Three blocks down the street from where I live in South Texas lives another Treviño.  I know this because a real estate agent knocked on the door about two months ago looking for him.  “I’m sorry,” she said, clearing up the confusion. “I thought this was his address.”

Curious who this other Treviño might be, I soon found him through a map app.  On a hunch, I had wondered if his was the house on my walking route with a TRUMP sign on his front lawn.  It was, and is. The sign was no cardboard paper-thing the like with which we are all familiar.  His was huge, held up by wooden posts.  From a marketing perspective, his investment in time and effort was rather useless.  His house is on a dead-end street.

I have been tempted to knock on his door and have a conversation with him in my hope of understanding the Trump attraction among the sizeable minority of Hispanic/Latino voters –  beyond what I think I know already.  I might be wrong.  All I know about him is that he permanently and prominently flies what I think is a Marine Corps flag for anyone who might walk by.

When President-elect Biden at last was declared the winner in November, I wanted to get in the truck and engage in the same insufferable, car-honking Trump caravans that I was subjected to twice before the election. (Now that was a good marketing ploy: 200 cars bedecked in Trump signs stretched out for blocks looked like 2,000 cars and their shrill, incessant blaring made them sound to be more like 20,000.)

But I resisted sinking to their level.  I was taught never to chortle nor gloat after victory – not even after Texas beats Oklahoma.

Given the mob-attack on the Capitol yesterday by the worst of Trump’s supporters, I do want to ring this former Marine’s doorbell to see if we could have a gentlemanly conversation about where we are as a country.  Perhaps he regrets voting for a man who not only failed to protect the Constitution but sought to undermine it?

Watching the protest-turn-riot, I could not imagine these low-life traitors getting into the building.  Having worked there, I knew how fortified the place is – when properly staffed.  The police will get it under control soon, I assured a friend who had called from New York while I repeated the same wrong-headed assumption in texts with other very upset friends and family members.  The level of their revulsion to what they were watching live on television surprised me.  It was heart-felt, from deep within – and that continues today as the texting has churned up again.

When the disloyal know-nothings pushed past the tall and thick Columbus Doors, I changed my mind.  My immediate concern were the doors themselves.  However one feels about Columbus, the front doors of the Capitol retell how Spain inaugurated the modern age and the United States – no small thing in my book even though it is hard for Hispanic/Latinos to reconcile how to feel about our history, for we are both the conqueror and the conquered.

Another friend calling from San Antonio reminded me during our conversation during the betrayer-riot that it was his birthday – ‘soon to be a national holiday, however this turns out,’ he deadpanned.  I needed a good laugh by then. 

The day-after, of course, is no laughing matter; and this morning I read in the Times that two Spanish-surnamed members of Congress from Florida voted to disregard and disenfranchise the voters of Arizona or Pennsylvania when called upon to certify those states’ electoral votes for the democratically elected President and Vice President of the United States. 

You would think that these two Republican congressmen – Carlos Giménez and Mario Díaz Balart, with memories of Fidel Castro’s Cuba on their minds – would know the dangers of fascism, dictatorship and tyranny. These two – hypocrites, morons or partisans blinded by revenge or all three – were joined by sixteen – 16! – quisling members of Congress from Texas, thankfully none of them Hispanic/Latino.  

All this occurred in the aftermath of tens of thousands of Hispanic/Latinos having voted for Trump in November, including my Marine neighbor and at least three members of my family.  Voting for the treasonous, incompetent fool now feloniously occupying the White House, too, might have been other distant cousins, some of them most likely infected by religious or, ironically, racial intolerance.

I probably shall not engage any of them, but I am intrigued to know if the veteran down the street actually fought in war or if he like Trump is a cowardly blowhard.  Men and women who have actually seen battle not only deserve respect, they at times have far different insights than one suspects.  

If I ever do see him during one of my walks, I shall say hello and see if I have reason to be optimistic about the reunification of the country – which, curiously, is now more possible than the day before the riot, for the country at last has seen the best evidence yet to reject and defeat Trumpism.

Or we indeed shall have reached a dead end.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

It must be difficult for Jorge Ramos.  The hate and fear Donald Trump gins up every day against Hispanic/Latinos forces the anchor of the Univisión evening news program to confront the madness non-stop.  Days might go by when the average Dreamer or undocumented worker does not have to confront the racist travesties Trump has unleashed.  But Ramos must. 

The news business can marinate its practitioners in melancholy, and it can affect one’s health, especially when the issue is far greater than just hate.  It is scapegoating, and it will last long after Trump leaves office, which is why Ramos has to be at his professionally decorous best always.  For his Sunday morning talk show last week,  Al Punto, Ramos invited two pro-Trump Hispanic/Latino supporters to discuss Trump.  Ramos was cool and unflappable but his blood pressure surely must have soared as the two Trumpers skirted questions about Trump’s evident racist core.  

It costs not being fake news, especially when a journalist is in the presence of individuals who are complicit in damage that will linger for years – as are other Hispanic/Latinos who justify their Republican leanings on lofty concepts like free markets, self-reliance and morality but do not look at the collateral damage wrought by a man who in another era would have donned the white robes of animosity.

