Not even a brain aneurysm could stop the forward march of musician and educator Armando Tejeda toward his doctorate.
In May, at age 59, Tejeda became the first in his family of San Antonio lawyers, politicians and musicians to achieve a doctoral degree, having defended his dissertation to professors at the University of the Incarnate Word. The dissertation, titled “Teaching Quality in South Texas,” focuses on how students perceive the instruction they receive.
To get there, Tejeda had to overcome several roadblocks. He suffered debilitating injuries when he was hit by a drunk driver in 1985, including a damaged left hand that affected his bajo sexto playing. Injury to his lower back plagued him for years, resulting in back surgery in 2005. A 2016 brain aneurysm might have killed him if not for the help of friends and family, and after the coronavirus pandemic interrupted his studies, COVID-19 took his mother’s life in 2021.
In a written encomium to his primo hermano, musician Juan Tejeda said his cousin’s achievement was “due to his belief in himself and in his people, and his persistence and dogged determination.”
Juan Tejeda was among a cast of speakers at a tardeada, or afternoon party, celebrating his cousin’s achievement held in early June at Palo Alto College. There, he thanked former Bexar County District Attorney Robert de León and Balcones Heights Mayor Suzanne de León for organizing the community event to celebrate what some might see as a singular accomplishment.
“This is a very important accomplishment, not just for Armando himself,” Juan Tejeda said, “it’s important for all of our familia, and it’s important for all of nuestra raza, for all of our community here in San Antonio, to be able to get a Ph.D.”
Deeply rooted family
A quiet, unassuming man, Tejeda speaks mainly of others when asked to describe his successes.
“The reason that I’m here standing before you today is because of the support of everybody in this room,” he said at the tardeada.
During a subsequent interview, he credited his and Juan’s successes to their parents.
“I attribute a lot of what we’ve done in education and music and politics to this work ethic that we were taught by both parents,” he said, speaking of his mother Alicia, father Rogerio and other family elders who have remained close in the tight-knit family.
As a group, the Tejedas are deeply rooted in San Antonio. A monument to late legislator Frank Tejeda stands at the entrance to Brooks, the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s annual Tejano Conjunto Festival was started 43 years ago by Juan Tejeda, and the family was among the Canary Islanders originally granted land tracts in San Antonio — a Southside plot which the family still owns and maintains.
With such deep roots, no one seemed surprised to hear from Armando Tejeda’s cousin and neighbor of 50 years, Gabe Gonzales, when he stood to praise his longtime friend. “Dr. Tejeda has always been there,” Gonzales said, using his friends’ new honorific. “[He’s] always been very supportive.”
Speaker after speaker at the tardeada, a gathering of family, friends, neighbors and supporters, mentioned Tejada’s humility, persistence and consistency.
Central Catholic High School classmate Chris Silva took the microphone and said, You haven’t changed at all. You’re just doing the same thing that you did but on a grander scale. We’re proud of you. South Side!”
A bad headache
Mando, as Tejeda is called by all who know him, recalled playing conjunto music with his parents, siblings and cousins growing up on the South Side. He first picked up his father’s bajo sexto in 1971 in an attempt to accompany Juan Tejeda’s accordion playing but had to wait until age 14 for his hand to grow big enough to wrap around the guitar’s thick wooden neck.
The cousins have played together ever since, releasing a 17-song album of conjunto music titled Raíz Xicanx.
Armando Tejeda’s experience also includes playing bajo behind conjunto stars Valerio Longoria, Flavio Longoria, Eva Ybarra, Chalito Johnson, Lupe and Andy Saenz, Santiago Jimenez Jr. and Jesse Borrego Sr.
It was during a 2016 Conjunto Borrego show at the Alamo Beer Company that Tejeda began experiencing a headache that wouldn’t go away.
“About halfway through, it was getting to the point where it was serious,” he said, remembering that neither hydration nor a dose of Tylenol from the drummer helped. “It got to the point when I knew something was really different: I got tunnel vision.”
Tejeda finished the gig but told his bandmates he was unable to help load equipment afterward. He tried to drive himself home but could only make it to his mother’s home nearer by, though he didn’t want to wake her at night.
Tejeda’s wife, Isabel, was busy putting the kids to bed and didn’t answer her phone, so he called his brother Tony next door, who arrived with his spouse, Mary, to take him to the hospital.
He waited in pain without being seen until a vocal Mary insisted on telling the doctors that Tejeda had a family history of aneurysms, his mother having survived one and an aunt who died from one. Still, at 10 o’clock in the morning, a doctor sent him home telling him to see a neurosurgeon.
Days went by before Tejeda saw Dr. Arnold Vardiman. “And he told me, ‘You need to be in the hospital now.’”
The aneurysm in the center of his brain was removed the next day. Recovery, rehab and a mild stroke followed, with Tejeda missing an entire summer of work teaching at Texas A&M University-San Antonio before returning to his duties in the fall.
Special needs
UIW education professor Art Hernandez served as chair of Tejeda’s doctoral dissertation committee. During the tardeada, Hernandez said the qualities that stood out about Tejeda’s focus on special needs education was that “he really cares about the students with whom he works.”
Later, Hernandez described the content of Tejeda’s dissertation as “exploring the dynamics of how students experience school, and the possibility that those dynamics are different for students from different backgrounds.”
Tejeda said his long-term interest in special needs education started after he left a budding legal career because he felt he could do more for the community as a teacher. As a caseworker for the state-funded Southside Truancy Outreach Program, Tejeda noticed that the majority of students who didn’t want to go to school were students who had been put into special education with learning disabilities.
“Children with special needs are marginalized because of a disability,” he said, and “people were not focusing enough on their positive qualities.”
While such students receive the message that they are unable to learn in school, Tejeda became committed to “the idea of trying to help them know that they could learn, [and] understand that they are not their disability.”
Tejeda had already been certified in special education and early childhood education before he and Isabel’s son Joseph was born in 2005 with special needs, which he considers a blessing.
With doctorate in hand, Tejeda will continue “teaching our teachers to become good teachers” of kids like Joseph, as Juan Tejeda put it during the tardeada.
Reflecting on the success of his now-former student, Hernandez summed up his thoughts on Tejeda.
“One of the things that really recommends him is that underneath the surface, the thing that really drives him and motivates him is the success of others,” he said.
