Gina Ortiz Jones, a Filipino American who served as under secretary of the Air Force during the Biden administration, won a runoff election on Saturday to become the mayor of San Antonio, making her the first openly gay leader of the seventh-largest city in the country.
Ms. Jones, 44, defeated Rolando Pablos, 57, a Mexican immigrant and former Texas secretary of state known for his close ties to Gov. Greg Abbott, a conservative Republican.
“San Antonio showed up and showed out,” Ms. Jones told a group of supporters Saturday night, and then referring to voters she added. “We reminded them that our city is about compassion and it’s about leading with everybody in mind.”
“So I look forward to being a mayor for all.”
The election was a test of Latino sentiment after the dramatic shift of Hispanic voters toward Donald J. Trump in 2024. Kamala Harris handily won San Antonio, a Latino-majority city and Democratic stronghold, but Mr. Trump made significant gains in the city on his way to a 14-percentage-point victory in Texas.
On Saturday night, Mr. Pablos conceded. “We tried. It was a very tough race.”
Though technically nonpartisan, Mr. Pablos did not downplay his ties to Republican leaders in Texas, nor did Ms. Jones shy from her longstanding Democratic connections. Heading into Saturday, she was seen as the front-runner, having earned the largest portion of the voting bloc in a crowded, 27-candidate election in May. Then, she won 27 percent of the vote to Mr. Pablos’s 17 percent.
She was also closely aligned with the politics of the outgoing mayor, Ron Nirenberg, who was first elected in 2017 and is term limited after four consecutive wins.
San Antonio, a working-class Democratic bastion, has given rise to national political figures such as Joaquin and Julián Castro and Henry Cisneros. Most of the city’s 10 council districts are represented by left-leaning elected members.
Ms. Jones, who unsuccessfully ran twice for a congressional seat in Texas as a Democrat, campaigned on her plans to expand early-childhood education to more children and increase affordable housing and work programs for unskilled workers.
In an interview before the election, Ms. Jones said a priority would be tackling poverty in a city where nearly 20 percent have lived below the poverty line since the 1980s, according to U.S. census figures.
“I want to make sure that we are a city that is serving everybody,” she said.
Ms. Jones will be the second mayor with Asian heritage to lead a city that is closely associated with Mexican American culture.
During the campaign, Ms. Jones spoke candidly about her upbringing. Her mother, Victorina M. Ortiz, a retired educator, immigrated from the Philippines in the 1970s and raised her and her sister by herself, commuting weekly for two years to the border city of Laredo to work as a teacher while her daughters stayed behind in San Antonio. Ms. Jones’s father, a Vietnam veteran, has not been a part of her life.
“There are a lot of folks in our community that were raised by single parents,” Ms. Jones said, adding that she always admired her mother’s work ethic. “That was something that she always instilled on me.”
During the campaign, her opponent accused Ms. Jones of appropriating the last name Ortiz to appeal to Latinos, though most Filipinos have Spanish surnames and middle names, a legacy of colonization. She said the charge was “racist.”
“I’m proud of my identity,” she said.
For her part, Ms. Jones accused Mr. Pablos of being “Abbott’s puppet.” Mr. Pablos was a secretary of state for Governor Abbott and a member of the Public Utility Commission under former Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican. Mr. Pablos said his relationships with state elected officials were an asset, not a liability.
Ms. Jones left San Antonio in 1999, after she received an Air Force R.O.T.C. scholarship to attend Boston University. She earned advanced degrees from the University of Kansas and the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies.
She ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in South Texas in 2018 and 2020, before President Biden nominated her in 2021 to the second-highest-ranking civilian position in the Air Force.
Unlike other major cities, San Antonio uses a council-manager form of local government, in which the mayor acts primarily as the chairman of the City Council and leaves the day-to-day operation to a city manager.
Nonetheless, Ms. Ortiz said she had the support of at least three council members to enact her agenda.
“I’m proud to have already had a strong coalition there to be able to get things done for the city,” she said. “We are a city that wants to move forward with everybody in mind and really not be so divisive.”
Edgar Sandoval covers Texas for The Times, with a focus on the Latino community and the border with Mexico. He is based in San Antonio.
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