I stopped writing on this blog because I wanted to refrain from contributing to the furies of the times.  But watching Ramos on Sunday I pondered if I could try to explain how some Hispanic/Latinos can support Trump’s demonstrably dehumanizing rhetoric and policies.  I have lived and worked in – not just visited – the top four states of the Union in which more than 60 percent of the Hispanic/Latinos live.  I have worked in journalism and polling public opinion.  I have lived along the U.S.-Mexico border observing both travail and treasure.  Perhaps, then, my perspective might have some merit.

A recent Fox News poll pegged Trump’s Hispanic/Latino support at 21 percent nationally.  A couple of days later a poll commissioned by The New York Times had him at 31 percent.  These surveys are of registered voters – adults with personal and political histories and interests.  These polls do not include the mass number of Hispanic/Latinos not registered to vote.  The 21-31 percent pro-Trump figure would collapse into a mere few digits were all eligible Hispanic/Latinos uniformly surveyed.  And that makes the complicity of Republican Hispanic/Latino voters ever more, shall I dare say, deplorable.  They are the few who enable, who consort, who do the damage.

But, still, why, why, why?  What would press 21 to 31 percent of Hispanic/Latinos to vote for someone who if he had the chance would throw non-white persons out of the country – including those two characters on Ramos’ program on Sunday?  And it would not matter that some of us look whiter than Trump.

The answer is complex.  It is not about not liking Hillary.  One would have to go back 500 years to begin to understand this kind of perversion that goes beyond single-issue voters who vote according to dogmatic beliefs that have their roots in antiquated thinking that holds women to second-class status, considers gays and lesbians not human and submits free will to institutions considered omniscient.  Those beliefs trigger hard, ideological anger, but they do not explain it all.

Of individuals, then, who vote for a candidate who hates them it can only be said that they lack something deeper in their person, in their selves.  And if one concludes these voters might be deficient psychologically about something so existentially important, then it has to be about the absence of self-worth or, on the other extreme, the worth only of self-interest, that is to say, the financial bottom line that then begets the absence of empathy for others.  Thus we have the spectacle of some of these voters who are immigrants – many of them recent – arguing for the wall to be built since they are now on this side of it.

Hispanic/Latino Trump voters are as dangerous to the future of the United States as is Trump.  After their candidate is hopefully defeated in a landslide in November, these voters will exist amid the long-term aftermath of the still-rampant pandemic.  Chronic unemployment  will prevail in the years ahead, causing civil strife and deficits in the economy that then will threaten Social Security and other safety-net programs.  We are in for volatile times, and these voters, given neither to reason nor logic, will be ripe for exploitation by the next Trump, which the Republican Party is expert in creating. 

The two apologists on Ramos’ program represent a part of the Hispanic/Latino culture that has generated the undemocratic history and the accompanying economic malaise of most of what we call Latin America.  That nasty quirk exists in many of us, and it was most recently personified in horrifying detail by the candidacy of Rubén Díaz Sr., a fundamentalist Protestant preacher and vocal supporter of Trump.  Díaz, who hatefully opposes women’s reproductive rights and denigrates gays and lesbians and can talk about little else with any sophisticated understanding, was the leading candidate for a congressional seat in New York City until his defeat, as of this writing, by his polar opposite.  New York is not alone in giving birth to this type of fascist. 

In this vein, more Hispanic/Latino Catholics are becoming aware of how some bishops in the United States and the right-wing television EWTN network have become adjunct organs of the Republican Party, like Fox News.  Blessedly, Pope Francis is trying to undo the damage of the previous two Popes.

I think the misguided voting behavior of Trump supporters – and of Hispanic/Latinos who do not vote – boils down to this:  Small thinking. They do not see the promise of Hispanic/Latinos and their responsibility to the future.  They do not understand that history is calling us to make sure the country survives and flourishes in order to lead the world against pandemics, global climate change and international lawlessness. 

Most Hispanic/Latinos are still unaware to this new charge because most Hispanic/Latino ‘leaders’ themselves seem to lack understanding of the flow of history and Hispanic/Latinos, despite being the largest of the country’s minority populations, remain absent from the national conversation. 

The only exception I make for Hispanic/Latino Trump voters are those whose property and lives are disrespected by immigrants and drug lords (who, of course, would not exist were it not for the evil of drug consumption on the U.S. side of the border).  If these voters want to again send a message about the problems along the border, then they are wholly within their rights.

Other than that, more of us should work to endeavor to recalibrate our understanding of ourselves – and in the process perhaps help keep Jorge Ramos’ blood pressure in check.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman and served in the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Even though more Hispanic/Latinos live in Harris County (Houston) than in all of New Mexico, it is difficult to watch brown-skinned people cheer for and defend someone who hates them – and their parents and their families.  But there they were, a few hundred of them, at a Trump rally in New Mexico a couple of days ago.  In the end, most of them hate themselves, so their attendance should not surprise anyone.  Like most misfits, they are a minority.  I do not use that word to be mean or demean.  I use it because these people do not fit in the reality around them.  There was a world-is-flat ambience at that event.

