Latinos Struggle for Role in National Leadership

At a time when Latino influence is growing in national politics, led by huge strides in California, the ranks of Latino leadership at the national level remain strikingly thin.

There are no Latinos in the 100-member U.S. Senate and haven’t been for more than 20 years, since New Mexico Democrat Joseph Montoya was defeated in 1976.

There are only 18 Latino voting members of the 435-seat House of Representatives, 11 of them from just two states, Texas and California. By contrast, African Americans, who make up about the same share of the national population, hold 39 seats.

In the Clinton administration, U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson will be the sole Latino in the president’s 14-member Cabinet, assuming his nomination as Energy secretary wins Senate confirmation as expected. That compares with two Latino members of the Cabinet in Clinton’s first term, Transportation Secretary Federico Pena and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros.

Back in 1992, when he first ran for president, Clinton stood before Latino activists and pledged to build an ethnically diverse administration “that looks like America, that feels like America.”

But to Raul Yzaguirre, the result seems more like a mixed bag.

“Compared to previous administrations, the Clinton administration looks very good. But compared to our expectations and the implied promises, it doesn’t,” said Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group in Washington.

Indeed, he added, “Compared to our aspirations, it looks pretty bad.”

Population patterns help explain the phenomenon. But the broader question of whether Latinos are underrepresented in Washington is a classic half-empty/half-full debate.

“Both images can be true,” argued Rodolfo de la Garza, a University of Texas political scientist. “There aren’t enough Latinos [in high national office]. But depending on your definition, there’s never enough of anything.”

With Latinos now the country’s fastest-growing ethnic group--their number is expected to more than double to a quarter of the population in 50 years--the question of adequate representation is more than academic. It’s also more than a little touchy for a president reelected with 71% Latino support.

Witness the delicate dance surrounding Pena’s exit from the Cabinet. The former Transportation secretary wanted to leave Washington last year, but agreed to stay, switching jobs and becoming Energy secretary after pressure was applied by Latino groups angry at losing a Cabinet voice. Richardson was nominated earlier this month to replace Pena.

Unfulfilled Expectations

As the game of musical Cabinet chairs suggests, the Clinton administration is highly sensitive to questions of inclusion and diversity.

“We’ve worked harder on this and more on this than any administration in history,” said Ron Klain, chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore, whom activists credit with being particularly aggressive in recruitment efforts as he prepares to run for president in 2000. “Sure, we can do better, and we keep on trying to do better.”

But good intentions and campaign promises go only so far, just as deflated expectations and frustrated feelings explain only so much.

Although emotionalism rules many political discussions of race and ethnicity--and prejudice certainly hasn’t gone away--experts mostly cite empirical reasons for why more Latinos aren’t serving in top national jobs. One explanation starts with the highly concentrated nature of the Latino population.

There are about 28.3 million Latinos in the United States, according to July 1996 census figures. More than half live in California and Texas. The result is considerable clout in the nation’s two most populous states--and considerably less everywhere else.

In fact, in the handful of remaining states with 1 million or more Latino residents--New York, Illinois and Florida--the population, and Latino political power, is even more concentrated, largely in the major metropolitan areas of New York City, Chicago and Miami’s Dade County.

The tactics needed to prevail in local politics, to break down doors that stand open for others, can make it difficult to build the broader base necessary to achieve higher office. As a result, Latino politicians are sometimes pigeonholed as strictly ethnic figures.

“You have to be tough as hell. You have to keep banging away,” said Mary Rose Wilcox, a Latina member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors whose district here in Phoenix is overwhelmingly Latino, black and Native American. Forced to seem more strident, she suggested, “you lose your appeal to a wider audience.”

Further diluting Latino clout are internal differences that belie the catchall Latino label. Republican-leaning Cuban Americans in Florida and mostly Democratic Puerto Ricans in New York and Mexican Americans in the Southwest “share a lot of commonalities,” said John Garcia, a University of Arizona expert on Latino politics. “But there are some real distinctions” and often fierce competition over appointments and other political plums--a competition all the more intense because the fighting is over a small piece of the pie.

But arguably the most important reason for Latinos’ low profile on the national scene is the most prosaic. Latinos are a young community: The median age is 26.4, compared with 34.6 for the overall population. Many are not citizens, or not yet eligible to vote, shrinking the most obvious base of support for fledgling candidates. Only about 6.6 million Latinos--roughly one in four--were registered to vote as of the last estimate in November 1996.

Partly because of that, Latinos have started climbing the political ladder in sizable numbers only within the last 20 years or so. Even in California, where Latino political influence has soared, the phenomenon is relatively new, helped along by term limits that ousted more senior state lawmakers in the last two elections.

