The young Eric Garcetti, the future mayor-elect of Los Angeles with dad, Gil, who became district attorney. (From Garcetti’s Facebook page)

AMONG THE ESTIMATED 2.1 million violent deaths during the decade-long Mexican Revolution a century ago were the brutal hangings of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of supporters and officials of the longstanding government of dictator Porfirio Diaz that was overthrown.

They have long been forgotten, unearthed only in the memories of their families, many of them long since emigrated to safety in the United States.

One of those who was hanged was Massimo Garcetti, an Italian immigrant who had risen to some success in his adopted homeland, becoming a judge in the northern state of Chihuahua

“I assume,” says Garcetti’s great-grandson, Eric, “that means he was on the wrong side of the revolution.”

History may show it to be one of the few times that a Garcetti has been on the wrong side of anything dealing with politics, certainly the biggest stamp on that being Eric’s surprisingly easy election as mayor of Los Angeles last week.

In a bitterly-contested campaign whose winner some feared wouldn’t be known possibly for weeks, Garcetti stunned two of the city’s most dominant forces – organized labor and the Hispanic leadership – by whipping opponent Wendy Greuel among virtually every voter bloc, including Latinos.

Garcetti’s triumph makes the story of his great-grandfather’s hanging, believed to have taken place in a square in Chihuahua, that much more significant because it hasn’t been one that the mayor-elect has trotted out in a narrative of tragedy and hardship as politicians are known to do.

He could have claimed, if he wanted, that his family has shed blood for Mexico – that he is a mejicano in more than just ancestry and ethnocentric political hyperbole.

The recent campaign in which critics – many of them the city’s Latino leadership — and even the Los Angeles Times questioned whether he was Hispanic enough, were opportunities for Garcetti to make a stronger case for himself as to his Latinoness.

Not that he avoided it. But he didn’t wear his ethnicity on his sleeves.

As he told a group of Latino voters in one of his last campaign stops, “I don’t want your vote just because I speak Spanish.”

And that, in addition to being perhaps Garcetti’s shrewdest move of handling his ethnicity in politics, appears to signal a shift on the pubic thinking of what and who is a Hispanic as Latinos in Los Angele in recent days have rushed to celebrate his victory.

Oscar Garza, who edited the now-defunct Ciudad magazine recalled this week how his publication had once trumpeted “how Latinos in L.A. are increasingly the children or partners of people from other ethnicities and races.”

“And now,” he says of Garcetti, “L.A. has a mayor who fits that bill.

“Eric Garcetti represents the 2.0 model of Latinos in L.A. “

Garcetti’s election has also brought into question the credibility of the city’s Latino leadership, which heavily endorsed his opponent – some of them openly questioning whether the now mayor-elect was really Hispanic.

There was the Italian last name and the ancestry from Italy, which is not that unusual among Hispanics in Latin America but seems to rankle some Mexican Americans buried in provincialism.

“He says he’s Latino,” City Councilman Jose Huizar, himself a Mexican immigrant. “But, you know, that’s for the voters to see or the constituents to see.”

On Election Day, an overwhelming number of Latinos apparently saw Garcetti as one of their own. Garcetti won 60 percent of the Latino votes, according to an exit poll from Loyola Marymount University’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles.

So much for the pull and power of all those self-inflated Latino leaders, as Garcetti now seems to have emboldened those who voted for him.

“Eric Garcetti embodies the new L.A.,” says Harvard-educated Los Angeles attorney Vibiana Andrade, possibly underscoring the sentiments of the 2.0 Latinos. “MEChA meeting over? This guy has got a city to run!”

So who is Eric Garcetti, this 42-year-old, three-term City Councilman with Columbia and Oxford University pedigrees who is redefining being Hispanic in American public life?

For starters, when looked upon objectively, there appears little doubt about Garcetti not only being Hispanic but, as the Times in 2000 wrote about his father – former District Attorney Gil Garcetti, “if it weren’t for his Italian name, it seems unlikely that he would be accused of being a ‘phony’ Latino.

“Gil Garcetti was raised in an unmistakably Mexican American household. Three of his four grandparents were Mexican; the fourth, Massimo Garcetti, immigrated to Mexico from Italy about 1890.”

