Video Transcript

Frank Almaguer—A Hispanic Perspective:

Many people, when they first meet me, may not realize my Hispanic roots.  They see my physical appearance, and assume that I am a white Anglo-Saxon American.  In fact I was born in Cuba of a relatively low income family, grew up in Miami with a single mother.

My first educational experience was going to a fourth grade in Miami, and not speaking English at all, and ultimately winding up in a class for what today we would call “special children.” 

I got a good education at the University of Florida.  I became enamored with the idea of serving.  And one of the things that, by the way, pains me these days is that public service does not command the same high prestige that it in my view ought to.  But it certainly did at the time I was growing up.  And when I began to serve, first as a Peace Corps volunteer, then with Peace Corps staff, and USAID, and interacting very closely with the State Department, I felt total acceptance.  I never had that particular problem.  But I did become aware of the fact that fellow Hispanics really were having a difficult time breaking – whether it be a “glass ceiling” or an undescribed ceiling of sorts.

In fact, when I was in Honduras the first time, and this time working with the Peace Corps, President Carter appointed the first woman, and the first Hispanic woman to ever serve as ambassador.  Her name was Mari-Luci Jarimillo.  She arrived with almost no knowledge of what an ambassador does, as is often the case of a political ambassador, but just this wonderful instinct.  The Hondurans did not know what to do with a woman ambassador. 

The fact that she was Hispanic almost perhaps reinforced the idea that maybe this was a second rate person, ironically.  I know of a very distinguished Hispanic ambassador, who at the time he was nominated, the country to which he was going to be accredited went to the State Department and told the Secretary of State at the time, George Shultz, that they didn’t have anything against this particular individual but the fact that he was Hispanic was taken by the authorities in that particular country as perhaps evidence that the U.S. was treating that country as a second rate country.  I wasn’t there, so therefore I can’t attest to this, but one of the reasons why George Shultz rates very high in my list of great Secretaries of State is I understand he kicked this particular visitor out of his office.  I’m assuming he did it diplomatically and not physically, but he made it very clear that he was appointing an American ambassador, and the fact that he happened to be Hispanic or anything else was irrelevant.