From Episcopacy, Legacy.

If you do not follow European soccer, you cannot possibly know who Sergio Ramos is.  For the past two years, Ramos has used his head to score amazing goals at the most critical times for the most important sports team in the world, Real Madrid.  On Sunday, however, the great Ramos headed in a goal into his own net that ultimately cost Real victory.  We all at times score against ourselves.  It is in our nature.  Otherwise, we would be perfect.

Ramos came to mind on my drive back to Austin from San Antonio after paying my respects to the city’s former archbishop, Patricio Flores, who died last week.  In thinking about Flores and Ramos, I was not dwelling on loss so much as considering legacy.  Many more millions of people know who Ramos is than who Flores was.  Years from now Ramos will be remembered around the globe through video clips for his heroics on the field.  Flores will not be as noted nor remembered.  But, of course, it is not the life led nor the name known but that which we leave behind that matters.

Flores was one of those important men and women whom I have known who did matter.  The former Houston priest became the first Mexican-American bishop and archbishop in a land made Catholic by Spanish explorers centuries before and as such Flores heralded part of the beginning of the new chapter of the American story that we are now writing.  We are in a time in which we are going to have to provide a new intellectual context for the Hispanic/Latino community going forward.  It is no longer a question of who was first at this or at that.  It is the new not the old legacy that matters.

This reconsideration of ourselves was destined to start in Texas.  There was a reason why the first premier Hispanic/Latino social and political organizations were all established in San Antonio and South Texas.   However important, the overarching principles of those organizations of the last 50 years – civil rights, social justice, equal protection under law – were not enough.  The well-intended idea that the Hispanic/Latino community would achieve equal status and power by pursuing alone the guarantees of the Constitution ultimately has proved deficient.  We could soon be again where we were before Paul VI made Flores a bishop in 1970.

Whatever you might think of the election and the prospects of a Trump Presidency, we need a new perspective that defines our community and its purpose and gives it energy for the future at hand.  The great repression that might be headed our way will demonstrate the need for unity and action and it will foist on us a new sense of solidarity that, unintended or not, will re-enforce our self-identity.  I am not talking about organizing a separatist model but we need a new model of thinking within our system of democratic governance.

Neither you nor I nor anyone cannot escape what we now confront.  We will be compelled at last to find the voice we have never had but which is now possible because of our growing numbers.   To find a voice to resonate within ourselves, some of us will think of Patricio Flores. In building a new but cogent school of thought that  generates a mission statement that expresses a world view that everybody easily and naturally understands, we would bring purpose to a large mass of human beings still being formed.

The basic tenet of the new thinking has to be that key economy-driving states like Texas will fail if Hispanics/Latinos do not accelerate our social, economic and political progress.  And if those states fail, the nation will fall.  A larger, poorer Hispanic/Latino community will not be able to shoulder the cost of servicing the nation’s growing debt, supporting its aging population and paying for new defense systems in an increasingly dangerous world.

It is incumbent that Hispanic/Latinos* internalize our role in saving the country, and we must inculcate that belief within our community so that it is as common as the rising sun.  We must draw out and build upon the best within us more effectively and fully:  our sense of family, our desire for community, our congenital loyalty, our desire to belong.  More so, our efforts must rest on the need to foster self-confidence and self-belief in our students, and I believe that rests in restoring cultural pride.  The loss of our culture, including respect for our names and surnames, is complicit in our present state of being.

What lies ahead for the world in this new age in which religion matters less and yet matters more no one can know.  Church attendance and reverence is down; religious judgmental fervor rendered into partisan use and terrorist tool is up; indifference to what made religion important – faith – is quotidian, a universal, daily reality and subversive.

We must be careful, then, to use our heads well and not score against ourselves lest we lose the whole game and leave a last legacy.

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

*Hispanic/Latinos is not a typo. It is a run-in confection to overcome the rhetorical divide between Hispanics who consider themselves not Latinos and Latinos who do not consider themselves Hispanic.