Eric’s grandparents, Juanita and Salvadore, lived for a good while in the city’s traditionally Hispanic Eastside, which accommodated the future mayor-elect in another important aspect.

In the 1940s, the Eastside was also heavily Jewish. The Breed Street Shul, a historical Jewish synagogue, remains one of the treasures of that community. And Eric Garcetti, through his mother Sukey Roth is Jewish.

“Weekends involved bowls of menudo at my grandparents’ and bagels at my cousins’ house,” Garcetti says of his childhood with a Mexican and Jewish background. “I think if you’re Latino, you’re very comfortable with the idea of mestizo, being mixed.

“So I kind of joke that I’m mestizo double, double mixed.”

Garcetti’s grandmother Juanita was one of 19 children born to Mexican immigrants in Arizona. His grandfather Salvadore was a barber and, according to Gil Garcetti, a small-time gambler and numbers runner who claimed to have known gangster Mickey Cohen and to have worked briefly for Los Angeles mob boss Bugsy Siegel.

Today that is a far cry from Eric Garcetti, Juanita and Salvadore’s Rhodes Scholar grandson who has risen to surprising heights, could climb to even greater places and is changing the way people look at Hispanics.

About the wildest thing you can say about Eric Garcetti is that he plays jazz piano to let off steam and that the only thing he fears is the chupacabra.

Yes, the chupacabra. How much more Latino could he be?

“I don’t know if it’s out there,” he says. “But if it is, that frightens the heck out of me.”

Los Angeles Mayor-Elect Eric Garcetti is redefining what and who is Latino in multi-ethnic America. (AP Photo)

ERIC GARCETTI WAS elected mayor of Los Angeles Tuesday, sweeping into office with a slew of new expectations, not the least of which what he will mean for Hispanics not only in his hometown but beyond.

For Garcetti is the new face of being Latino in America, even as some of his critics charged that he wasn’t Hispanic enough and raising a more serious question in this nation’s multi-ethnic society:

Who is or who isn’t Latino?

As for Garcetti, Los Angeles’ new 42-year-old mayor elect’s grandfather was born in Mexico. His great-grandfather, Massimo Garcetti, was a Mexican judge who was hanged during the Mexican Revolution. Garcetti speaks perfect Spanish. He not only considers himself Hispanic, he has also called himself Chicano.

His critics, though, may have been judging Garcetti as much on his skin coloration. He is as huero as they come in a city and in the Southwest where caramel brown-skinned Mexican Americans make up the majority of Latinos.

Perhaps those critics don’t watch Spanish televisions novelas which is full of hueros speaking Spanish – and on which Garcetti would easily pass.

Just as he easily passed the test among Latino voters in Los Angeles where, they largely went for Garcetti and not his runoff opponent Wendy Greuel – though she had a lion’s share of endorsements from Hispanic politicians and leaders, including farm workers co-founder Dolores Huerta, County Supervisor Gloria Molina and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s cousin, Assembly Speaker John Perez.

Villaraigosa, who didn’t endorse in the race, leaves office June 30 as the city’s consummate Latino politician – the first Hispanic elected mayor in modern times and at one time the hope of Latino aspirations to higher office.

But he will be leaving with those hopes dashed, at least for the moment, and replaced both in office and in promise by Garcetti, who undoubtedly soon will be embraced by all the Latino organizations, especially those that lean Democratically, looking for a fresh face for national leadership.

In Garcetti, they have an ideal candidate: A former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, one of the few American Latinos so honored; a graduate of Columbia who also studied at the London School of Economics; the son of a former district attorney; a lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserves; and scandal-free, married to Amy Wakeland with whom he has a daughter, Maya Juanita, a name after any Latino’s heart.

Add to that a built-in political asset that few other Latino politicians have.

Garcetti is Jewish. Jews in Los Angeles today are celebrating that he is the city’s first Jewish mayor.

“Weekends involved bowls of menudo at my grandparents’ and bagels at my cousins’ house,” Garcetti says of his childhood with a Mexican and Jewish background. “I think if you’re Latino, you’re very comfortable with the idea of mestizo, being mixed.

“So I kind of joke that I’m mestizo double, double mixed.”

It enabled Garcetti to fashion a coalition built around two of the most powerful political elements in Los Angeles – and in America today – Latinos and Jews.

