Mario Marcel Salas

Mario Marcel Salas (born July 30, 1949 in San Antonio, Texas) is a civil rights leader, author and politician. His parents were an Afro-Mexican father and a mixed race mother. He graduated from Phyllis Wheatley High School, an African American segregated school, and like many black schools across the country remained segregated long after the 1954 Brown Vs. Board decision. It was soon after high school that he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and became a civil rights worker for over 30 years. He entered San Antonio College and graduated with two associate degrees, in Applied Science-Engineering Technology and Liberal Arts. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) in 1987. He married Edwina Lacy, of Chicago, Illinois, on July 9, 1988, to whom were born Elena Patrice and Angela Christine.

Salas organized most of the Black Student Unions on San Antonio college campuses in 1969, and was co-founder of the Barbara Jordan Community Center in San Antonio. Along with former SNCC member Rick Greene and former Speaker of the Texas House Gib Lewis, he negotiated the Martin Luther King, Jr. state holiday. Salas writes for several African American newspapers, and was the chief negotiator for the first cable television franchise in San Antonio.

Salas was involved in the liberation of Grenada as a supporter of the movement against Grenadian dictator Eric Gary in 1979. Salas has been critical of the Iraq War and has formulated a concept he calls the colonial matrix. In this theory Salas says that Foundation Myth is what every American is raised up with and consists of Half-Truths, omissions, lies distortions and erasures of how the United States was formed. Racial myths are at the core of American Education and serve as a mechanism to control the thought processes from birth to death-seeking to present a false narrative in history, culture, and the belief systems of individuals. He sites several examples, one being the Battle of the Alamo. In supporting Dr. Phillip Tuckers research, Salas argues that the Battle lasted only about 20 minutes and most of the Alamo defenders ran and were killed outside of the walls. Hence, the Alamo story is basically white racialized fiction. Under this theory, Salas claims that the racist colonial structures that were in place when America was settled are still operating in a "morphed form."