MIAMI — President Barack Obama is on track to name more Latinos to top posts than any of his predecessors, drawing appointees from a wide range of the nation’s Latino communities, including Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Colombians.
That won’t necessarily give the president a free pass on issues such as immigration, but it may ease Latinos’ worries about whether Obama will continue reaching out to a group that was key to his winning the White House.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is by far Obama’s most famous Latino appointee. Coloradans are also familiar with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, formerly a U.S. senator and state attorney general.
In less than a year in office, the president has tapped at least 48 other Latinos to positions senior enough to require Senate confirmation. So far, 35 have been approved.
That compares with a total of 30 approved under Bill Clinton and 34 under George W. Bush during their first 20 months in office, according to data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
The personnel office does not track appointments of judges or ambassadors. Early indicators suggest that Obama is naming many Latinos to those positions as well, though he has been slow to appoint judges in general.
Covering a wide area
“He’s really captured our trajectory and the vast, vast array of Latinos that make up our country, whether it’s Mexicanos, Puertorriquenos or Dominicanos,” said Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, the Cabinet’s first Latina.
The officials cover a wide swath of policy areas and include:
• Solis, a California native and former congresswoman whose parents hail from Mexico and Nicaragua.
• Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, an Ivy Leaguer from New York whose parents fled the Dominican Republic dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo.
• Jose Riojas, assistant secretary for veterans affairs, a retired brigadier general and Mexican-American from Missouri.
• Joe Garcia, U.S. director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Minority Economic Impact.
• Thomas Perez, head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
• Lou de Baca, chief of the U.S. State Department’s anti-slavery and human trafficking efforts.
In some ways, Obama is simply following his predecessor’s example. Until the Obama administration, Bush’s Cabinet was widely considered the most ethnically diverse in U.S. history, with Latinos serving as secretaries of commerce and housing and as attorney general. Fewer than half of Obama’s Cabinet members are white men.
Al Cardenas, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party and a Cuban-American, said he was impressed by Obama’s initial Latino appointments, particularly to positions in defense, Treasury and housing, though he said he will be watching to see whether the pace falls off.
About half of Obama’s picks trace their roots to Mexico and the former Spanish holdings in the Southwest, not surprising since two-thirds of Latinos in the U.S. identify themselves as Mexican-American. But the administration also includes about half a dozen people of South American descent and nearly a dozen Latinos from the Caribbean.
No strong Latino ties
Oddly, that geographic and international diversity may come in part from Obama’s lack of experience in working with Latinos, said Matt Barreto, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies Latino politics.
Bush had a long history of working with Mexican-Americans in Texas and had family and political connections to the Republican-leaning Cuban-American community in Florida. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama’s chief opponent during the primaries, had strong support from the Democratic Latino leadership in heavily Mexican- American Texas and California, and to some extent Florida. Obama didn’t have those ties.
“In some ways, the Latino community benefits from being new to Obama outreach. He doesn’t have the entrenched interests,” Barreto said.
More than half of the appointees hold an Ivy League degree, and more than a quarter, like the president, have a diploma from Harvard, an Associated Press review found.