It is also a natural native constituency for Garcetti that now has almost elevated him to a recognizably national level and the precipice of even higher office in California.

The Golden State’s three top elected officials – Gov. Jerry Brown and U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer – are in their 70s. And Garcetti has joined the pool of younger blood around them.

And in upsetting preconceived notions about what being Hispanic and what Latino power is today, Garcetti has shown he may have a unique understanding that Latino voters want more than just pandering to their ethnicity

“My grandparents were from northern Mexico, Chihuahua and Sonora,” Garcetti told a Latino group in Spanish at one of his last campaign stops. “But I don’t want your vote just because I speak Spanish.”

Former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela is the logical choice to be the team’s next manager. (AP Photo)

WHEN THE DODGERS replaced the Yankees as the team with the highest payroll this year, they also assumed the great expectations that come with spending that kind of money in America’s national pastime.

But a little over a month into the season, the only thing that Dodgers and the Yankees have in common is an abnormal rash of injuries to stars that have put too any multi-million-dollar players on the Disabled List.

Playing with subs and journeyman players, though, the Yankees are in first place in their America League division. The Dodgers, with most of their injured stars back in the lineup, occupy last place in their National League division.

Understandably, fans and sportswriters have begun calling for the firing of Dodgers manager Don Mattingly, once a star with the Yankees but with no real connection to the Los Angeles team and a contract that expires this season.

It is a monumental disappointment. The Dodgers were sold last year for a record $2.2 million, ridding Los Angeles of the previously owner who was widely despised.

Heightening the disillusionment was that the team first celebrated the Jackie Robinson film “42,” and now has been upstaged by that Hollywood motion picture being the only positive thing you can associate with the Dodgers.

The situation is so bad that a leading national writer with Fox even predicts that Mattingly will be sacked as early as this Thursday.

It has raised the subject of who will replace Mattingly, with the usual names popping up, but importantly they are names that reflect on noticeable shortcoming for the times.

None of those names are of Hispanics.

And yet these are Dodgers who hold themselves up as the model for racial inclusion. They are the team that broke baseball’s color barrier with Jackie Robinson in 1947. They are among the first teams that began a widespread recruitment in Latin America, even opening the first baseball camp for that purpose in the Dominican Republic.

But the expected firing of Don Mattingly opens a tremendous opportunity for the Dodgers to make another historic statement in the hiring of a Latino manager.

Ozzie Guillen heads the list of experienced Latino managers who are available. He managed the Miami Marlins last season, and he won a World Series in 2005 with the Chicago White Sox.

Of couse, diehard Latino fans say the Dodgers have perfect Hispanic former player who comes to each game and who would be the ideal Latino Dodger manager.

Former pitching great Fernando Valenzuela, who thrilled Dodger fans with Fernandomania a generation ago, is one of the team’s Spanish-speaking radio announcers.

As such, he is intimately familiar with the team’s players and knows their strengths and limitations. He also has coaching experience, having been he pitching coach for the Mexican national team in the World Baseball Classic.

Earlier this year, passing Fernando in the press box, I asked him the question, though at the time it was completely academic as the season had just begun.

“Ever think about managing?” I asked him in Spanish.

“Vez en cuando,” he said. From time to time.

The Dodgers have their next manager in house, if they’re anywhere as smart as they are rich.

They insist they are staying with Mattingly but for how long?

Fernando has no managing experience. You can hear them saying when that moment does come.

That’s true. But then that’s the same amount that Don Mattingly had when they gave him the job.

Will they discriminate in their thinking in hiring a new manager who is Latino and bleeds real Dodger blue?

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ South Korean import Hyun-Jin Ryu has become the hottest pitcher on the staff. (Getty Images/KNBC)

IF HYUN-JIN RYU pitched regularly in New York, he would soon be the sensation that basketball player Jeremy Lin was for the Knicks last year.

Jinsanity! Can’t you hear it now?

Citi Field in Flushing Meadows would be packed. The face of the 26-year-old pitching phenom would be on tee-shirts, plastered over the tabloids and marketed across America.

It may still. But it will come out of Los Angeles where the Dodgers’ South Korean lefthander may yet become the toast of baseball, transcending ethnic pride the way Fernando-mania did a generation ago.

