This week on bigcitysmalltown, Bob Rivard sits down with Ambassador Tony Garza, a Brownsville native who served as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico under President George W. Bush from 2002 to 2009 and now works as counsel and special advisor to the global law firm White & Case in Mexico City, to discuss the state of the U.S.-Mexico relationship at a moment of unusual tension and opportunity.

They discuss:

• Why the transactionalism defining U.S.-Mexico relations today was always present beneath the surface — and what changed when it became explicit
• How President Sheinbaum has managed the relationship with Washington, and why her approach has earned approval on both sides of the border
• The coordinated operation that took down El Mencho, and what it reveals about the level of intelligence-sharing between the two governments
• Why "cartels" is the wrong word for what Mexico is actually dealing with — and why that distinction matters for policy
• Whether the Trump administration would ever order direct military action inside Mexico
• How multinational companies navigate corruption and security risks while continuing to invest heavily in Mexican manufacturing
• Why nearshoring has proceeded more slowly than the headlines suggested — and where the real growth has actually come from
• The missed opportunity for comprehensive immigration reform in 2001, and what a more pragmatic path forward might look like today
• Why San Antonio's DNA — automotive, cyber, aeronautics, and its deep ties to northern Mexico — positions it better than Austin for what's coming next in North America

RECOMMENDED NEXT LISTEN:

▶ 165. How Hill Country Landowners Are Challenging CPS Energy's 370-Mile Transmission Line Plan — Ambassador Garza references water and energy infrastructure as emerging areas for U.S.-Mexico cooperation. This episode examines one of the most consequential energy projects now moving through the Texas Hill Country.

…..

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This week on bigcitysmalltown, Bob Rivard sits down with Ashley Alvarado, CEO of Texas Public Radio, and Angie Mock, CEO of the San Antonio Report, to discuss a major development in San Antonio's local news landscape: the two organizations are merging. 

Effective July 1st, the San Antonio Report will donate its assets to Texas Public Radio, combining operations under one roof to strengthen independent, nonprofit journalism in San Antonio.

They discuss:

• Why two financially healthy organizations chose to merge — and how this is different from the consolidations happening elsewhere in the industry
• What the combined newsroom will look like on day one: 31 journalism positions, with all but four working as reporters in the community
• How the San Antonio Report's digital specificity and Texas Public Radio's broadcast reach complement each other — and what that means for covering the city
• Why YouTube has become unavoidable for reaching younger San Antonians, with 60 to 75 percent of county residents turning to it for news every week
• What Ashley Alvarado learned leading a similar merger at KPCC in Los Angeles — and how those lessons are shaping the approach here
• How the two newsrooms will physically unite, with the San Antonio Report moving to TPR's downtown facilities in late July
• The challenge of serving a politically diverse city — and why relevance and trust have to be built together, not assumed
• What the merger means for investigative and accountability journalism at City Hall and beyond

RECOMMENDED NEXT LISTEN:

▶ 170. Don Graham and Dr. Abel Antonio Chávez on Journalism, Our Lady of the Lake, and Why Access to Education Changes Everything — The retired chairman of The Washington Post Company and the president of Our Lady of the Lake University on the state of journalism, democracy, and what it takes to keep independent news alive in a city like San Antonio.

…..

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This week on bigcitysmalltown, Bob Rivard sits down with two guests at the podcast studio at Our Lady of the Lake University — a first for the show. Don Graham is the retired chairman and publisher of The Washington Post Company, whose family also owned Newsweek Magazine, where Bob worked as a war correspondent and later chief of correspondents in the 1990s. Dr. Abel Antonio Chávez is the 10th president of Our Lady of the Lake University, a position he has held since July 2022. A first-generation, first-in-family college graduate and son of immigrants, he went from Front Range Community College to a BS in mechanical engineering, an MBA, and a PhD in civil and environmental engineering, and built a career partnering with local governments and universities across the globe on community-based energy and emissions accounting.

Graham came to campus as a commencement speaker. The visit grew out of his decades-long commitment to college access — work rooted in Washington, DC, where the city's lack of a state university system means students pay out-of-state tuition everywhere they apply.

