Lupita Zepeda has several measures for her employment in telecommunications — one is the four decades that she worked for Southwestern Bell and AT&T and the value and meaning she holds for that experience. Another is the giant leaps in technology over those four decades that saw phone service evolve from manual access to Smartphones.
When she began her career with Southwestern Bell Telephone in Laredo in 1978 as a business service order writer, the company was still offering two and four-party phone lines in the epoch of rotary dial phones made of Bakelite and thermoplastics. Zepeda said she wrote the orders on “dumb terminals,” a keyboard and monitor setup that took the information into a larger system.
The company transferred her to San Antonio in 1984 as a marketing formatter for service orders. She recalled that the single largest order at that time was for hundreds of phones for Santa Rosa Hospital’s new system. She noted that phone service back then was pretty much all land lines, but that by 1985 large, un-wieldly cell phones had begun to appear.
Zepeda was transferred to Houston in 1997 to oversee a Southwestern Bell business call center for repairs and special services for businesses on T-1 digital circuitry. According to Zepeda, the technology changes thereafter were rapid. “We were on DSL Internet and which would later evolve into U-Verse powered by AT&T’s fiber network. We saw cell phones go from analog to digital and all its evolutions through 2G, 3G, 4G, and now the LTE (Long Term Evolution) network that powers Smartphones with faster service and all its downloading capabilities,” she said.
Just before Zepeda transferred back to Laredo in 2006, Southwestern Bell had purchased AT&T, adopting the AT&T name and brand.
She returned to her hometown as AT&T’s director of government affairs and community involvement for the 34 counties in her district. In that capacity she said she worked with elected officials at all levels — local, state, and federal.
The most recent fruit of that labor was her work to ban texting while driving, an effort that began a decade ago and will become effective statewide September 1, 2017.
She credits State Senator Judith Zaffirini for making the bill a priority that became State law. “She carried the bill through five legislative sessions. She was very involved,” Zepeda said.
“AT&T was instrumental in educating all communities about texting while driving. Part of what we did every year was to take driving simulators to high schools so that students could understand how critical the issue is,” she said.
She recounted that the AT&T mentoring program that brought together Junior Achievement and Communities in Schools “was one of the most rewarding educational efforts in which I participated. Students cane to our offices to shadow AT&T employees who reinforced the importance of staying in school and a good work ethic. We mentored over a thousand students in the last four years,” she said.
On the occasion of her retirement after 39 years of service with AT&T, the Laredo City Council recognized Zepeda at its August 7 meeting, acknowledging her service to Laredo and South Texas and her involvement in local organizations that benefited the youth of Laredo. Among those organizations are Junior Achievement, Border Olympics, the Sacred Heart Children’s Home, Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Laredo, the Work Force of South Texas, and Boys and Girls Clubs of Laredo.
After announcing her retirement, Zepeda took a one-week hiatus before becoming district administrator for the District 80 office of State Representative Tracy O. King. The office is on the first floor of the City’s McKendrick-Ochoa-Salinas Library in South Laredo.
The daughter of the late Lorenzo and Elena Guajardo Zepeda, Lupita Zepeda resides in the childhood home in which she was raised with siblings Orlando, Aurora, and Oralia. She recalled long summer days of play on the unpaved streets of the Guadalupe neighborhood. “We knew it was time to come indoors when the street lights came on in the evening,” she recalled. “Life was simple then. It was about family and listening to your parents. Bicycles and skates were a large part of our lives. The treats were the occasional trip to Dairy Kreme on Guadalupe or a movie at the Plaza,” she said.
Family remains a large part of Zepeda’s life. Especially valuable to her is time with her nieces and nephews.
Zepeda attended Central School and Lamar Junior High. She’s a 1973 graduate of Martin High School.
She is a parishioner of San Agustín Cathedral.
