobben, an alumna of the National Book Foundation, Alfred A. Knopf and other publishers. This year’s authors include an array of National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipients and New York Times best sellers, as well as similar prize winners in children’s and young adult books.
I’ve had the pleasure through the years of serving as a moderator for a number of authors. This year I’m assigned to veteran Texas journalist Dick J. Reavis for his new volume, Texas Reporter, Texas Radical, a collection of his pieces selected by Sam Houston State University English professor Michael Demson. Although Reavis worked for the defunct San Antonio Light from Monterrey, Mexico, in the early 1990s and for the San Antonio Express-News in the early 2000s, for most of his career he wrote deeply researched lengthy articles for Texas Monthly and other magazines, as well as books. Several of the pieces collected in this excellent new book involve one of San Antonio’s most colorful and contradictory characters, Mario Cantu, the late proprietor of a famous restaurant now buried under the downtown campus of the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Reavis is a man of considerable courage. On a trip to a village in the mountainous jungles of Oaxaca in the mid-1970s for a story about a peasant uprising, he and a leader of the uprising were confronted with their local guide, Don Pedro, by three “pistoleros,” thugs hired by large landowners to fight peasants who were forming collectives and competing for land to establish their own farms. The local guide, a gray-haired schoolteacher in his sixties, mouthed off to the thugs despite the fact one of them was brandishing an M-16, the automatic rifle U.S. troops used in Vietnam. The thugs retreated in their pickup, but only to lie in wait. Not long after, they confronted the three again. Don Pedro, who had picked up an M-1, the rifle used by the U.S. military in World War II, got off four shots before being riddled by a dozen bullets from the M-16. Reavis and his companion ran as bullets raked the jungle, and managed to hide, faces to the ground. After about 15 minutes the companion retrieved the M-1 from Don Pedro’s body and the two carefully completed their treacherous trip to the village, an adventure Reavis wrote about in Mother Jones magazine in May 1978.
For a story for Texas Monthly, Reavis bought a Harley Davidson to ride with the notorious Bandidos motorcycle gang. The story, titled “Never Love a Bandido,” was not flattering.
Before becoming a journalist, Reavis was active in the Civil Rights Movement. As a high school junior in the farming town of Littlefield, northwest of Lubbock and hardly a hotbed of leftist politics, he and a friend mounted a campaign to integrate one of the town’s few restaurants. A few years later, in the summers of 1965 and 1966, he went to Alabama to register Black voters and organize boycotts, despite full awareness that Black-run organizations saw one of the major advantages of enlisting white student volunteers was that when they were murdered it evoked more national outrage than the murder of Black civil rights workers. Reavis was jailed but, fortunately, not assassinated.
Reavis came by his politics (and his profession) honestly. His father was serving as a B-29 navigator in Guam and the Philippines when Reavis was born in 1945. His father’s service with Black servicemembers in the war left him with little patience for segregation when he came home to Oklahoma. When the Oklahoma Legislature passed the requirement of a loyalty oath for state employees, he moved to West Texas and started a small-town newspaper. Dick Reavis would also come to consider himself a Communist, even a Maoist — an act of some courage in Texas. He would evolve, eventually becoming a Democratic Socialist.
You’ll have a hard time finding his ideology in his journalism, though. “Reavis quieted his personal voice to allow those of others to be heard,” Demson wrote in his lengthy and fascinating introduction to the book. Reavis’s politics are most noticeable in the subjects he chose. Time after time he immersed himself in the lives of those marginalized by society. Readers will get to know, or at least better understand, not only the peasant rebels who organized in the mountains of Oaxaca and the Bandidos in Fort Worth, but also sex workers and their customers in Nuevo Laredo, Kickapoo tribe members in Eagle Pass, inmates and attendants in the Rusk State Hospital for the criminally insane among others, Klan members in Pasadena, union dock workers in Houston, Branch Davidians in Waco and others.
Reavis doesn’t champion or denigrate any of them. He simply watches them and listens to them, and does outside research so that he can not only introduce them to readers, but also explain the broader social situations that helped to shape them.
For San Antonians, the book holds a special treat: a series of encounters with Mario Cantu, a man who was radicalized in his twenties while spending six years in a federal prison after being caught in Monterrey, Mexico, picking up heroin for sale in San Antonio. He would later turn “Mario’s,” located in what was once a red-light district on the western edge of downtown, into a bustling restaurant and watering hole with regulars that included a flock of politicians. He became something of a celebrity despite, or perhaps partly because of, rumors that his political sympathies for the downtrodden not only moved him to organize against police brutality in San Antonio, in support of farmworkers in the Rio Grande Valley and for undocumented workers and striking garbage workers, but also to run guns (perhaps the M-1 mentioned above) to rebels in the poorest parts of Mexico. While engaging in these radical activities he lived in a prosperous neighborhood and enjoyed exclusive clubs.
Reavis starts by relating how Cantu arranged a jungle meeting and interview with the elusive and charismatic Florencio “Güero” Medrano Mederos, a top leader in the Partido Proletario Unido de America, a subversive group whose leaders were hunted by Mexican authorities. Cantu would accompany Reavis on two subsequent trips to the Oaxacan jungles. Later he would go to see Cantu in Paris, where he self-exiled after being convicted in 1976 of harboring illegal aliens, aka much of his restaurant staff. (Cantu had started a restaurant in Paris. A friend of mine visited and said he was able to get his French waiters to wear guayaberas, but unable to prevent them from tucking them in. Reavis could not confirm the story.) At Cantu’s family’s request, Reavis tried to persuade Cantu to return home and take his medicine, possibly in the form of prison for violating probation. Finally, Reavis tells the story of testifying in Cantu’s probation revocation hearing in front of U.S. District Judge William Sessions, who would later become FBI director. Sessions had been bombarded with about 50 letters in support of Cantu, including from Archbishop Patrick Flores, grocery magnate Eloy Centeno and several legislators, as well as from Angela Davis and other radicals.
Other defense witnesses on Cantu’s behalf included federal Civil Rights Commissioner Richard Avena, Denver chicano leader Corky Gonzales, County Commissioner Albert Peña and a Mexican woman from Monterrey whose son had been disappeared after being arrested. Only Reavis, under questioning by William Kunstler, Cantu’s famous attorney, gave testimony that could hurt Cantu. The prosecutor asked if Cantu ran guns to Mexico. Reavis said he knew of an incident in which Cantu had been discovered running guns in Monterrey years earlier.
Reavis had warned Cantu that if his lawyers subpoenaed him, he would answer questions truthfully. As a witness — on the stand and in the world — his loyalty was to the truth, not to the cause. Sessions went easy on Cantu, sentencing him to five months in a halfway house before being returned to probation.
One of the best things about being a Book Festival moderator is that it has impelled me to read good books I might otherwise have missed. Texas Reporter, Texas Radical is one of these. And it’s just one of a hundred books that you can encounter at the San Antonio Book Festival on Saturday.
Correction: This column has been updated to correctly detail Reavis’ work history and the location of the Kickapoo tribe.
