A San Antonio man whom Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones asked about his hourly age during a City Hall press conference last week lambasted her in an Express-News op-ed that accused her of making unfair assumptions about his work life.
“Words matter. You never truly know someone’s story unless you’ve walked in their shoes,” Ruben Mateo Lopez, a worker for Centro San Antonio — a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the downtown area — wrote in the Tuesday opinion piece. “I wish the mayor had asked me about my story, not just my wage.”
The encounter between Jones and Lopez occurred during a Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce press conference on Project Marvel, which Jones hijacked. To illustrate a point about San Antonio’s reliance on low-wage hospitality jobs, the mayor selected Lopez from the crowd and asked how much he earned per hour.
Lopez responded that he made $19 an hour.
“That means you make less than $42,000 a year,” Jones replied.
“I get by pretty good,” Lopez responded.
“OK, well, I am glad that you do,” Jones said.
In the op-ed, Lopez wrote that he was unsure whether Jones was being sarcastic with her response. Nonetheless, the entire interaction left a bad impression, he explained.
“Centro gave me a path forward, as it has for many of my colleagues,” the Burbank High School graduate wrote. “We are one of the few organizations that intentionally hire people who are homeless or in recovery from addiction. We are a second-chance organization.”
Indeed, Lopez himself was homeless before finding work and a community at Centro San Antonio, he wrote.
The Current asked Jones’ office if she thought she could have handled the interaction with Lopez differently. A representative from the office replied: “May I ask which part specifically was seen as disingenuous?”
Meanwhile, Centro CEO Trish DeBerry, in a Monday episode of the Beyond the Bite podcast with Eddie Aldrete, said she found Jones’ comments to her staff “disrespectful.”
“As mama bear, I’m uber-protective of my ambassadors, and I almost came out of my skin,” she said. “Don’t pick on my people.”
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This article appears in Aug 21 – Sep 2, 2025.