Mario Cantú

American activist and restauranteur

• Born: April 2, 1937
• Birthplace: San Antonio, Texas
• Died: November 9, 2000
• Place of death: San Antonio, Texas

Cantú was an activist and restauranteur who offered a more Latin-American-centric perspective on the Chicano civil rights movement than most other activists and who worked to establish closer ties between Chicanos and dissident groups in Mexico and other parts of Latin America

Early Life

Mario Cantú (kahn-TEW) was born Mauro Casiano Cantú, Jr., in San Antonio, Texas, on April 2, 1937. He became known as Mario in elementary school, when his teachers found it difficult to remember “Mauro” and nicknamed him “Mario,” a name he subsequently used throughout his life. His parents were Mauro Cantú and Lucrecia Casiano Cantú, owners and operators of the M. Cantú Super Mercado in San Antonio, where Mario and his brothers and sisters worked as children.

After graduating from high school, Cantú married his first wife and went to work in the family grocery store full time. He soon realized that the encroachment of larger grocery chains and the move of much of the store’s clientele from the city’s center to the suburbs threatened the long-term viability of the store, and he persuaded his father to turn the grocery into a restaurant. Mario’s Restaurant was a great success, becoming the favorite gathering place of Chicano and Mexican politicians and celebrities, and it was one of a very few restaurants in San Antonio that served blacks, as well as Latinos and whites.

While the restaurant thrived, Cantú did not. He began to sell drugs and, after a heroin bust and conviction in 1962, he was sentenced to federal prison. There is some disagreement among his biographers as to precisely where he was incarcerated; some say it was the correctional facility at Leavenworth, Kansas, while others maintain it was a facility at Terre Haute, Indiana. What is certain is that the prison stint would prove to be his making, as it was there that Cantú first met and was befriended by Puerto Rican independentistas, activists agitating for the independence of Puerto Rico from the United States. The relationships Cantú built with these fellow prisoners and the discussions they had, both in prison and in Cantú’s postrelease correspondence, were to greatly influence his future thinking and activism for Chicano civil rights.

Life’s Work

Upon his release from prison in 1969, Cantú returned to San Antonio with a new sense of purpose. He began his career as an activist by organizing Semana de la Raza celebrations to take place around September 16, Mexican Independence Day. He also founded Tu-Casa, an organization that helped Mexican citizens living illegally in the United States to gain legal status. In addition, Cantú worked with La Raza Unida Party, an American political party founded with the objective of improving the lives and increasing the economic and political opportunities of Mexican Americans. After his release he also met and married his second wife, Irma Medellín, and he took over Mario’s Restaurant upon the death of his father. The restaurant subsequently became the favored gathering place for Chicano activists and politicians.

Mario’s Restaurant was raided by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1976. The restaurant employed a number of illegal aliens, and Cantú was arrested and charged with harboring these workers. Despite organizing a Mario Cantú Defense Committee and rallying support from prominent Chicano activists, politicians, and religious leaders, Cantú was convicted and sentenced to five years probation, becoming the first U.S. citizen to be convicted of harboring illegal aliens.

After his conviction, a newly radicalized Cantú turned to Mexico for both inspiration and new allies in his civil rights work. He led a protest in San Antonio against visiting Mexican president Luis Echeverría in 1976, calling him an assassin and a tool of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He became involved with the Partido Proletário Unido de América (PPUA), a guerrilla resistance organization that sought to arm Mexican campesinos (farmers) so they could seize land appropriated by the Mexican federal government. Cantú befriended PPUA’s leader, Florencio Medrano,and made a number of trips from Texas to Mexico to deliver weapons to PPUA. Such activities were in violation of his parole, and after Cantú appeared on television in 1978 in news footage of a PPUA-led uprising, he was summoned to appear before the court to explain his involvement. Rather than appear, Cantú fled with his wife to Paris, where he spent several years touring and speaking about the injustices perpetrated by the Mexican government against the nation’s indigenous peoples. He finally returned to the United States in 1979, at which time his parole was revoked and he served the rest of his sentence in a halfway house.

After completing his probation, Cantú’s activism took a back seat to his restaurant business. He returned to Paris briefly to open a restaurant, Mario’s Papa Maya, with his third wife. The restaurant was well received and a critical success, but Cantú came back to the United States. He established and ran a series of restaurants in different locations, but none were as successful as the original Mario’s Restaurant in San Antonio, and by 2011, none but the San Antonio restaurant survived. Continued drug use began to take a toll on his mental and physical health, and Cantú died in 2000 at the age of sixty-three.

Significance

Cantú’s primary importance as a Chicano activist came not only from his work for Mexican Americans in the United States but also from his internationalist views of the civil rights struggle, which led him to advocate closer ties to dissenting groups in Latin America. He believed that Chicanos needed to develop a greater sense of solidarity with oppressed indigenous peoples of Mexico and Latin America, as well as a sense of themselves as Mexicans living on land that was once a part of Mexico. In this, he offered a much-needed alternative viewpoint to the better-known, more United States-oriented thinking of Chicano activists like César Chávez and José Ángel Gutiérrez, whom Cantú felt had been co-opted by Anglo politicians.

Unlike other Chicano activists, and notwithstanding his own efforts to shield the illegal aliens working in Mario’s Restaurant, Cantúe was opposed to amnesty for illegal immigrants, as he believed such programs failed to address the root problems of oppression of indigenous peoples and capitalist abuses in Mexico. Throughout his activist career, Cantú remained a forceful critic of American foreign policy in Mexico and Latin America and of the Mexican government’s internal struggles with indigenous separatists.

Bibliography

Cervantes, Leo. More than a Century of the Chicano Movement. Phoenix, Ariz.: Editorial Orbis Press, 2004. A good overview of the major movers and shakers of the Chicano civil rights movement, including Cantú and those who worked closely with him.

Gomez, Alan Eladio. “`Nuestras Vidas Corren Casi Paralelas’: Chicanos, Independentistas, and the Prison Rebellions in Leavenworth, 1969-1972.” Latino Studies 6 (Spring, 2008): 64-96. Examines the influence of the Puerto Rican independentistas on Cantú and other Mexican American prisoners in the Leavenworth penitentiary, as well as the origins of Cantú’s internationalist philosophy.

Reavis, Dick J. “Rebel With a Cause.” Texas Monthly, February 1979. 130-133.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Taste for Trouble.” Texas Monthly, January 2001. 64-68. Reavis, a reporter for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) who covered Cantú’s activities with PPUA in Mexico, was also Cantú’s friend, and he writes in both articles about Cantú’s philosophy and thinking, as well as his activities in Mexico.