“Hadouken!” fans will be yelling after Ryu’s strikeouts like when the Street Fighter video game player throws a fireball.

For who would have ever known that three weeks into the season, the Dodgers most dependable pitcher would be Hyun-Jin Ryu, the import who in his own way could become to ace Clayton Kershaw what Don Drysdale was to Sandy Koufax in that heyday when there was no offense to speak of and the Dodgers existed on pitching and prayers.

Of course, it has become that way today, too, with absentee Dodger bats failing to take much pressure off a pitching staff that is having to be retooled in the early weeks of the season.

On Thursday, Ryu didn’t figure in the decision of the Dodgers’ 3-2 victory over the Mets, but he was the reason they were able to win the third game of the series and fly back to Los Angeles after an unremarkable road trip that made as much news for the injury report as for the quality of baseball on the field.

Ryu pitched seven strong innings, giving up only three hits while striking out eight. He gave up his only run in the bottom of the sixth inning but came back to shut the Mets down in order in the seventh.

“He told us he could do it — It’s a big win for us,” Dodger skipper Don Mattingly said of Ryu going out for the seventh inning and giving the team’s recently taxed bullpen a badly-needed break.

What there was of a Dodgers offense amounted to Matt Kemp, who appears to have gotten himself out of the early season slump. His first homer of the season on Wednesday night was wasted in that loss, but Kemp returned Thursday with an RBI single in the first inning and scoring what amounted to the deciding run in the top of the ninth inning.

Andre Ethier singled home Nick Punto with the first run of the inning, and Kemp scored on Juan Uribe’s infield single.

Offensively, Kemp appears back. He was 11-for-24 (.458) with five RBIs on the six-game road trip, raising his season average to .266. Mark Ellis, who has had the hottest bat lately, was given the day off.

But the story of the game was undoubtedly Ryu, who was cheered on by a larger than usual contingent of Koreans who attended the game — which Ryu called “a big strength for my pitching.”

“I was aware there are a lot of Korean Americans here in New York,” Ryu told ESPN through a translator. “It was definitely encouragement.”

So, coming next to Dodger Stadium

Jinsanity.

“Hadouken!”

Florida Senator Marco Rubio delivered the official response to President Obama’s State of the Union.

HAS ANY POLITICIAN making a nationally televised official response to a presidential State of the Union ever had the buildup that Florida Senator Marco Rubio had Tuesday night.

Most politicians in that position are lucky to have a paragraph about them in that day’s newspaper.

Rubio had his face plastered on the cover of Time magazine all over America, with the word “savior” in nice bold letters.

So Tuesday night, the expectations on the 41-year-old senator were unlike any that have ever been placed on someone in his position.

Marco Rubio may have taken a big lead in the 2016 Republican race for the party’s nomination, introducing himself to the country as “the Hispanic Obama,” the man who could be America’s first Latino president.

Or he may have ruined his chances, not by failing in his response to the president but by exposing himself as the man to beat and the candidate that other Republican and Democratic presidential wannabes alike will now attempt to marginalize, criticize and tear down.

For Rubio as a political rising star could now find himself like the mythical Icarus, flying too close to the sun and soon to crash.

But how can you not like what he did, delivering the official GOP response twice, in English and in Spanish, eloquently and talking about the middle class like someone who knows what it’s like to feel lucky to be there.

What was it he said?

“This opportunity – to make it to the middle class or beyond no matter where you start out in life – it isn’t bestowed on us from Washington. It comes from a vibrant free economy.

“Presidents in both parties, from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle class prosperity. But President Obama? He believes it’s the cause of our problems.”

Hi-yo, Silver! was all I could say and wonder, watching him, what the Republicans were thinking last year in not taking a chance in having him as Romney’s running mate. Not because he’s Hispanic or bilingual or looks really good in a suit.

No, because Marco Rubio came across as committed, as the kid you watched growing up next door, as the young man you would want your daughter to bring home or the guy you would pick to be your son’s best friend.

When he reached down and chugged from a water bottle, he seemed real. When he talked about his immigrant roots, about his parents, about his middle-class neighborhood and neighbors and their concerns about Medicare and making ends meet, well, you’re not going to hear that from too many politicians.