I would think that more than 80 percent of Hispanic/Latinos in New Mexico will vote against Trump next year.  But even if only 100 of these New Mexicans vote for Trump they are of inestimable value to psychologists.  Imagine a Jew rooting for Hitler or a Catholic for the KKK.  Or gays and lesbians going wild for Jerry Falwell.  I wonder what a serious study would conclude these fringe-fried voters have in common.

But to be fair, I can understand if some of those New Mexicans do not see the threat Trump poses, although they live closer to the slaughter in El Paso than I do, and I live in Texas.  Some of them do not see themselves as Hispanic or Latino Americans, like me.  Some of them truly are from families that were already on those lands almost 400 years before the Trump family made it to the United States from Germany.  Donald Trump is 3^rd generation.  Some residents of New Mexico are in their 20^th generation.  And so, like some of the animals who have roamed the forests for centuries and do not see the hunter approaching with a gun, these New Mexicans who hail from those storied Spanish families cannot be disparaged wholly. 

Some of them simply cannot imagine that anyone would question their right to exist in the land of their state.  The really are Americans compared to Trump, like seven times more so. But were it up to Trump and his white nationalists, New Mexico would not have any brown-skinned New Mexicans or Spanish derivatives.  Period.

The ones who attended the rally who are uneducated, minimum-wage workers and veterans do offend me.  They reveal a certain amount of ignorance that makes them victims of people like Trump again and again; and they are too ignorant to see it.  None of the people I saw there seemed like the well-heeled who arrived in their Rolls craving still more tax cuts.

Some of these are displaced, and by that I mean they do not know who they are.  I know we are not supposed to criticize anyone for living their life their way, but these modern-day Frank Sinatras could be ignored if they did not pose a threat to the nation by encouraging their fellow psychopath’s re-election.  I sort of feel about these people like I do about mothers whom I see smoking around their kids.  Ignorance does kill.

On another note: Julián and Joe Biden.  I do not want to know who in the Castro camp plotted that little escapade for the debate in Houston.  It brings to mind the playing-with-fire bromide.  Ironically, Julián’s youthful appearance fed the disproportionate reaction.  Julián’s misstep was more match than bonfire.  Still, it burned away that big lead he had in the polls, so even the match singed.  The result, though, was more people wondering about the age-fitness of Bernie Sanders.  And Beto literally shooting himself out of contention was the real misfire of the night.  It shows he is more intellectual imposter than Bobby Kennedy.

The net result seems to be Democrats are making their move to Biden and Warren – at least until the voting starts. 

I shall remain for Julián until Texas votes.  I believe Hispanic/Latinos should make a political statement.  If he is not on the ballot for the primary election, I shall vote for Amy Klobuchar.  She is basically a female version of Biden without the age issue and she is from the Midwest, which could decide the election.  If she is not around by Texas-time, I shall vote for Biden.  I like Warren but we do not need the country to shift from hard-stupid to left-screech. We need stability and a time to catch our breath.

In the meantime, why doesn’t a smartie in the Castro campaign suggest a rally in New Mexico? 

Probably got burned.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is a former journalist living in Austin, Texas.

Many years ago, I fell in love with the word preposterous.  Some words latch on for no reason, except we like the sound of them, like Zuazua, the name of major thruway in downtown Monterrey.  I came to love that street-name when as a young boy the family would cross the Río Grande at Laredo and Nuevo Laredo to visit the family in México.  In the mind of a child, I surmised that Zuazua had to be Zorro’s wife. 

Preposterous comes from a Latin word that means out of order, not right.  The Emerson College Poll that showed Julián Castro receiving 1.6 percent of the vote in a Texas Democratic presidential primary election is just that, preposterous.  The word absurd is also apt.  Absurd has its roots in Latin, too, and gives voice to the word sordo in Spanish, which means deaf.

Let me make sure I read this right:  The Dallas Morning News paid the Emerson College polling operation to put their ear to the ground and survey Texas Democrats so that if they went to the polls today Julián would get less than two percent of the vote. 

I cannot even begin to say how preposterously absurd this is.

I know something about polls, having worked for a polling firm in Miami.  But I also worked as an editor at a newspaper.  A reporter once handed me a story that seemed – at the touch – outlandish, or out-of-this-world.  On the other hand, when I was a columnist on the opinion side I one morning turned in a piece that the copy desk did me the favor of sending – going over my head – to the editor who after lunch came into my office and closed the door softly behind her.  ‘I’m not sure about this,’ she said sweetly.  Re-reading it, I was chagrined.  The column, gratefully, did not run, saving me large measures of grief. 

So people make mistakes.  I know newspapers are short-staffed these days but did Emerson College just e-mail their results and the Morning News slapped a table into print the same day? A poll that shows Joe Biden at 27.7 percent; Beto O’Rourke, 19; Bernie Sanders, 15.7; Elizabeth Warren, 13.7; Pete Buttigieg, 7.2; and Julián trailing Kamala Harris and Andrew Yang – Andrew Yang, ladies and gentlemen – but tied with Corey Booker at 1.6 percent?

