Gina Ortiz Jones Elected As San Antonio’s Mayor

Gina Ortiz Jones was elected as San Antonio’s mayor in a runoff election held on June 7th, 2025. With 54% of all votes, Ms. Jones defeated her opponent, Rolando Pablos, 57, a Mexican immigrant and former Texas secretary of state known for his connection to Gov. Greg Abbott, a conservative Republican.

“Truly, I am looking out into a crowd of folks that work their butts off,” Ms. Jones said to a group of supporters. “It was my name on the ballot, but you and I know decency was on the ballot. Kindness was on the ballot. Compassion was on the ballot. And San Antonio showed up and showed out.”

Ms. Jones, 44, a former Filipino American secretary under the Air Force of the Biden Administration, is the first openly gay leader of one of the largest cities in the world. She has unsuccessfully ran twice before for a congressional seat in Texas as a Democrat, once in 2018 and once in 2020, before she was promoted in 2021 to the second-highest ranking civilian officer in the Air Force by President Biden.

Now Ms. Jones is now determined to expand early-childhood education to more children and increase affordable housing and work programs for workers. In an interview with Ms. Jones before the election, she said one of her priorities as mayor would be to tackle poverty, which was a big issue in an area where 20% of the population lived beneath the poverty line. “I want to make sure that we are a city that is serving everybody,” she said.

In her campaign, Ms. Jones also describes her childhood. She and her younger sister were raised single-handedly by her mother, Victorina M. Ortiz. She immigrated from the Philippines in the 1970s and worked in the border city of Laredo as an educator while her daughters stayed back in San Antonio. Ms. Jones’s father, a Vietnam veteran, wasn’t part of their lives.

During the campaign, Mr. Pablos accused Ms. Jones used the last name Ortiz to appeal to Latinos, despite the fact that most Filipinos have Spanish surnames and middle names. Ms. Jones said the accusation was racist and said that she was “proud of my [her] identity.”

In return, Ms. Jones charged Mr. Pablos for being “Abbott’s puppet” because he was a secretary of state for Governor Abbott and a member of the Public Utility Commission under former Governor Rick Perry. Mr. Pablos replied that his connections were an advantage.