That’s a reasonable mistake.
On his 2009 voter-registration form, Bush listed himself as Hispanic. This is particularly interesting because the identification is personal, not political. The form was not public. The form was not made public until the New York Times requested it from the Miami-Dade County Elections Department.
And there was no political advantage in it. He did not represent himself as Hispanic in public. And he would not have been better off if he did. When the New York Times made it public, he was mocked. When the New York Times made it public, he apologized. He said that it was a mistake.
The first thing to know is that Bush has always been an enthusiast for Latin America. He is fluent in Spanish. He went on exchange to Mexico during the summers away from boarding school. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Latin American Studies. He worked in Venezuela to work as the vice president of the Texas Commercial Bank.
But the most important thing to know about Jeb is his family.
Jeb met his wife, Columba, in Mexico. He was on exchange in Ibarilla, outside León in central Mexico. She was a few years younger than him, and he was infatuated. He says it was love at first sight. He says it was like lightning. Bush has told many stories about their first meeting, but his favourite version goes like this:
There was a popular courtship ritual in those days in which, after Catholic Mass, young bachelors and bachelorettes would form concentric circles around a town’s plaza and stroll in opposite directions, stealing glances at one another. “My version of that story that’s been told thousands of times over the last six or seven centuries is that my wife was driving a car around the town square and I was in the town square,” Jeb would recall. “She looked out the back of her car. She was in the backseat and I saw her.” Columba was half a torso shorter than Jeb, with dark eyes and a mesmerizing voice, and he was immediately lovestruck. “She was very alluring, very mysterious … I was captivated.”
That’s from McKay Coppins’ The Wilderness, but Bush tells this story again and again. He started his campaign by introducing himself and his wife, in English and Spanish, and telling the story of how they met.
Bush believes Columba changed his life.
He said that he had been a “cynical little turd at a cynical school.” That was Philipps Andover, where Bush was a slacker, closer to the school’s freaks than anyone else on campus. His grades were poor. He smoke a lot of weed. He was tall and intimidating. And he was aimless. He thought his name was enough.
Columba changed that. “She kept me wrapped around her little finger,” he said. “I just couldn’t keep her out of my thoughts. It was all consuming. I wrote her almost every day.” During his final semester, he did everything he could to impress her. He succeeded.
He made honor roll that term. He won one of the school’s top academic prizes. And his classmates saw the change in him. The Boston Globe reports:
Before the Mexican trip, Bush “was more casual, more of a party guy,” Chandler said. “He seemed pretty transformed by the Mexico experience. He was more serious.”
Another classmate said that “He matured,” but put a finer point on it: “He had gone from being an antiestablishment force to being a member of an establishment dynasty.” Bush still had the name.
Bush took Columba to Acapulco. He proposed to her in Mexico City over Christmas 1973. He did not introduce her to his parents until after the engagement. He had not even told them about her.
He married her in a private ceremony at the University of Texas at Austin in February 1974. At the time of the wedding, Columba did not speak English, so part of the ceremony was conducted in Spanish.
Bush did not invite his friends to the wedding. “Only Columba’s mother and sister, George’s mother, and our immediate family plus Paula, our housekeeper, were there,” Barbara Bush wrote in her memoirs. There is only one photograph of the wedding. Barbara took it.
Columba did not take to the Bush family. “Colu’s entry into the Bush family would prove difficult, a process that even after thirty years is still a work in progress,” Peter and Rochelle Schweizer explain in their book about the family. “At family gatherings the family would laugh, play, and tell stories. Colu would just sit, smile, and wonder.”
Columba became a citizen in 1979 so that she could vote for her father-in-law. She was not comfortable with the choice. “It was a difficult decision to make,” she said.
Today Columba rarely speaks English in public. She spoke at the 1988 Republican National Convention in Spanish. At home, the family speaks more Spanish than English. And when his wife speaks to his youngest child, she speaks to him in Spanish.
Jeb’s children are Hispanic. They are culturally Hispanic. The first words his eldest son learned were agua, jugo, and aquí. His children are also identifiably Hispanic. Here is George P. Bush at the 1988 convention:
Just before the 1988 convention, George H. W. Bush referred to Jeb and Columba’s children as “the little brown ones.” Columba told the press that she thought her father-in-law was being affectionate.
Jeb remembers when George P. Bush was called a spic out on the baseball diamond. He remembers when Columba was slighted. He remembers the racist jokes and judgmental remarks by the society men and women of Houston.
Columba could not stand it. She gave Bush an ultimatum: they could move to Mexico, or they could move to Miami. Whatever they did, they could not raise their children in Texas. Bush chose Miami.
Bush entered politics there. He became County Chair of the Republican Party. And as he worked there, he came to embody the mix of WASP and Hispanic social and political styles of the Republican Party in South Florida. Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic:
In 1979, when Jeb’s father began creating a presidential-campaign network, Jeb and his family moved to Miami to help him out. Miami turned out to be perfect both for the family and for Jeb’s ambitions. The Republican Party there was growing, thanks to Cubans who admired President Reagan and Vice President Bush’s anti-Castro policies. Jeb ran for chairman of Dade County’s Republican Party and won—the first political win for his generation of Bushes.
Twenty years later, Jeb Bush became governor as Florida was changing, enabling him to add Central Americans and Puerto Ricans to his list of constituents and allies. Over time, he became what Ana Navarro calls “pan-Hispanic,” meaning he speaks Spanish fluently with an accent that’s not detectable as Cuban or Nicaraguan or Mexican, and has an understanding of each specific culture’s idiosyncrasies. Jorge L. Arrizurieta, a Miami businessman and a longtime friend of Jeb’s, calls him a gringo aplatanado, by which he means “the most Latino American you will ever meet.” Arrizurieta told me that Jeb “enjoys all these Cuban gestures and phrases with friends.” He’ll tap his elbow when someone’s being cheap—a gesture that signifies caminando con los codos, or “walking on your elbows,” which saves wear and tear on your shoes.
He is “completely bicultural,” says Raquel Rodriguez, a Miami lawyer who met Jeb while volunteering on his dad’s first presidential campaign, in 1980, and later served as his general counsel. The day I called Rodriguez, she’d been reading a story in Politico magazine about how much of an introvert Jeb was. But this didn’t wholly jibe with the Jeb she knew. “I mean, he doesn’t want to lead the conga line or anything. But on the other hand, little old ladies come up to him and hug him and kiss him, and he’ll hug them back. It’s a very Hispanic trait … He gets that we like to invade your personal space.”
Bush’s politics reflect his adopted Hispanic family and political background. He loathes the nativists of his party. And when, in April 2014, he referred to illegal immigration as “an act of love,” he meant it.
Those migrants wanted to provide for their family, he said. They wanted to make sure their family was intact. They crossed the border because they had no other means to do so. And that was love.
Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love. It’s an act of commitment to your family.
Bush entire political life is a kind of commitment to family. First the one, then the other. And when Bush registered himself as Hispanic that, too, might have been an act of love.
