Alex Birnel a community organizer, poses for a photo outside of San Antonio City Hall.
Andrew J. Whitaker/San Antonio Express-News
Alex Birnel didn’t put on the banana suit because he wanted to. He was a University of Texas at San Antonio freshman at the time… and how embarrassing.
He did it because he knew it would get his classmates to stop in their tracks, and then he could chat them up about registering to vote.
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Same with the robot outfit.
Birnel is still trying to get people to vote, but these days he’s working behind the scenes sans costume — engaging in what he deems worthwhile political fights, pushing liberal policies and trying to nudge San Antonio’s leaders to the left.
Since Birnel donned the eye-catching get-ups more than a decade ago, he’s had a hand in campaigns that sought to protect the low-wage workers who power the city’s tourism industry by mandating paid sick leave, to get city-owned CPS Energy to speed up its transition to green energy and to reform policing laws by requiring officers to issue citations for low-level offenses instead of making an arrest.
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This is one in a series of profiles the San Antonio Express-News will publish over the course of 2026 recognizing emerging leaders in business, science, politics, education, the arts and other fields.
To learn more about the series and to nominate people you think should be considered for profiles, go to Expressnews.com/20for26.
You can read previous stories in the series here.
Not all of these fights have been successful. Paid sick leave never went into effect and voters trounced the police reform measure. His efforts to get the City Council to adopt a resolution demanding a ceasefire in the Gaza strip also went nowhere.
But MOVE Texas, the statewide nonprofit that grew out of his college voter registration effort, has helped increase voters’ access to polling places in Bexar County. And the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter he co-founded in 2017 worked to prevent an apartment complex from being built on property near the Hays Street Bridge that had been intended for a park. Today the land is the Berkley V. and Vincent M. Dawson Park, which opened in 2024 and features two skate parks.
San Antonio’s nonpartisan City Council has gotten younger and more far left-leaning since Birnel’s freshman year of college in 2011. Three of its 10 members identify as democratic socialists, an affiliation made famous by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Council members Teri Castillo, Jalen McKee-Rodriguez and Ric Galvan — who range in age from 34 to 25 — belong to the Democratic Socialists of America’s San Antonio chapter.
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Birnel was one of the small handful of people Castillo consulted before launching her 2021 campaign for the District 5 seat representing the West Side and parts of the South Side. It’s the poorest of San Antonio’s 10 City Council districts. At the time, Castillo was a housing organizer with the Texas Organizing Project. She knew Birnel from his community advocacy — and also from sitting next to him in a Latino history class at UTSA.
“He had a lot of good questions in terms of priorities — the why — and about the path to victory, and how once you get elected you have to do the things you ran on and how you accomplish that,” Castillo said.
From watching his work in the community, she said she learned the importance of letting residents dictate what they want City Hall to address and seeking their advice when crafting policies that’ll affect their neighborhoods.
MOVE Texas
Birnel, 33, is an avid reader, primarily of political theory. He’s got nearly 4,000 books in his personal library.
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He said Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” shaped his view of politics when he read it the summer after graduating from Sandra Day O’Connor High School. Zinn argued that political and social change comes from the bottom up, through grassroots organizing by ordinary people — like students at a public university.
During his freshman year, Birnel and his friends started a UTSA club called Mobilize, Organize, Vote, and Empower, or MOVE, to register college students to vote. Students at other San Antonio campuses, including Trinity University and Northwest Vista College, quickly started their own chapters.
The growing interest led its founders to turn the club into a nonprofit focused on registering students and informing them of upcoming elections.
The city debate in 2013 over whether to update its non-discrimination ordinance to add protections for sexual orientation and gender identity was what got MOVE San Antonio involved in policymaking. Birnel said supporters of the ordinance asked the group to join them in testifying on behalf of it before the City Council.
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Birnel describes it as a watershed moment.
“It got us thinking about the other end of building power,” he said. “Not only do we need to get young people on the voter rolls, but we need to affect the political discourse and the types of candidates coming forward — and the way we do this is by staking clear claims on this is what we’re about.”
Alex Birnel co-founded the organization that would eventually become MOVE Texas, where he worked from 2018 to 2025.
Andrew J. Whitaker/San Antonio Express-News
The council passed the updated ordinance that September. More than a decade later, it remains on the books.
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The ordinance affects city government’s nearly 14,000 employees. It also extends to businesses open to the public that sell a product or service, such as restaurants and movie theaters, making it unlawful to deny services on account of a customer’s gender identity or sexual orientation, in addition to other protected classes like race, age and religion.
Birnel took a paid position with MOVE San Antonio in spring 2018 — its first advocacy director. By the end of the year, the organization would expand statewide, transforming into MOVE Texas.
Since then, MOVE Texas has twice sued Bexar County to force the elections department to increase the number of polling places. It pushed for the county to use a countywide program to allow voters to cast their ballots at any county polling site, not just their assigned neighborhood locations. That system has been in place in Bexar County since 2019.