“Mr. President, I still live in the same working class neighborhood I grew up in,” Rubio said. “My neighbors aren’t millionaires. They’re retirees who depend on Social Security and Medicare.

“They’re workers who have to get up early tomorrow morning and go to work to pay the bills. They’re immigrants, who came here because they were stuck in poverty in countries where the government dominated the economy.

“The tax increases and the deficit spending you propose will hurt middle class families. It will cost them their raises. It will cost them their benefits. It may even cost some of them their jobs.”

The rhetoric was nothing more than Republican rhetoric, of course, and moments like this are more than just about the words. Moments like this are about the imagery, the style and the presentation.

In the television-plus age of multi-media, the moment is also beyond talking heads and more about charisma and how people move you or don’t.

Don’t take my word for it. Rubio was following a president who nine years ago excited America in a televised Democratic National Convention speech of which no one can honestly tell you what he said but they certainly remember his lasting image and the moment.

So is Marco Rubio the Republicans’ savior?

Well, the Democrats will need to step up in kind.

Colombia’s Ruben Salazar Gomez (R) receives his biretta hat from Pope Benedict XVI as he made him a cardinal in November.

WILL THIS BE THE time that the world gets its first Latino pope to lead the Roman Catholic Church?

With the Church struggling with increasing non-churchgoers but an ever-rising Hispanic population in the world, even Pope Benedict XVI sought to bring a more geographically diverse mix into the European-dominated College of Cardinals.

Last fall, he named a Colombian, Cardinal Ruben Salazar Gomez, as one of six new cardinals – part of what the pope called the “unique, universal and all-inclusive identity” of the church.

Salazar Gomez, 70, is thought by many to be a rising star in the church and an outspoken advocate for a peaceful resolution to Colombia’s civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions.

As such, he is also perhaps the only cardinal who fits the image of a warrior pope, albeit for peace, that could go a long way in reshaping the church’s image as an active crusader to calm the world’s turbulence.

“As church, we have always said that the armed conflict in Colombia must end through dialogue and consensus in order to achieve true and lasting peace,” he told Catholic News Service shortly before being elevated to a cardinal.

In January, the pontiff gave Salazar Gomez a new assignment, making him a member of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

Salazar Gomez is also from the southern hemisphere, where two-thirds of the world’s Catholics live. Latin America, which boasts half of the world’s Catholics, now has 21 voting-age cardinals. North America has 14.

Europeans, though, dominate the group of 120 cardinals under age 80 who are eligible to vote in a conclave to elect a new pope. Sixty-two of those cardinals are European.

But it is Latin America where the church has grown the most in recent decades. Latin America represents 42 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, the church’s largest single block, compared to 25 percent in Europe.

Other Latin American cardinals whose names have been mentioned as possible popes are  Odilo Scherer, 63, of Brazil, Leonardo Sandri, 69, of Argentina and Joao Braz de Aviz, 65, of Brazil.

The possibility of a Latino pope has also been heightened by recent remarks of who might succeed Benedict, among them Archbishop Gerhard Mueller, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the pope’s former position.

“I know a lot of bishops and cardinals from Latin America who could take responsibility for the universal Church,” he said.

The Bogota-born cardinal has been described by those who have worked alongside him as “a hard-working mediator who has been able to gain the respect of opposing forces in the country.”

“This is also an indication of the Vatican’s political support for the peace process that the church has supported in Colombia,” the Rev. Dario Echeverri Gonzalez of the National Conciliation Commission said of Salazar Gomez’s selection as cardinal last fall.

“He’s very serious, very executive in his approach. He’s very intelligent and able to take a position without making enemies.”

The National Conciliation Commission is an independent church group that works toward a solution to the civil war.

Bishop Nel Beltran Santamaria of Sincelejo has said that Salazar Gomez can almost seem “timid,” though that hides the complex character of a tireless, passionate worker.

“He’s the kind of unique individual that is able to earn the respect of everyone, thanks mostly to his hard work,” Beltran told Catholic News Service.

For traditional Catholics, Salazar Gomez also offers the usual conservative philosophy long associated with the Vatican, having vowed as his three priorities “protecting marriage as the union between one man and one woman, saving innocent life in the womb, and promoting peace in Colombia.”