They discuss:

• How Our Lady of the Lake has served San Antonio's most economically challenged students for 130 years — and what it takes to sustain that mission today
• Dr. Chávez's path from a Denver neighborhood to a top engineering school he couldn't afford, a pivot to community college, and eventually the presidency of a university in a neighborhood that looks just like the one he grew up in
• How Don Graham's time as a beat cop in Washington, DC after Vietnam shaped his understanding of what college access actually means
• The federal scholarship program Graham helped push through a unanimous Republican Congress in 1998 to help DC students afford college
• What Graham witnessed as an early Facebook board member — and what it taught him about giving young people real responsibility
• The sale of The Washington Post to Jeff Bezos in 2013, why it happened, and what Graham thinks of the paper today
• San Antonio's deep economic and cultural ties to Mexico — and how tariffs are affecting the local auto manufacturing economy
• What it means to be an optimist about American democracy after decades at the center of Washington life

RECOMMENDED NEXT LISTEN:

▶ 149. How AlamoPROMISE Continues Expanding College Access for San Antonians — Stephanie Vasquez, Chief Program Officer for Alamo Promise, on what it takes to make college accessible to every Bexar County high school graduate — and what the program has learned from serving more than 30,000 Promise scholars.

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This week on bigcitysmalltown, host Cory Ames tells the story of the Robert L.B. Tobin Land Bridge at Phil Hardberger Park — in a new format for the show. Rather than a traditional guest conversation, this episode is a narrated oral history, recorded in the field at the park itself, weaving together tape from a morning walk Cory took with former Mayor Phil Hardberger and natural resources manager Wendy Leonard.

Just a week or so before this episode was released, a bronze statue of Phil Hardberger was unveiled at the park that bears his name. He is 91 years old and still walks the trails.

The episode covers:

• How Phil Hardberger promised San Antonio a new park while running for mayor — and spent two years looking for the right land
• The phone call that led him to a former dairy farm on the north side, never fully clear-cut, 330 acres still largely as nature left it
• How Wurzbach Parkway split the property in two — and why that became the genesis of one of the most celebrated wildlife bridges in the country
• The $23 million fight to fund the land bridge, the jury of architects Phil assembled, and the moment he committed to raising $12 million himself
• How the bridge was engineered — steel girders, three feet of soil, Corten steel walls designed to block sight and sound from 60,000 cars passing underneath daily
• Why animals began crossing before construction was even finished — and how within one year, all 31 mammal species known to inhabit the park had been documented using it
• What Wendy Leonard has learned managing the bridge's natural systems, and why the vegetation hasn't always cooperated
• How the land bridge reconnected a wildlife corridor stretching to the Salado Creek Greenway — and brought painted buntings back to the park

RECOMMENDED NEXT LISTEN:

▶ 168. More Than Parks: How San Antonio Is Building Trails, Gardens, and Green Space Into a Growing City — A Creative Futures panel on green equity, urban nature, and the push to integrate green spaces into every corner of a fast-growing city. Essential context for this conversation.

…..

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This week on bigcitysmalltown, Cory Ames moderates a live panel from Creative Futures, a two-day summit in San Antonio bringing together creators, builders, entrepreneurs, and civic thinkers. This conversation focuses on green spaces in San Antonio — how we grow them, how we protect them, and how we creatively integrate nature into a city that is expanding fast.

Joining Cory are Brandon Ross, capital programs manager for San Antonio Parks and Recreation, where he has spent two decades overseeing the Howard Peak Greenway Trail System, now over 100 miles of connected trail and growing; Bob Webster, co-owner of Shades of Green Nursery, a San Antonio institution he and his business partner Roberta Church built over 45 years, now being transformed into a public legacy garden; Stephen Lucke, founder and CEO of Gardopia Gardens, a nonprofit stewarding more than 20 acres across 75 schools and 10 school districts, reaching over 25,000 people annually; and Adriana Quiñones, President and CEO of Arboretum San Antonio, a 230-plus-acre former golf course on the southeast side being converted into one of the city's most significant public green spaces.

They discuss:

• How the Howard Peak Greenway Trail System grew to over 100 miles — and why connecting green spaces multiplies their ecological value
• The physical barriers — rail lines, major roadways, lack of safe crossings — that limit access to parks and trails across the city
• Why Bob Webster turned down $3.5 million for Shades of Green, and what he's building in its place
• The difference between a park and a garden, and why San Antonio needs both
• How Gardopia Gardens uses school yards, churches, and public land to integrate food growing into everyday life
• Why native and edible trees — pecans, Mexican plums, mulberries — should replace the default landscaping choices across the city
• How Arboretum San Antonio is using community input from over 18,000 San Antonians to shape a 20-year development plan
• What green equity means in practice, and why access to green space shouldn't require traveling far

RECOMMENDED NEXT LISTEN:

▶ 160. How a Polluted Lake Became a Wildlife Haven in San Antonio — A closer look at how one of San Antonio's most degraded natural spaces was reclaimed — and what it says about the city's relationship with its environment.

