by Raúl Yzaguirre

When I agreed to lead Sen. Hillary Clinton’s efforts to attract Latino voters during the presidential primaries, I believed she was the most qualified candidate for the job, in part because she had built a profound and lasting relationship with our community.

In my view, Senator Clinton had earned the respect and support of a majority of the nation’s Latino electorate.

Most Latino primary voters agreed. In state after state, Clinton routinely attracted 60 to 70 percent of the Latino vote against Barack Obama, the eventual Democratic presidential nominee.

President Clinton may have been this nation’s first “black president,” but Bill and Hillary have long been among the Latino community’s greatest advocates. Latinos made significant gains during the Clinton administration in appointments and a wide array of policy initiatives. I felt Senator Clinton’s ascension would lead again to Hispanics playing an important role in the White House.

When Senator Clinton lost in the primaries, I pondered the potential impact on our community that the election of Barack Obama or John McCain could have. I worried that Latinos would not wield much influence with either administration and expressed that view in a commentary in Hispanic Link Weekly Report.

Senator Obama is smart and well intentioned, but he lacks deep ties to our community and an intimate understanding of the needs and interests of the nation’s Latinos.

In short, he doesn’t have a track record with us, I pointed out.

As for Senator McCain, whom I regard as a friend, most Latinos disagree with much of the GOP platform. Our community also was disappointed by his shift to placate his party’s extreme right wing, which many of us view as antagonistic toward immigrants and people of color. His choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, likewise, was a great disappointment.

Given the outcome of the primaries, I believed Latino voters needed to take a broad view of the Nov. 4 election. Our community’s fast-growing population, the overall excitement of the campaign, and a slew of get-out-the-vote efforts attracted record numbers of Latinos to the polls. Senator Clinton may not have made it to the finish line, but Latinos still played an important role.

The White House wasn’t the only game in town. The Latino community redoubled its efforts to elect candidates at the local, state and federal level especially in Congress, where we are woefully underrepresented.

In the long term, Latinos must be well represented in both the Republican and Democratic ranks. Voting exclusively for one political party diminishes our leverage in the overall political process.

It remains vital that we grow our representation in state legislatures in advance of the 2010 U.S. Census. It is our state representatives who, based on the Census results, will get to redraw the district boundaries that directly affect who gets to represent us in the state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives.

­The long-term effect of voting local is critically important.

School boards, city councils and the like are often stepping stones to statewide or national office. No matter how you look at it, the road to the White House begins at your local polling place.

If the success of Barack Obama proves anything, it is that the United States is still a country where people born to modest means can rise to the top of the nation’s political or economic ranks. Like Senator Obama, many of our nation’s most successful Hispanic politicians got their start as community activists. I’m convinced there’s a future presidential candidate in our midst.

In the end, I decided, no matter who was elected to the White House, the November election offered Latino voters an opportunity to shape our nation’s future. That opportunity was not wasted. Hispanic Link.

(Raúl Yzaguirre is executive director of the Arizona State University Center for Community Development and Civil Rights. He built the National Council of La Raza into the nation’s most influential Hispanic organization as its president for three decades before stepping down four years ago. E-mail: raul.yzaguirre@asu.edu). © 2008

by Jackie Guzmán

(Sixth in a series profiling leaders of major national Hispanic organizations).

SKETCHBOX: In 1977, five Congress members comprised the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The very next year they held a small dinner to benefit Latino youth.

The event foreshadowed a vision shared by its members to form a separate, nonpartisan educational organization to encourage young people to enter the public-policy arena. Today, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute is the nation’s premier Hispanic policy leadership development group, providing scholarships, internships and fellowships to college-age students, graduates and young professionals.

Each fall since 1980, it hosts a series of events — a public policy conference, annual gala, comedy night — considered in Washington as the kick-off to National Hispanic Heritage Month. I sat down with Esther Aguilera, CHCI’s president and chief executive officer, at a conference table at its headquarters. Paintings of the early chairmen of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute lined the room’s walls. The responsibility for their legacy now converges on this one person.

PROFILE: To Esther Aguilera, meeting challenges in the public-policy arena is about anticipating them and staying ahead of the curve.

She came to this understanding the long way. Born in Jalisco, Mexico, she migrated to the United States in 1972 at age 4 with her mother, Aurora, and five siblings. They came to reunite with her father, Adolfo, who was working as a landscape laborer. He began filing petitions to legalize their stay, a process that would take 15 years.

They rented a two-bedroom house in San Fernando, Calif. Mother Aurora found a job as a garment worker. “My parents struggled to put food on the table,” Aguilera recalls.

She remembers herself entering college in a competitive, white world trapped by low self-esteem “something I had to conquer.”

At Occidental College in Los Angeles, she studied public policy and began her involvement, finding an internship with the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. “I met a lot of people in policy-making positions who didn’t know the Latino experience. I wanted to make sure a voice of working-poor Latinos was part of what they heard.”

In 1990 she obtained her first Washington, D.C., job as a public-policy analyst with the National Council of La Raza, now the nation’s largest Hispanic advocacy body.

In 1993, she became the executive director of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Her responsibilities included building relationships with Congress, the White House and the community constituents it served.