The organization also unsuccessfully pushed the county to put an election day polling place in the jail, something Harris and Dallas counties do.
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Birnel’s first campaign as advocacy director was to get the City Council to pass a citywide, mandatory paid sick leave policy for workers whose employers don’t provide it. Service industry workers, like those in the hospitality industry, are some of the least likely to have sick days.
MOVE Texas and other organizers collected more than 140,000 signatures in San Antonio to put a paid sick leave ordinance on the November 2018 ballot.
But then-Mayor Ron Nirenberg and the City Council decided to adopt the ordinance in lieu of an election. They feared the measure’s popularity would bring out new voters who would also support a proposition on that ballot that would cap the city manager’s pay and tenure — something the mayor, council and business leaders opposed. (Even without sick leave on the ballot, 59% of voters approved imposing such caps. However, voters overturned them in 2024.)
Area business associations sued to block the sick leave ordinance from taking effect, and court rulings ultimately prevented the city from ever enforcing it.
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But the fact that organizers were able to collect thousands of signatures — more than twice the votes Nirenberg got in the June 2017 runoff that put him in the mayor’s office the first time — was a win in itself, Birnel said. It was “a measuring stick for what people want,” and evidence of “a left electorate” in San Antonio, he said.
MOVE Texas was also one of the loudest voices advocating for the closure of city-owned CPS Energy’s coal-fired J.K. Spruce Power Plant, which is the worst polluter among the utility’s power plants.
In 2023, the utility’s board of trustees adopted a plan to close the Spruce 1 coal plant by 2028 and to convert the Spruce 2 plant to run on cleaner-burning natural gas by 2027. The move was largely spurred by a deadly winter storm in early 2021 that underscored the importance of having a locally reliable system after the statewide electric grid nearly collapsed.
‘Connector’
Ananda Tomas describes Birnel as a “connector.” He’s the link between nonprofits, activist groups and elected officials trying to advance various policy goals.
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Tomas is executive director of Act 4 SA, a criminal-justice reform group she founded in 2021, shortly after voters narrowly rejected a proposition to strip the police union of its right to collectively bargain with the city for labor contracts. Tomas had been deputy director of the Fix SAPD campaign, which collected the required 20,000 signatures to put the proposition before voters.
Supporters said collective bargaining rights give the union too much influence over how officers accused of misconduct are disciplined. Almost 49% of voters agreed.
“You can’t do this work if you’re not connected to others doing the work,” Tomas said.
MOVE Texas backed Act 4 SA’s campaign to collect enough signatures to get a measure on the May 2023 ballot that sought to decriminalize marijuana and abortion, expand cite-and-release and ban the police department from employing deadly policing techniques. While other Texas cities had passed ordinances to decriminalize low-level marijuana possession or end the use of chokeholds and no-knock warrants, no city had done this all at once — or attempted to decriminalize abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down federal abortion protections in June 2022.
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The police union spent nearly $2 million urging voters to reject the measure, which they resoundingly did. Only 28% of voters supported the package.
Losses, whether at the ballot box or at the council dais, are part of organizing.
“But if you do nothing, nothing will happen,” Birnel said. “If you do something, something might — and I say might because you might organize your heart out and you might eat shit and lose. But the logic favors action.”
Birnel left MOVE Texas last year to take a job as a campaigns manager for Local Progress, a national organization that promotes racial and economic justice policies at all levels of government.
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He works from home and could live anywhere, but he has no plans to leave San Antonio. That’s partly because of the food and the inspiration he finds from what he says is the city’s “DIY underbelly,” which he describes as “the mix of artists, creatives, punks and organizers who build informal spaces for themselves both to preserve an alternative history of San Antonio distinct from established narratives and to create and sustain independent community power in the present.”
He’s also staying put because he can’t imagine understanding another city’s history, recent political fights or the local news media as intimately as he does the Alamo City’s.
“Part of how you build credibility as a person that loves this place is that you tend to it, you’re dedicated to it, you till the soil here,” Birnel said. “I do think that I have been through enough fights to try to do various things here.”
In the short term, that includes helping people unionize their workplaces. He won’t say who he is working with, but added that he hopes City Council aides will one day unionize.
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In the long term, he wants VIA Metropolitan Transit to provide free bus service — something the transit agency opposes. He also envisions a municipally owned grocery store operating on the East Side, where residents lack access to healthy and affordable food, and CPS Energy adopting a tiered rate structure, in which the biggest users pay more.
Free bus fare and government-run grocery stores were part of Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign for New York City mayor last year. Mamdani is a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Since taking office, he has brought national attention to ways local government can deliver services citywide and help make life more affordable.
Some on council are interested in having VIA try out free bus fares. But the idea stalled early this year when VIA’s board rejected Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’ directive that the agency plan a six-month pilot that would let passengers ride for free on popular routes.
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Birnel chalked that up to her not first laying the groundwork and garnering support from VIA employees and the community for the policy change.
“I don’t think you get to skip the organizing,” he said.