I know a lot of words but I cannot think of anything beyond preposterous and absurd to describe this folly.  What about zany?  I remember one afternoon when CNN, doing daily tracking in Bush-Gore 2000, reported a poll from the night before that had Gore up, as I recall, by 22 points.  And they put it on the screen for millions to see. Sometimes something is just not real.  If CNN had reported that day that the north and south poles had moved somehow fantastically to within one mile of each other, that would have been more believable.

One of the problems with a poll like Emerson’s is obvious even to the unschooled: The sample of just 400 Texas Democrats was too small.  It is hard to get a good read of market as diverse as Texas by asking only 400 people.  It can be done, but 800 would be safer.  You can poll 400 people in homogenous Iowa and get a good read but not Texas.  And, of course, there was no focus group data to append any semblance of reality.

Perhaps Emerson is right if people are not wanting to throw away their vote, a concept I have always found precious because it is nuts.  Perhaps Julián is running the wrong kind of campaign.  The tragedy in El Paso certainly helps Beto O’Rourke in Texas, even after his performance immediately after the massacre and the ensuing sadness.  He was, as expected, maudlin, even borderline theatrical.

So a former mayor of San Antonio and former member of the Obama Cabinet from Texas, whose congressman-brother Joaquín of the same surname is as much in the news, would not get more than two percent of the vote in a presidential primary in which perhaps as much as 50 percent of the voters casting ballots might be Hispanic/Latino? 

Especially as Hispanic/Latinos circle the wagons?

Perhaps Emerson would want a do-over and get it right? 

Not a crazy idea.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor and assistant state editor of The Austin American-Statesman in Texas.

Looking through the window, I had noticed the plants in the backyard, wanting of moisture. They were drooping.  Parched, their leaves were ashen.  I fixed my morning coffee wondering if I should drive my equally dust-caked truck through the car wash before I left for San Antonio.  There was mention of rain on the radio.  

I concluded I would risk embarrassment if I ran into someone I knew in the parking garage of the hotel on the river where the San Antonio Association of Hispanic Journalists would meet to announce their scholarship winners for the year.  It being August, college registrars are expectant.

‘One or 18 dead’ was the latest update from El Paso before I turned the radio off. 

That phrase says everything about the next step we take and the path we travel in the years ahead as a state and as a country.  El Paso is more than another mass shooting.  We are drifting into angry, uncharted waters of racial polarization, and they can sink us.  The United States is not so special as to avoid calamity.  Who, exactly, do we think we are?

Before I came to know the name Patrick Crusius, my thoughts turned to the handful of numbskulls in our family who voted for Donald Trump.  I do not talk to them much.  They are mostly uneducated and somewhat ridiculous individuals. 

The exception in this cluster is an African American who married a niece.  Truly a nice fellow, hard worker, etc. – a catch for any woman.  She is blessed to have him.  But he intends to vote for Trump again.  He told me so eight weeks ago at a high school graduation party for the most excellent son they have raised.  Of a different life experience than most black folks, my niece’s husband came to this country by way of Belize.  On that alone and because I like him so much, I have to suspend all and give him a pass.  At least he can have a somewhat intelligent conversation on the federal debt, etc.

The others are morons. 

If I come across as uncharitable and unchristian, I am — tiredly so.  I have a way of dismissing people who are ignorant, uninformed or lazy.  It is a big failing.  And though ashamed of admitting it, I do think it:  If your surname is Spanish and/or you look Hispanic/Latino and you intend to vote for Donald Trump’s re-election you simply are a stupid person.

I do not get any comfort writing this in so public a space.  But we no longer can refrain from saying it – and we need to stand up and confront those fools who do not understand nor realize the danger of someone who causes other racist haters to mow down innocent brown-looking or black-looking people.  Or Jews.  Or Muslims.  Or gays and lesbians.  Or perhaps your own in the next shooting. 

Individuals who deal on a daily basis with personal anger or self-hate or self-frustration because of mistakes they made in life are equally as dangerous as the alien from Allen.  They default to arguments like ‘the Clintons are corrupt’ to vote against a competent, intelligent woman for President.  They buy the big lies concocted by Fox News because they do not know what to believe about their confused, meaningless lives.  Not until the next ever-more powerful hurricane or tornado levels their town will they get it about climate change.

The election next year will prove decisive.  One or 18.

Waking up in the middle of the night, I thought I heard rain.  In my tired state, I was careful not to stumble in the dark and went downstairs.  I opened the front door of the house.  It indeed was raining.  A sweet rain.

I could see it had cleaned the truck, which reflected light through the trees. It seemed ambitiously resplendent. 

The plants are sure to draw strength soon.

And stand upright.

We should be no different.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño, former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman, lives in Austin, Texas.

I am ensconced of my own free will alone in a town in South Texas where it hardly rains and where the temperature already has hit 110 degrees ahead of July and August.  There is little to do here.  I know almost no one.  The very nice guesthouse I inhabit has no cable television.  Rather sparse, my existence, but planned that way: To turn self-imposed, air-conditioned incarceration into solitude to force a book.

