Henry Cisneros - Early Career

Early Career

Cisneros’ community-building career began in urban public service, and setting in motion a focus he would maintain through his entire career to present. The summer after earning his undergraduate degree, he worked in the office of the City Manager of San Antonio. While earning his Master’s degree from Texas A&M, Cisneros worked in the office of the City Manager of Bryan, Texas, and later as the assistant director of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Model Cities program for urban revitalization in San Antonio.

After completing his education at A&M in January 1970, Cisneros and his wife moved to Washington, D.C. where he became the assistant to the Executive Vice President of the National League of Cities. In 1971, the year his eldest daughter Teresa Angelica was born, Cisneros was honored as a White House Fellow and served as an assistant to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Elliot Richardson.

Upon earning a Ford Foundation Grant in 1972, Cisneros and his young family moved to Boston, where he earned his second Master’s degree at Harvard. During this time, he worked as a teaching assistant in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In 1974, after turning down a professorship at MIT, Cisneros chose to return to San Antonio. There, he assumed a teaching faculty position in the Public Administration program at the University of Texas at San Antonio.