…..

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This week on bigcitysmalltown, Cory Ames moderates a live panel from Creative Futures, a two-day summit in San Antonio bringing together creators, builders, entrepreneurs, and civic thinkers. The conversation centers on what it looks like to build a creative life and creative career in San Antonio — and what the city still needs to get there.

Joining Cory are Lionel Sosa, founder of what became the largest Hispanic advertising agency in the United States, a consultant on multiple national presidential campaigns, and a portrait artist whose work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian and presidential libraries; Kathy Sosa, co-founder of one of the Southwest's largest independent Hispanic ad agencies, a veteran of national political campaigns, and a mixed media artist whose work exploring the Texas-Mexico borderland has earned national recognition; and Andi Rodriguez, Vice President of Cultural Placemaking at Centro San Antonio, whose Art Everywhere project has placed hundreds of commissioned works by local artists throughout downtown since 2020.

They discuss:

• How San Antonio's arts infrastructure has grown — from grant programs to the 1.5% public art provision in city building projects
• Why strong mayoral leadership has historically driven the city's creative identity, and what a leadership vacuum means for the arts community
• What the Art Everywhere project has taught Andi about building a supply chain for public art in the private sector
• What Lionel and Kathy have observed in Querétaro, Mexico — including a program that lets artists pay income taxes with their work
• The mindset differences between artists who thrive and those who don't — and why shameless self-promotion is a survival skill
• How the discovery of a Querétaro church's role in building San Antonio's missions led to a documentary, a binational art show, and a student cultural exchange

RECOMMENDED NEXT LISTEN:

▶ 64. Kathy Sosa and Antonio Arelle Barquet: The Other Side of the Mirror — Kathy Sosa and Antonio Arelle Barquet, director of the Museum of Art in Querétaro, discuss the binational art project that grew out of the historic connection between Querétaro and San Antonio's missions — the same story Kathy and Lionel recount in this episode.

.. ..

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This week on bigcitysmalltown, Bob Rivard sits down with Dr. Michelangelo Sabatino, director of UT San Antonio's School of Architecture and Planning and the Roland K. Bloomberg Endowed Professor in Architecture. Six months into his role, Sabatino is making the rounds — meeting architects, developers, civic leaders, and students — and bringing a historian's eye and a pedestrian's sensibility to one of the fastest-growing cities in the country.

They discuss:

• What drew Sabatino from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago to San Antonio, and why the city's UNESCO World Heritage sites and River Walk made it an easy call
• How the school's move to One Riverwalk Place is transforming not just where students learn, but how — using the downtown core as a living laboratory
• Why adaptive reuse, not new construction, is where the most creative architectural thinking happens — and how San Antonio has long led the way
• The challenge of knitting together UTSA's expanding downtown campus across four compass points of the urban core, and what 6,000 students downtown by end of 2026 could mean for the city
• How San Antonio's growth into a megaregion with Austin raises urgent questions about equity, infrastructure, and who benefits
• The "bird's eye view" problem: why seeing cities only from above — or from a car — leads to dangerous planning mistakes
• Why first-generation students from San Antonio's working-class neighborhoods may be the city's most important agents of change

RECOMMENDED NEXT LISTEN:

▶ #151. 8.3 Million New Neighbors by 2050 — Henry Cisneros and Bob Rivard on the Austin-San Antonio Megaregion — Essential context for this conversation. Henry Cisneros and Bob Rivard examine the demographic forces reshaping the San Antonio-Austin corridor and what it means for how both cities plan, build, and grow.

.. ..

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This week on bigcitysmalltown, we examine the fight over the Howard Solstice Transmission Line — a proposed 370-mile, 765kV power line that would connect CPS Energy's Howard Road Station in Bexar County to a new substation in Pecos County, cutting through some of the most ecologically sensitive terrain in Texas.

Host Bob Rivard welcomes Ted Flato, founding principal of Lake|Flato Architects and founder of the Headwaters Alliance, and Jada Jo Smith, owner of Orange Blossom Realty in Utopia and an elected official on the Bandera County River Authority and Groundwater District. Both are longtime Hill Country ranchers and leading voices in the opposition coalition, which has grown to nearly 48,000 members.

