#22: Looking for the next Henry Cisneros

Could have made us proud, hermano

It sounds like an old mariachi song.

In walks a tall, dark, handsome Educated Chicano, straight out of Texas A&M University and Harvard Kennedy School (with two Master’s degrees on that ass) who becomes the first Latino mayor of a U.S. major city. Elected four times, he transforms the once poor Mexican-American city of San Antonio into an economic and tourist powerhouse. The brother dresses in slick suits, stays in shape, and ain’t no long-haired radical type still lost in the 1970s. He marries his high school sweetheart, has three wonderful children and appears in 1980s Texas social studies books as the possible “future first Hispanic president” of the United States.

‘You, too, could be the next Henry Cisneros,’ school teachers tell future ECHs from Texas to California. Estimated date he could become president? Around 2004 or 2008, teachers promise.

Our middle-class Mexican Moses has arrived…

Then scandal hits. He admits to an extramarital affair with his chief political campaign fundraiser, a white woman. He leaves public life to reconcile with his wife (whom he’s still married to today). He later become Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Clinton, but is indicted on 18 counts of conspiracy, giving false statements and obstruction of Justice relating to hush money to the former mistress.  Eventually, he pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge but his pardoned by President Clinton.

Since then and despite Latinos practically begging, Cisneros declines to run for Senate, Texas Gov., dog catcher or take a cabinet job again. Instead, he stays in the private sector as president and chief operating officer of Univision Communications then builds an urban real estate business. He’s too ashamed to reenter the public eye.

Meanwhile, let’s be honest, ain’t been a political replacement for years and miles since. There are no current ECH Senators (again, Cubans don’t count). The one ECH governor is about to be term-limited out of office. That ECH mayor in Los Angeles, yep, got caught in an affair. That ECH current Secretary of Interior is bald and fat. One ECH elected sister, as one blog put it, “is more known for her Christmas cards than for her advocacy.”

The real thing hasn’t come along.

As a result, every election ECHs wait, search, scout, or hope to blindly anoint the next Henry Cisnernos. Rather it’s a charismatic Latino city councilor in Albuquerque, a smart Latina county commissioner in Houston, a brainy superintendent of the San Fernando Valley, the new San Antonio mayor or his twin brother, hell, even a funny regional director of the border patrol in Arizona, the ECH is ready to crown the next Henry Cisneros to keep the dream alive. What’s the dream? Having a national leader — maybe even a president — who will let the country know that, yes, we are Americans. We’ve arrived.

“But the real truth is,” Tomas Rivera wrote in …and the earth did not swallow him,”we never arrive.”

Maybe.

But that’s not going to stop ECHs from searching. That’s not going to stop ECHs from voting. That’s not going to stop ECHs from putting their hopes in substitutes until the real thing comes along.

Truthfully, he or she, is out there but is probably just entering elementary school. He is from the next generation, maybe from Los Angeles or Tucson, maybe she’s the daughter of undocumented immigrants currently living in Phoenix or Atlanta or North Carolina. Eventually, he’s heading to Harvard, Columbia, or Duke, will read all the works before our time and his. No one will be able to touch her intellect, and if you and I are still alive, to hear her speak, hear her lay out her plans, man, it will shake something deep inside, re-awake aging dreams, re-plant that long-held hope that the world of our grandparents, parents, or children will finally change.

‘You’re late,’ we will say. ‘But it’s OK. You were worth the wait.’