My unusual seclusion and circumstance caused me to have to watch the first Democratic presidential candidate debate from Miami last night on my cell phone.  Not good for my eyesight nor my phone bill, what with WiFi that came and went, perhaps due to the storms that suddenly raked the area.  The arroyos flooded and the astonishing water, long gone by morning, will have shifted the sands of the creeks and gullies.

Despite the intermittent electronic hiccups, what I witnessed I loved: Loud lightning and thunder and flashing rain out the window and Julián Castro doing some raking of his own on my little screen.  He more than held his own. I have been around politics long enough to recognize candidates who are in it for the self-attention and those who use the experience to grow because they know it is a way to learn.  In standing his ground last night, I saw a young man continuing to learn and mature.  More so, I saw someone becoming a leader. He is growing as candidate and person.

I was very proud of him and for those who have supported him.  Finally we have on the national stage someone in whom most Hispanic/Latinos can see a reflection – of themselves.  Our ability, our talent, our good nature, our purpose, our sense of the future, our humanity and of what we can be – all on display.  I was delighted – and more delighted that the pundits were delighted. 

Experts who know campaigns know that their elements can come together grudgingly, sometimes slowly and at times without an obvious plan.  But when the candidate starts to come together, other things fall into place and they feed on themselves.  Small streams becoming rivers.  A shift occurs, the course and flow of events change.

A friend in Boston called me after the debate to say that she ‘felt good about my investment’.  She told me she had decided to give to Castro’s campaign $100 after hearing me speak in Boston in March.  Like too many Hispanic/Latinos whom I know, she had dismissed Julián’s candidacy outright, as implausible.  We are so used to candidates lunging for attention that too many Hispanic/Latinos who should know better wrote Castro off immediately.  He did not fit the role we have of candidates today, some of them unadulterated exhibitionists, and so too many people I know did not even deign to deem worthy the idea of writing Castro a check.  But now my friend in Boston is going to give another $50.  Another friend in Austin who can give more gave only $100.  He told me he did not like throwing his money away.  It will be interesting if he will do more now. 

Another friend in Denver who is of Julián’s age was more than dismissive when we talked last week during a business trip to México.  He was outright hostile, arguing Castro was on an ego trip.  An odd thing to say about so nice a fellow.  You want to talk ego trip, talk Beto O’Rourke, who to me is out of his depth and seems always to be getting ready for his band’s second set at a club.  He might imagine himself Bobby Kennedy reincarnate but I dare say the comparison falls awfully short. 

I watched Julián closely last night in the context of what others for whom he is new might see.  I myself do not know him; barely have met him.  So perhaps I am a good test.  To me he comes across, again, as nice but not wimpy.  It is increasingly evident that this is a guy whom one can trust because he does not give himself up to emotion.  Though he is more representative of the immigration issue than the other candidates, he is not an angry man; and yet he is angry at the monstrosities committed everyday by Trump and his gangsters, for that is what they are – nothing less than the ruffians who supported Hitler’s and Mussolini’s rise to power.

Castro can raise his voice without being shrill and/or nasty – unlike others on stage last night.  He came across as cool, calm and collected and therefore he did a lot to not pigeon-hole himself as the immigration candidate.  And with that comes the expansion of electoral electability and possibility. 

If you are Hispanic/Latino anywhere in the country and do not give Julián Castro a chance and help him, you probably can see things that I cannot in the other candidates.  All things being equal, how can any Hispanic/Latino not support him?  I believe now that if more Hispanic/Latinos stand up for Castro, he will be around, for he has staying power, and he will be in the race longer than people suspected when 2019 began.  Write a check, write your friends, write your own chapter.  

Secluded though I am in a place where clearing my throat becomes a cacophony, I am not impervious to sense the change of the currents. 

Nether the arroyos nor the political landscape are what they were yesterday.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is a former journalist and speechwriter who lives in Austin, Texas.

I have not written on this blog for ages.  I am involved in two larger projects which take time and effort.  However, my sister, given my life in journalism and government, assumed I knew Julián Castro.  When she asked me about him, I took note.

My sister has been my personal political barometer for years.  Better than Gallup or Pew or Quinnipiac or Suffolk.  The day the Monica Lewinsky bombshell exploded, I was a speechwriter in the Clinton Administration.  After a few hours of the frenzy that followed, with Bill Clinton’s opponents shrieking for his resignation, I called my sister and asked what she thought.  She was not happy.  But she lingered only for a few moments in silence and told me what the country would ultimately conclude about Clinton after the hysteria of an impeachment trial:  His behavior was reprehensible but he had been good at his job and he should stay. 

When she asked about Castro, I told her I had met the former mayor of San Antonio and member of the Cabinet in the Obama Administration, but only that.  The same holds for twin brother Joaquín, who is a member of Congress.  I know only a bit better their mother, Rosie, who is a figure in her own right. 

On the Castro twins I have been agnostic.  But now, as the field of candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination unfolds in these days of Trumpian politics, my view is coming into focus, as must be those of Hispanic/Latinos like my sister who want to give a Spanish-surnamed candidate the benefit of a doubt. 

