Thanks to the creative idea of longtime water management pioneer Roberto Anguiano, more than 38,000 volunteers have cleared over 600 tons of trash from San Antonio's waterways since 1995. During his more than 50-year career in water quality management, Anguiano worked tirelessly to develop a healthy ecosystem for a city that is guided by its river and tributaries. The annual Basura Bash (Trash Bash) is just one of the innovative projects envisioned by Anguiano that is helping San Antonio achieve that goal.
After training at Lackland Air Force Base, his active-duty years in military service were spent working as a water and sanitation specialist in various locations throughout the world. Returning to San Antonio, he held leadership positions at the San Antonio River Authority and San Antonio Water Systems (SAWS), and in 2004 he was appointed to the Board of Trustees of SAWS, where he helped create the city's 50-year water plan. Anguiano was a champion of the South Side, where he lived with his wife and five children, not far from San Jose Mission. In 1995, he founded the Mission San Jose Neighborhood Association to address basic infrastructure needs and Los Vecinos de las Misiones to assist homeowners near Mission Espada with housing revitalization and utility hook-up grants.
He loved San Antonio's historic missions and its beautiful river pathway from the Mission Concepcion vicinity to the farthest south mission, Mission Espada. Anguiano served on both the San Antonio River Oversight Committee, established in 1998 to improve access and ecological integrity to the city's famous waterway, and the Mission Trails Oversight Committee, established to oversee the development of the hike-and-bike trails that now link the city's five missions.
His children remember their father as a wise man who spent many hours quietly sitting on his patio, deeply looking at the many trees on his property. "We wondered what he was thinking about. Maybe he was charting out his next steps, his next project, maybe even reminiscing about time spent with his family. Honestly, we believe those trees were speaking to him. Nature in essence was his teacher, and in turn he was a teacher for us, our neighborhood, and the larger community."
Certainly, co-founding the annual Basura Bash (Trash Bash), the largest single-day waterway clean-up in Texas, led to a successful lesson in environmentalism for the community. Each year it enlists the participation of 2000 volunteers from across the city---from schools, businesses, churches, and every other sector. It started small, as a project that Anguiano designed with the Environmental Club of McCollum High School in 1995; it became wildly popular, and in its first 27 years of its existence, the Basura Bash collected more than 600 tons of trash, 45 tons of recyclables, 8 tons of metals, and more than 6,000 tires from the San Antonio River and the 20 tributaries that wind their way through the city. Those numbers are sure to increase in the years ahead---the Basura Bash is an enduring gift to San Antonio, thanks to Roberto Anguiano.