For Rick Treviño, the road to the City Council would lead straight through Sen. Bernie Sanders.

After Sanders lost the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton, a loss that now feels all the more ruinous with the ascendance of President-elect Donald Trump, the populist senator released a back-to-basics statement urging supporters to “start engaging at the local and state level in an unprecedented way …

“Now we need many of them to start running for school boards, city councils, county commissions, state legislatures and governorships,” Sanders said. “State and local governments make enormously important decisions, and we cannot allow right-wing Republicans to increasingly control them.”

After traveling to Philadelphia as a national delegate for Sanders, only to watch the party crown Clinton its nominee, Treviño has heeded the senator’s call to continue the “political revolution”: He’s running for an open seat in District 6.

“This is a continuation of that,” Treviño said. “I am primarily interested in representing the needs of the poor and the working people of District 6.”

Treviño, 31, became secretary of the Bexar County Democratic Party this summer, but Monday he pledged to resign, should he win the May election. He moved from District 7 to District 6 this year, he said, in order to run.

Treviño will face at least two opponents: Melissa Havrda, a 42-year-old attorney; and Greg Brockhouse, a 44-year-old political consultant.

Restricted by term limits, Councilman Ray Lopez is vacating the seat.

A high school geography teacher, Treviño is a whip-smart progressive who anchors his idealistic screeds against “corporate America” with a bookish vocabulary. On Monday, he casually alluded to “Aristotelian politics” and “mediating institutions” before bringing his speech back to street level: “Oh yeah, man. I’m ready to roll.”

And he leaves no doubt he would take Sanders’ confrontational stance against the corrupting influence of money with him to City Hall.

“I’m a fearless leader right now,” he said. “I’m going to go up against the power interests of San Antonio — and bring it.

“This is America,” he added. “You follow the money and you find out where the strings are tied. There’s no one tied to me, man.”

Treviño was born in Laredo. His mother, an immigrant from Nuevo Laredo, became a U.S. citizen about two years ago. She and his father both work as registered nurses.

Treviño moved here at 20 to major in political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

“I actually graduated in the fall of ’08, when Lehman (Bros.) was crashing,” he said. “This was not the economy I thought I would be graduating into.”

Treviño waited tables in local restaurants before earning a master’s degree in educational leadership from Trinity University and finding his current job at Sam Houston High School on the East Side.

Last year, his students persuaded the San Antonio Food Bank to open a farmers market at the school, part of a broader effort supported by federal funding to improve a blighted, 22-square-mile section of the East Side designated a Promise Zone.

“I lucked into working in a Promise neighborhood,” Treviño said.

He’s proud that the market offers shoppers double the face value of food stamps in fruits and vegetables — an idea dubbed “double-up food bucks” that Treviño advocated for, inspired by a market in Michigan.

Income inequality is fueling his foray into politics.

“To know I’m living in the most unequal city in the United States, I’ve got to do something about it,” Treviño said. “It’s my responsibility. … What this creates is instability in the community. You don’t have any shared experience anymore. If this continues, it’s really going to destabilize the city.”

Treviño bemoaned the city’s “disconnect” with social welfare groups: “I’m going to be really active in making those connections.”

He acknowledged his ambitions to take the “political revolution” to higher office. But he pledged to serve all his terms on the council.

“I have to put myself in positions to prove I can be that leader,” he said.

bchasnoff@express-news.net