Like many of us, she has been wading through the sea of candidates looking for the one with ballast.  She got emotionally involved with Beto O’Rourke in the necessary battle last year against the odious Ted Cruz.  She is now cool on O’Rourke, again reflecting the public mood.  O’Rourke’s poll numbers have begun to plummet. 

In the void Beto is leaving, Julián is finding his voice, and in doing so becoming real to individuals like my sister and me.  Julián is authentic Hispanic/Latino, born in Texas.  His Spanish might not be the best, but as I have pondered whom to support it has become apparent to me that if Hispanic/Latinos are ever going to be at the table, we need to support our own.  Perhaps Florida can teach us a lesson.  There, enough of the Hispanic/Latinos who traditionally vote Democratic have supported Republican Marco Rubio in his two races for the Senate.  And most Hispanic/Latinos in Florida, including almost half of Cuban Americans, now vote Democratic in presidential elections.  And so Rubio has been a proponent for non-Cuban Hispanic/Latino communities interested in positive immigration reform.

Regarding Julián:  He is obviously and eminently more qualified to be President than Donald Trump.  That Julián is Stanford and Harvard is too trite, although you would think that would be enough, especially when saying awful, ignorant things is the currency of the day.  When shouting passes for leadership and charisma mistaken for character, Julián’s youthful appearance is magnified:  He is more choir boy than charlatan, more of value than vulgar, more serious than showboat, more truthful than tendentious.

He is also, as we would say, buena gente.  And, Lord, do we need good people now.  Julián is starting to come across on the screen, and perhaps Hispanic/Latino voters across the nation will rally to his side.  After all, African Americans support their own by 95-percent margins, white voters by 60 percent white candidates, Jewish Americans theirs, gays and lesbians theirs – why should Hispanic/Latinos think that we alone should rise above it all?  I wonder if any eligible American voter of Irish descent voted against John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Hispanic/Latinos have supported candidates of every stripe and color.  Let us continue to be fair and good people, tolerant of all.  But let us not be stupid. 

The Democratic ticket most likely will win next year, and it will set in motion politics within the Democratic Party and the public policy of the country for the next ten years.  I believe the Hispanic/Latino population is elementally essential for the survival of this country, and it would be nice if we came in from the political periphery.

Since I am as American as anyone else, I think I should vote for someone who is of my own life – and as good as the other Democratic candidates on the issues.  Does anyone else in the race know the Hispanic/Latino community – meaning me and the people I know – better than Julián?  It is unclear to me why Hispanic/Latinos in California would vote necessarily for Kamala Harris; or John Hickenlooper in Colorado; or Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts; or Corey Booker in New Jersey; or Kirsten Gillibrand in New York; or Jay Inslee in Washington.  I know local politics matter, and these are great people, all – but not necessarily better than Julián.

To whom does anyone considering running for public office turn to first?  Family.  Julián Castro is the closest to family that Hispanic/Latinos anywhere in the nation have among the candidates running for office. 

Hispanic/ Latinos are the largest minority population in at least 27 states.  To make the cut for the first nationally televised debate, Julián needs 65,000 individuals – whatever they can afford – to donate to his campaign with a minimum of 200 donors in at least 20 different states.  I think my sister – the most buena of any gente I know – is going to be among the ones who helps put Julián on that stage. 

I shall follow her lead, again, and do the same. 

And our family probably will, too.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is a former journalist and speechwriter in the Clinton and Obama administrations. He lives in Austin, Texas.

They came, these ancient names – these Alcalás and Guevaras along with the families González, Pérez, Hernández, Ramírez, Sánchez and de la Garza and García and Barrios and Rubio and Martínez and many more – originally from different places in Spain, with heredities in the rest of Europe and Africa and the Muslim nations.

From the low hills of Burgos they came, some from Sevilla, others Valéncia, others Austurias, others Córdoba.  They came speaking Spanish and the dialects of the time. They came to what would become the Americas.  They came as Catholics, arriving in this country two centuries before the founding of Jamestown.  They came as Jews. One of the first synagogues in what would become the United States was founded in Rhode Island by Portuguese and Spanish Jews.

Many of those who crossed the ocean and were at sea for weeks would land along the would-be Mexican coast in galleons under the colors of the Catholic kings and queens of Spanish kingdoms to join a story already in progress on the new continent.  From those families, we came, converting our genealogy into a permanent voyage.

Their names return us to the very past that make us here in the present make the future.  Gazing into the past, we can see how our names comingled to form our families and our history.  We see ourselves in those names and wonder how we are who they were.

Picture them standing on wooden decks, the wide ocean around them. Imagine their faces, the wind upon them.  Consider more so the courage pushing them forward. They came seeking religious freedom or fleeing oppression or both or seeking the gold discovered in the mountains and hills and streams of New Spain, what would become México and Texas and the lands all the way to Alturas in northern California just below its present-day boundary with Oregon. Spanish explorers and Basques and Cataláns pushed as far north as Vancouver Island and now-Alaska.  In la florida, they skiffed the waves from ships anchored in emerald waves to create San Agustín and raise other cities in the hemisphere.

Like those who preceded us, we are on a voyage of discovery – and rediscovery.