They discuss:

• How CPS Energy and AEP Texas proposed the line — and why the compressed timeline caught landowners off guard
• Why the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone makes certain routes especially dangerous
• How the Hill Country Preservation Coalition built a broad, bipartisan opposition movement in a matter of months
• What "the least harmful route" means — and how much of it CPS Energy appears to have embraced
• What landowners can expect if the line crosses their property, and why eminent domain is the worst outcome
• Where the case stands now as the Public Utility Commission of Texas prepares to make a final decision

RECOMMENDED NEXT LISTEN:

▶ #159. The Cost of Powering San Antonio: CPS Energy  - CEO Rudy Garza on Potential Increasing Rates, Sustainable Growth, and Grid Demand — Bob Rivard sat down with CPS Energy CEO Rudy Garza to explore the pressures facing San Antonio's municipally owned utility, including surging demand, grid reliability, and the infrastructure investments driving the Howard Solstice project. Essential context for this conversation.

.. ..

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This week on bigcitysmalltown, we examine the story behind ProsperOps, a cloud cost optimization startup with roots in San Antonio and Austin. Founded by a group of former Rackspace employees—known as “Rackers”—ProsperOps has quietly grown into a significant player in cloud services, culminating in its acquisition by Chicago-based Flexera earlier this year.

Host Bob Rivard welcomes founders Erik Carlin and Chris Cochran for an in-depth conversation about the company's unconventional journey. Operating as a remote-first team with no fixed address, ProsperOps leveraged early support from the local “Racker family,” worked with minimal overhead, and never sought outside venture capital after its initial round. The company’s approach, shaped by the unique culture at Rackspace, stands out in the Texas startup landscape.

They discuss:

• How Rackspace’s culture of “fanatical support” influenced the creation of ProsperOps
• The impact of remote work—before and after the pandemic—on building a fast-growing company
• Navigating early funding, resisting acquisition offers, and why the founders waited for the right exit
• The challenges and opportunities for tech entrepreneurs in San Antonio and along the Austin-San Antonio corridor
• What the ProsperOps story says about the future of local startups, remote work, and the city’s efforts to build a lasting tech ecosystem

RECOMMENDED NEXT LISTEN:

▶️ #138. Alamo Angels: The Future of South Texas Startups – Building on the local founder journey explored in the ProsperOps episode, host Bob Rivard sits down with Sebastian Garzon of Alamo Angels to unpack how a thriving network of investors and entrepreneurs is shaping San Antonio’s next wave of tech success stories. Discover what it takes to grow a robust startup ecosystem and why early-stage investment is key to the city’s innovation future.

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This week on bigcitysmalltown, we turn our attention to Big Bend—one of the most remote and ecologically significant regions in Texas—amid renewed national debate over plans to build a border wall through Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, and surrounding areas. The episode addresses the longstanding local opposition to the wall, the potential impacts on the natural landscape, and what the proposal could mean for communities and businesses in West Texas.

Bob is joined by Brewster County Judge Greg Henington, Tara Shackelford of Hidden Dagger Adventures, and Sam Stavanoha, owner of the French Company Grocer and organizer of nobigbendwall.org. Together, they provide insight into the local response, the risks faced by residents and entrepreneurs, and the complicated political landscape influencing the debate.

They discuss:

• Why locals say Big Bend’s natural barriers render a wall unnecessary

• The environmental, economic, and cultural consequences of wall construction in the region

• The role of technology as an alternative to physical barriers along the border

• Grassroots efforts and local government resolutions opposing the wall

• How potential changes could affect tourism, private landowners, and daily life in West Texas

If you are interested in participating in either of the protests happening on Saturday, April 4, visit www.savebigbendatx.org for the Austin protest and nobigbendwall.org for the Big Bend protest.

For San Antonio and Texas listeners, this episode provides a close look at the intersection of national policy, local experience, and the fragile ecology of a cornerstone Texas landscape.

RECOMMENDED NEXT LISTEN:

▶️ #160. How a Polluted Lake Became a Wildlife Haven in San Antonio – Discover the remarkable rebirth of Mitchell Lake as Cory Ames and Erin Magerl reveal how a former sewage dump is now a vital wildlife sanctuary. This episode connects conservation on the borderlands to urban ecological renewal in San Antonio, showing what’s possible when communities rally to protect natural treasures.

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