George P. Bush with uncle, former President George W. Bush, and grandfather, former President George H. W. Bush

WHEN HE WAS LITTLE more than a child running around a national political convention, his grandfather had spotted him and joked that “he’s our little darkie.”

The grandfather was President George H.W. Bush, and no one knew exactly what to make of his comment about his dark-skinned grandson, George P. Bush, the son of Jeb Bush and his Mexican-born wife Columba.

Was it a racist comment, especially at a time when Republicans were beginning their worst period of disfavor among Hispanics? Was it simply politically incorrect? Or just insensitive? It also was a comment about a child, and not just any child but a quite privileged one.

The elder Bush was never heard to utter the comment again, at least not in public, and George Prescott Garnica Bush became just another face among those who often appeared on stage at conventions and political triumphs of his father who became governor of Florida and his uncle George W. Bush who, of course, became president.

Who would have thought, though, that the dark complexion over which an innocent comment made some squirm would one day become one of the young man’s biggest political assets.

Today he is known as P. Bush. He is 36, a former navy officer, head of an investment firm in Fort Worth and quite possibly the future of the Republican party in Texas, should the GOP succeed in maintaining it as a Red State in the face of meteoric Latino growth that some say will eventually swing it into the Democratic fold.

Bush is expected to make his first political run for Texas Land Commissioner in 2014 when his chances for election are excellent given that Republicans are still in control of the state.

But a lot of eyes will also be on P next year because it will offer the first real chance for predominantly Democratic Hispanic voters in Texas to react to a prominent “darkie” Republican – a Republican candidate who is not just Latino but bears the distinguishable characteristics of being mestizo, of mixed blood as are the majority of the state’s Mexican-Americans.

Texas just recently elected its first Hispanic to statewide office, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, but he is Cuban American and no one would ever have described him as “our darkie” because he is light-skinned and Mexican American voters did not especially take to him.

“P. Bush, though, looks like he could be the son of a Mexican American factory worker who has gone off to college and is doing well – he looks like me and my friends,” says Monica Romero, a school teacher in Houston.

“He’s Mexican American. He’s raza.”

Democrats, of course, will be the first to scoff at the notion that Mexican-Americans in Texas will vote for a Republican like Bush just because he is one of their own.

But as this past president campaign showed, Democrats were of that same thinking flying in their Mexican-American elected politicians like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to campaign for President Barack Obama wherever the number of Latino voters dictated the need.

It is the reason, too, that Hispanic leaders are concerned about the slowness of Obama to name a Latino to his second administration Cabinet – to appoint someone they can relate to, someone who will make that Cabinet reflect America and continue attracting Latino voters to the Democratic ranks.

Young Bush understands it will take more than a famous name and being known as the family’s beloved “darkie” to make it in politics, and he says that’s what he’s been doing with his life as he prepares to seek public office.

“My grandmother (Barbara Bush), who I always seek advice from, told me that before you enter politics — or even think about entering politics — you should distinguish yourself outside of politics by doing something in the business world or any other world,” he said in an interview.

“Make a name for yourself, have a family, marry someone great, have some kids, buy a house, pay taxes, and do the things everyone also does instead of just running out and saying, ‘Hey, I’m the nephew of or the son of or the grandson of…”

President Obama on Wednesday finally appointed a woman to his Cabinet, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell. (AP Photo)

ARE THERE ANY longshot Latino politicians who could make the grade on President Barack Obama’s Cabinet?

It appears that’s what it’s going to take now that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has taken himself out of the running.

It’s a situation also brought on by the fact that no high-profile Hispanic office-holder appears ready to fall on his sword, politically speaking, and give up his office in Congress to give a Democratic president a sorely-lacking brown face on his Cabinet.

The talk of what Latino can serve in the Cabinet has gotten so bad that The Associated Press this week floated the idea that the president could name Villaraigosa’s cousin, California Assembly Speaker John Perez, as Secretary of Labor.

The idea evoked laughs in California, even with Perez, who has a long history as a labor organizer.

“Look, I’m always flattered if somebody thinks my work is worthy of other consideration,” Perez said, scoffing at the thought. “But I’m focused on being speaker for these next two years.