If they were anything, they were hard workers, toiling upon and tilling the land, fishing the waters and forging the future.  They were a conquering people, regrettably at times treating those already here often with neither dignity nor compassion.  But, amid the mayhem, they fell in love with new, indigenous faces and made a new people. They came to love the new places, new rivers and new vistas that the people already here loved and with whom they began to parent a new chapter in history – a history we are still learning.

The mountains became the Sierra Madre and the rivers the Rio Grande, the Nueces, the Frio, the Medina, the Guadalupe, the Llano, the San Sabá and the Colorado.  Their new homes became Laredo, San Antonio, and El Paso del Norte. To the north and west, the Sacramento, the San Joaquín and the Gila helped create Albuquerque and Santa Fé and San Diego, Los Ángeles and San José and San Francisco – names now fixed in geography and in our genealogy.

Here they grew a new culture, surviving flood, fire, drought, famine, pestilence, revolution, exclusion and oppression.  All the while they worked hard.  They grew in number to help build a country, and today we – their descendants – sustain a nation whose population otherwise would recede into history. Bequeathed with beautiful names, we serve in the military, in government, in our churches, and we work in business and commerce, in schools and colleges, factories and stores and in our neighborhood, always building.

We are a growing community, instinctively yearning to find out who we are to know what we can become.  Our creative and entrepreneurial progenitors adapted to the new, while clinging to family – to ourselves – and made us the intermediaries between the past and the future, when the new that became old becomes new again.

We come from Juan and María de Jesús, Evaristo and Ana María, Manuel and Paula, Justo and Cecilio and Eulalia and Santiago but also from the indigenous already here.  We are Catholics, Protestants, Jews, agnostics, nonbelievers, freethinkers, evangelicals, gay, straight, lesbian.  We are Democrats, Republicans, independents, socialists.  We are married, intermarried, single, divorced.  We name our kids Javier and Courtney and Rafael and Heather.  We redeem the American Experiment and evolve within the American Experience.

And we give way, one generation to the next, as Nature and Nature’s God require.

While here, our genealogy infuses us with the spirit of those who long came before us, now gone, their music still in our souls, their memories lingering in space and time, their prayers our prayers.  Their spirit commits us to country, faith and home.  It is a spirit of commitment to the porvenir, the yet-to-come, and of dedication to democratic governance and human rights.  To tolerance and love, for we seek to be in union again with all of ourselves.

Our names and surnames accompany our sons, daughters and us generation upon generation. Our names are more than label, record or artifact.  They are the standards of our heritage; accords between past and future and adjoining lands.  The memories attached to our names — and the names themselves — are cherished signposts of the voyage of our families through time.

With gratitude and perspective honed by history, we remember; and with life anew are reborn to discover yet again, to find out who we are.

We have never said farewell to the past as we land in a new future.

For we are here, at home.

And always will be.

Reading about her in the newspaper in Austin, readers came to know little about Debra J. Camacho.  Nor do they now possess insight into the lives of Telesforo Chavez Casarez; Jose Antonio Hernandez; Lydia T. Pena; Herminia Perez; Janice Arelene Quinonez; Efrain Rodriquez Esquivel.  Nor  Julia Ybarbo.  Readers do know that they died.  Theirs were eight of 40 obituaries that The Austin American-Statesman published on Sunday, August 21, 2016.  Each was a human being, beloved, no doubt, by family and friends.

The five women and three men averaged 66 years of life and work.  Some presumably bore or fathered children, and almost all presumably started life with names that carry proper accents. All carried names easily found in the Spanish lexicon.  But in the final public record and testament of their lives, some of their names were stripped – perhaps carelessly – of the dignity bestowed on them by proper accents.  Their names, in effect, were misspelled.  They should have read:

Lydia T. Peña

Telesforo Chávez Cásarez

José Antonio Hernández

Efraín Rodríquez Esquivel

Debra J. Camacho

Herminia Pérez

Janice Arelene Quiñonez

Julia Ybarbo

Whether the printing of their incomplete and unfinished names offended the relatives of these now-gone is unknown.  The dead at the end might not have cared either about their names being misrepresented.  The dying have other things on their minds.  And any individual has the right to pronounce, spell, write and accent his or her name any way he or she desires.  The First Amendment at the very least protects how one chooses to write and pronounce his or her name.  So an individual or family can choose not to pronounce and accent “Peña”, for example, properly.

Yet Peña without the ñ becomes pena, which in Spanish to knowledgeable readers means pity or pain, instead of the more positive group of supporters.  Peña without the ñ also sounds vulgar – hardly the expression families would want in a death notice, the last public evidence of a human being’s existence.

Unless a family chooses to not use accents, wanton disregard of accenting Spanish names and surnames amounts to journalistic malpractice, especially as the country’s new demography asserts itself.

Editorial negligence occurs every day in hundreds of newspapers throughout the country when a Spanish name is not accented properly.  It happens every minute across the airwaves when television producers fail to properly accent names of individuals on the screen and when their reporters do not pronounce names properly.  The same holds true on radio when an unknowing announcer massacres a name in any frequency that like any other name personifies worth and demands respect.