“There and working with the private sector I honed a lot of skills and ideas on how we could progress as a community,” she says.

In 1998, Aguilera was appointed senior advisor to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and executive director of the Department of Energy’s small business office. Under Richardson, she developed senior policy recommendations leading to implementation of a national Hispanic outreach program and launched DOE’s first small business conference, now an annual event.

In 2004, she became CHCI’s president. After the CHCI board selected the soft-spoken, modest Aguilera from a deep, rich pool of candidates, she quickly proved she was meant for the job.

She brought with her the decision-making experience from other sectors where she had worked. With invisible wisdom, she applies that understanding to her executive responsibilities and to teaching the leadership skills that the CHCI experience imbues in the hundreds of interns it brings regularly to Washington’s inner circles.

Overseeing the organization and its growing budget — over $6 million — is satisfying, she admits. She views it as a measure on how CHCI impacts the lives of tomorrow’s leaders who will build their own legacies.

Aguilera has become a featured speaker at numerous Latino and other national conferences and forums, including Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

SOAPBOX: Aguilera confides that she has achieved more than her wildest dreams ever conjured.

She sidesteps political debates, states her view unambiguously that while leaders must always stay ahead of the curve, they need to maintain a balance between social drive and a personal life. Early in her career she was a workaholic and now her precious hours include “quality time” with her husband and two children. “When I come home, I focus on them, not work or other distractions,” she tells me.

That balance may be the antithesis of what formal education and early careerists drum into each other, especially when starting out. Women, often professional ones, understand the multiple expectations they have of themselves and believe are expected of them.

­Yet, there’s another connecting element, Esther Aguilera is telling us: character building is not an on-the-job preparation. Her inventory includes home values such as maintaining a memory about where she came from.

She talks with great admiration of her mother, Aurora, who encouraged her and her five siblings to seek higher education. Aguilera illustrates this, remembering the first time her mother, attended a CHCI gala last year. “She was astounded. She had never attended such an elegant event.”

Or is it the other way around? A family’s pathfinder children seek a way though the obstacles and at the most elegant event you are introducing your family to your place beyond those hurdles.

A SPECIAL INFLUENCE: “My elder sister Victoria and my mother are my inspirations. I am so proud of my mother’s courage and how far she has come, having experienced so much struggle. Victoria blazed a path that I followed.”

As the daughter of parents with humble stations in life but grand visions for their children, Aguilera comments that she has achieved far more than the American Dream. She expresses great pride that her five siblings have professional careers; one a doctor, three engineers and one a math/computer teacher.

“After we all went to college, my oldest brother and sister bought the family house and we all chipped in,” she says. For the Aguileras, “family” doesn’t end with childhood.

(Jackie Guzmán is a reporter with Hispanic Link News Service in Washington, D.C.) ©2008

by José de la Isla

José de la Isla

When Barack Obama won the presidential election Nov. 4 over John McCain, he did so with substantial help from Hispanic voters in four critical swing states. Nationwide, Hispanics supported Obama by better then two-to-one, Edison-Mitofsky exit polls showed, helping boost him to easy victories in such major electoral-count states as California, New York and Illinois.

The exit polls of some 17,000 voters broke down the national pro-Obama support: Blacks 96%-04% Hispanics 67%-31% Whites 43%-55% At least 10 million Latinos voted, surmises Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza. NCLR was part of the coalition effort by Hispanic organizations to boost voter registrations by more than a million. Preliminary figures show Latino voters made up nine percent of the total national electorate, or just over 10 million.

The oft-mentioned swing state scenario — involving Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Florida, all with sizeable Hispanic population proved true.

The policy-analysis group NDN reported the day after the election that Obama’s victory margins in those four states were attributable to the Latino vote.

Obama’s level of support from Hispanics comes as the second major voting-pattern shift in as many elections.

In 2004, attention was drawn to the 40%-or-more level of support President Bush received in his 2004 campaign against Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. The swing back to better than 2-to-1 in favor of Obama reflects a return to the mostly historical voting pattern.

In early September, pollster Sergio Bendixen revealed at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute public-policy conference Latinos already strongly favoring Obama in states where the election would hinge. Only Florida was in a virtual tie between the Democrat and Republican candidates. Huge Democratic voter registration and turnout efforts followed, along with unprecedented levels of funding for campaign advertising.

On election night, Florida and Virginia were projected even when Ohio swung for Obama. As polls closed in New Mexico and Colorado networks held off calling the race until California ­and other Pacific state tallies started coming in.

Elections analyst and former director of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project Andrew Hernández had told Hispanic Link News Service a week before the election that he envisioned Latinos getting due credit for their role in Obama’s triumph only if the Western states’ contribution was adequately acknowledged by the media. “It’s a Latino narrative,” he maintained, if New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada put him over the top. “That, of course,” he suggested, “can’t happen until the sun rises over San Francisco Bay.”

The day following the election, most pollsters and analysts were reporting that young voters and “minorities,” alluding to Latinos as well as blacks, putting Obama over the top. And the sun rise was reported rising over Golden Gate Bridge.

[José de la Isla, author of “The Rise of Hispanic Political Power” (Archer Books 2003), writes weekly commentaries for Hispanic Link News Service. Email: joseisla3@yahoo.com].