“And continuing to build back our economy, and continuing to build on the fiscal discipline that we’ve created here in California. And getting people back to work.”

Perez, though, may be no worse than some of the other Hispanic names being floated, among them current or past Cabinet under-secretaries and assistant secretaries.

In reality, those people probably have as much or more experience in running a Cabinet office than any big-name politician. But the Cabinet is still a highly visible political appointment, usually made up of important office-holders, large corporate heads or names that have a ring of political magic.

Of course, Obama’s nomination Wednesday of Sally Jewell as Interior Secretary lowers the bar to some degree. There are those who seriously wonder whether she would have been nominated had her name been Samuel Jewel.

No offense to Ms Jewell, but the president needed to name a woman to the Cabinet to offset the criticism that he was fostering a good ol’ boys club.

And he now needs to name a Hispanic.

So who will the Hispanic Sally Jewell be?

It will likely be a long-shot, possibly even the head of a Latino civil rights organization like Thomas Saenz of MALDEF or Janet Murguia of the National Council of La Raza. Those are good candidates whose presence might even elevate the stature of the Cabinet’s present membership.

Heck, it could even be John Perez, who some might call Villaraiosa-lite, except have you seen John Perez, who some might confuse as a candidate for NBC’s “Biggest Loser” weight-loss show?

Perez may have scoffed at the idea of being the Latino on the Obama Cabinet but he didn’t flat out rule it out.

“Let them ask,” he said, “and I’ll give you the answer then.”

California political consultant Bill Orozco and longtime companion Nancy Anne Nuno

AN EDITOR WE BOTH knew used to say that my friend Bill Orozco had a strange obsession with death.

It seemed that the longtime California political consultant always was the first to call and let you know when someone in politics or Latino activism had died, and he would do it in the most unusual way.

“The City Council just recessed in memory of….” he would say, dropping the name of the recently deceased who had just been recognized by political leaders by having a meeting or hearing adjourn in his or her honor.

Often the elected officials paying tribute to the person who had died would have learned of the passing from Bill himself, as he hovered around the council chambers or meeting room having just received news of the death from one of his many sources.

It wasn’t unusual for Bill to follow up with phone calls notifying you of rosaries, masses or funeral arrangements, letting you know the names of the widow and children and offering a photo of the deceased from his own vast collection of pictures.

For Bill was a photographer as well – “an amateur,” he humbly called himself, though his pictures were often as good as those of a pro and sometimes better because he would go places few professional photographers dared go.

He once got a shot of then Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre dressed to the nines in a studded charro suit and a Mexican sombrero at some out of the way Latino rodeo, when the dapper politician normally wouldn’t be caught dead seen in anything but $2,000 designer suits.

Another time Bill captured an image of about 50 gangbanger veteranos who had shown up like groupies at some event to catch a glimpse of actor and former convict Danny Trejo after the making of the film “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.”

Bill arrived with Danny Trejo, who was a longtime friend.

But Bill’s real passion was politics.

After a stint as an aide to former California State Senator David Roberti in the 1980s, Bill began consulting and strategizing for political candidates, mostly in Southern California, and sometimes outsiders challenging established power brokers.

“I’m a democrat with a little d,” Bill liked to say.

Though he had a lot of friends who were movers and shakers and political bosses, Bill in many ways was a rebel and loved the idea of opening the political process to newcomers and the young.

Nothing made Bill angrier than seeing entrenched politicians who took advantage of the system, especially when he suspected there were bribes involved or fixed contract bidding.

When the Los Angeles Times published a series of articles detailing graft and corruption involving Latino politicians in some of the county’s suburban cities, several people suspected Bill of being the whistle-blower, especially given that the wording in some of the stories bore a remarkable resemblance to what he had been telling anyone who would listen for years.

It may have also helped coming to that conclusion that Bill always called you the night before a Times story on the crooked politicians appeared to tip you off to check the newspaper the next morning.

“I don’t care if anyone knows,” he would say about this role as a whistle-blower. “I’m not the one taking bribes and rigging contracts.”

That was typical Bill Orozco.

“He was one of a kind – a lovable character,” said his longtime friend and East L.A. attorney Alex Jacinto. “He left us too early, and he’ll be missed.”