Journalists who do not spell or pronounce names of individuals and places correctly violate the most basic of journalism’s rules to report accurately the facts.  A journalist’s integrity takes a hit each time any name is presented improperly or mispronounced.  Beyond disrespecting human beings and devaluing them mindlessly, a journalist diminishes his or her professional integrity by demonstrating incompetence.  It is not just Hispanic/Latinos who notice.  An increasing number of non-Hispanic/Latinos now know Spanish and Spanish names and surnames.

By not requiring their staffs and systems and processes to treat Spanish names and surnames properly, media organizations chip away at the very credibility that abets the amorphous muddle that the market has become.  Some news executives have struggled – and some have failed miserably – trying to adapt to a new market in which an estimated 90 percent of Hispanics/Latinos in the United States carry an accent in at least one of their names.

Growing a news entity these days is a formidable challenge.  But at the very least, news executives should make sure that the most basic tools of their trade are not lost.  In a world in which every margin is important and new, niche markets created, the growth of the Hispanic/Latino market alone might not be a matter of life or death.

But media entities should at least keep alive and in some cases revive solid journalistic principles and practices.

Sometimes you hire the wrong person.  It just does not work out.

That is what the polls are showing now about Donald Trump.  But it is going to be hard if not impossible to fire him.  And that almost certainly will prove ruinous to the nation.

But the same thing can be said about Democratic Party activists, strategists and those on-air know-it-alls whose election-loss records reveal something other than mastery of campaigns, politics, messaging and issues.  They, too, are hard to get rid of, or at the very least it is difficult for them to understand the political realities of the country today.

I am not going to comment about how to get rid of Trump institutionally.  The ways and means set out by the Constitution are there for use.  Whether there are enough Republican members of Congress or of the Cabinet courageous enough to put country before party remains to be seen.  I rather doubt it, however sad, and much can be written about that, however desperately.

But the only way or means available to the public to be rid of Trump and the disaster that is the Republican majority in Congress are the 2018 and 2020 elections, which brings me back to the Democratic political establishment.

There is growing suspicion that Hillary Clinton – whom I love – is setting about to see if she might yet make another run for the office that slipped through her hands twice.  I have heard it from enough people who believe she has a winning argument that the Trump campaign in collusion with the Russians stole the election from her.  I can see the logic of it, but it does not resonate with me, I am sorry to say.

The problem is not Hillary.  Anyone who has read anything I have ever written on this website, the least-visited of the planet, knows that I believe she is eminently qualified to be President and that Trump being in the White House and not she is the cruelest moment in U.S. history.

But being anti-Trump is not enough.  That is what the Democratic political establishment does not understand.  Democrats have to offer more.  What the GOP offered in 2016 was a vehicle of resentment about things as they are.  Many voters took the ride of anger and hate that Trump offered.  In contrast, too many of us believed that in comparison to Trump, Hillary was a slam-dunk, and so what we offered was not well said and projected by the campaign.

And that is where we erred, with most of the responsibility landing on the decision-makers who now go on television with handy excuses related to Russia, Jared Kushner, Russian-owned banks, shadowy financial magnates and, of course, the now-infamous James Comey.

Yes, let that be part of the way we win what most voters wanted in 2016.  The anti-Trump sentiment at the Democratic grassroot-base is real, and it will grow as the GOP in Congress and the Supreme Court head down a road that most voters do not want to travel.

But that is not enough because the components of the voting electorate favor the Republican Party.  That might sound oxymoronic given that Hillary won the popular vote.  But that proved not enough.

There has to be a spokesman or spokeswoman who is able to say persuasively – unlike Hillary – this:  That America can solve its problems, especially those larger than abortion, transgender bathrooms, guns and immigration.  What makes the learned Democratic establishment think that the majority of Americans gets up in the morning thinking about these causes and that they want to hear about them every moment the television in on?

I am all in favor of women’s right to choose, for the protection of the transgender community, for common sense on guns and for the protection of immigrants.  But I and many others do not have to be labelled as less progressive because we do not want to be so wedded to ideological litmus tests that we lose the greater reality that if we do not win we lose on all fronts, not just bathroom bills.  Most Democrats did not support gay marriage but they do now, having been brought there by party activists who then convinced the country of their argument.  Fine – and good.

But surely we can be more inclusive of voters whom we somehow do not hear who believe we have gone off the rails.  We can them back because most Americans are good people.  There are too many activists afoot within the Democratic Party who suspect that too many Americans are not good because they are not as enlightened as the established elites.

This above all must be our game plan:  To turn perceived negatives into positives – a message that could resonate with, for example, many Hispanic/Latino men who showed less willingness to vote for Hillary than we presumptuously thought.  That is just one component of what we should worry about as we head into 2018 and 2020.  And you are not going to see too many pundits or experts on television or at party conferences talking about that kind of detail, which is where the devil is.

The fact of the matter is that we have the numbers to prevail — even in off-year elections.  But we shave off our majority status when we project the cause rather than the common good.

Unless we win next year and in 2020, we will have ruin and be even more desperate.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.