Latinos’ relatively recent emergence on the political scene has meant a smaller pool of qualified--or willing--applicants from which to choose Cabinet secretaries or fill other high-level government positions.

“Part of it is simply a matter of getting your ticket punched,” said Harry Pachon, a researcher and head of the Tomas Rivera Institute at Claremont Graduate University. “That takes time.”

And it takes longer to reach the top from the low rungs on the ladder. “Normally when vacancies arise, there is an effort to turn to those in the line of succession,” said Leon Panetta, former White House chief of staff. “There’s a comfort factor involved where you’ve worked with somebody, where you know that individual.”

Panetta, who left the White House last year, now believes that the administration could have done a better job looking beyond the obvious lists of candidates. “There’s no question there should be more [Latinos] in key positions throughout the administration,” he said.

Ironically, though, today’s pool of prospective Latino job applicants as well as political candidates may be diminished, thanks to an explosion of opportunity in other fields.

“Corporate America has snatched up a lot of folks,” said Guillermo Rodriguez, head of the San Francisco-based Latino Issues Forum. “On everything from benefits to salary, government can’t compete.”

Moreover, there is a pettiness and personal viciousness to politics as now practiced in Washington that puts many people off.

“There are people who are bright and sharp and would be good material,” said Fernando Torres-Gil of UCLA’s public policy school, “but they don’t want to put up with the abuse and the extraordinary scrutiny.”

Still, as more Latinos win political office or pursue public policy careers, the opportunities for advancement are likely to improve. Torres-Gil, for one, believes that too much attention is focused on counting faces in the higher-profile Cabinet positions.

“If you look at the sub-Cabinet, the special assistant and middle-level political appointments . . . you find a good number of Hispanic men and women moving up the system,” said the UCLA associate dean, who traced his own path through the ranks from a special assistant job in the Carter administration to a stint as Clinton’s assistant Health and Human Services secretary.

Among prominent Latinos serving in the president’s second term are George Munoz, head of the Overseas Private Investment Corp; Aida Alvarez, head of the Small Business Administration; Mickey Ibarra, the White House director of intergovernmental affairs; and Maria Echaveste, the incoming deputy White House chief of staff. Louis Caldera, a former California assemblyman now heading the national service program, was nominated in May to be secretary of the Army.

Echaveste, the daughter of itinerant California farm workers, is a particular source of pride among Latino activists. Soon she will become the highest-ranking Latino official believed to ever have served inside the White House.

“This is not what you could call a ‘soft’ position, dealing with public organizations, public liaison,” said Cisneros, now president of Los Angeles-based Univision, a Spanish-language TV network. “Everything from international affairs to nuclear policy to personnel matters to domestic policy goes through the chief of staff’s office.”

Invisible in Arizona

If Echaveste stands at one end of the proverbial pipeline, the other is here in Arizona, where Latinos have yet to gain the political clout commensurate with their growing population.

The state has nearly 1 million Latinos, the seventh-highest total in the country and more than 20% of Arizona’s population. There is one Latino in the state’s six-member congressional delegation: Democrat Ed Pastor, whose district lines were drawn by Republicans controlling the process to take in nearly two-thirds of the state’s Latinos.

Yet there are no statewide elected Latino officials and no likely prospects in sight. The Latino presence in the state Legislature has been stagnant for about 20 years.

“We haven’t really evolved out of our districts,” said Wilcox, the Maricopa County supervisor, noting that Latinos enjoy a strong presence in predominantly rural areas with a longer tradition of Latino leadership, but not in major cities such as Phoenix and Tucson, where most voters live.

Statewide, Latino registration and turnout lag far behind those of whites, with nothing like California’s anti-illegal-immigration Proposition 187 to spur participation or stir passions. Although an “English only” measure passed in 1988, “we really haven’t had the galvanizing issues here that would bring Latinos out to the polls,” said Earl de Berge, a nonpartisan pollster in Phoenix.

Latino political progress is also hindered by the fact that most are Democrats--among them all nine Latino state legislators. That makes advancement difficult in this Republican-leaning state.

Arturo Gutierrez spent 13 years in the Legislature, seven as Democratic leader, before leaving in 1986 to form a Phoenix lobbying and public relations firm. Like many activists, the veteran of the Chicano rights movement found his fervor waning with time.

“You have kids; they have to go to college,” he said. “I was getting older, and I had obligations to meet.”

Thus, it was bittersweet watching from afar as Richardson was nominated for Energy secretary and praised Clinton for having the best record on Latino issues of any president in history.

“He’s right of course,” said Gutierrez with a dry chuckle that seemed to sum up the ambivalence of many. “And isn’t that sad?”