Bill apparently died in his sleep Thursday morning of no known cause. He was 63. An autopsy is being performed to determine the exact cause of death.

Fittingly, I understand that at least one meeting of elected officials recessed in Bill’s memory Friday.

I’m not completely certain because Bill wasn’t around to call and let me know personally.

Eric Garcetti is facing questions about whether he is Hispanic enough to be mayor of L.A. (Los Angeles Times photo)

When is a Hispanic political candidate Latino enough?

That is the question that has been hounding Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti since he announced he wanted to succeed Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor.

And the questioning has intensified for Garcetti—whose grandfather, Salvador Garcetti, was born in Mexico—as the March 5 city election approaches.

Garcetti, 41, speaks Spanish fluently and has often referred to himself as being “Chicano,” but he is increasingly finding his claim to being Hispanic challenged—so much so that a headline in the Los Angeles Times asked, “In mayor’s race, is Garcetti Latino enough?”

It hasn’t helped that Villaraigosa has not endorsed him, nor anyone else, as a successor, and that the mayor’s cousin—Assembly Speaker John Perez—is not only backing another candidate but is also among those questioning Garcetti’s Latinoness.

“There isn’t a Latino candidate running for mayor that I know of,” Perez recently told KPCC public radio.

As the Times wrote this week: “As the campaign begins to capture public attention, a big question is whether Garcetti can re-create the surge of Latino support that helped secure Villaraigosa’s historic election eight years ago as the first Latino mayor of modern Los Angeles.”

The answer so far appears to be a resounding no, especially as Eric Garcetti’s major opponent — City Controller Wendy Greuel – has amassed a number of influential Hispanic leaders who seemingly have rejected Garcetti as being one of their own.

In addition to the Assembly Speaker, these include United Farm Workers leader Dolores Huerta and County Supervisor Gloria Molina who remains one of the most powerful Latino politicians in California, particularly when it comes to behind-the-scenes jockeying.

Eric Garcetti’s Latino predicament of having his ethnicity claim challenged also resurrects an age-old ploy that was used in the Chicano civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s to discredit, or attempt to discredit, liberal-to-moderate Latino leaders thought to be out of the mold of Chicano extremist activism. 

They were branded as “Tio Tacos,” Latino Uncle Toms, ironic considering that eventually most of the Hispanics who have been elected to power in America in succeeding years have probably been closer politically to those so-called Tio Tacos than to the hardcore activists.

Garcetti himself is a descendant of Latino heroism of its own right. One of the reasons his grandfather’s family emigrated to the U.S. is that Eric Garcetti’s great-grandfather, Massimo Garcetti, was a Mexican judge who was hanged during the Mexican Revolution.

In any other Latino politician, Garcetti’s personal story would have him acclaimed the poster child of the American Dream. His father Gil Garcetti rose to district attorney in Los Angeles, and Eric Garcetti became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and the London School of Economics.

But the issue that hounds Garcetti—as it does many like him—is whether he is of “Mexican blood,” something in these days of ethnic and cultural intermarriages would seem ludicrous, almost smacking of a bizarre wish for Latino ethnic cleansing.

Garcetti’s Mexican ancestors were Italians who emigrated to Mexico but apparently never produced mestizo descendants, children of mixed European and indigenous Mexican blood.

None of that should matter, according to Maria-Elena Martinez, associate professor of history and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, who says “Mexican” is neither a race nor an ethnicity, but a melting pot of a nationality.

“‘Mexican’ encompasses a lot of people,” she told L.A. Weekly last year in discussing Garcetti’s Mexican heritage. “If his family migrated from Europe to become miners and became Mexicans or because of a generation being born there, by all means they are Mexican.”

“Of course he can claim that he has a Mexican past—that he has Mexican ancestors.”

How Garcetti fares in the Los Angeles mayoral race may well answer his critics or raise even more questions about the re-examination of Hispanic ethnic politics in America.

In Garcetti’s mind, though, there is no doubt of who and what he is.

“Weekends involved bowls of menudo at my grandparents’ and bagels at my cousins’ house,” Garcetti says of his childhood with a Mexican and Jewish background. “I think if you’re Latino, you’re very comfortable with the idea of mestizo, being mixed.

“So I kind of joke that I’m mestizo double, double mixed.”