Blandina Cardenas: president, University of Texas, Pan American

Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful American Latino, April, 2007 by Soll Sussman

Run down the resume of Dr. Blandina "Bambi" Cardenas, president of the University of Texas-Pan American, and you will come across a non-stop record of achievements in education and civil rights.

"When I think about all of this, what is amazing to me is the staying power," she laughs in an exclusive interview with Latino Leaders. "I've survived for a very long time."

The 62-year-old educator was named president of the university of more than 17,000 students in Edinburg in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas in 2004. Among many previous achievements, she was commissioner for Children, Youth, and Families in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and served for 13 years on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

"I hope that my biggest achievement will be significantly advancing UT-Pan American as an institution that is serving its region in powerful ways," she says. The university is the 10th largest in Texas.

Dr. Cardenas has vivid memories from her first job in public relations at the American Bar Association (ABA) headquarters in Chicago. As one of her first tasks, she helped her bosses host a delegation of 17 Latin American legal experts.

"I was 19. I was the only woman in the room--and I was the only person under 45," she recalls. "I told myself, 'Boy, this is a long way from Del Rio, Texas.' Of course, then my stock went way up.

"I was engaged with the top lawyers of the country, and I was quite comfortable," she says of her work that followed at the ABA. "Most of my life I have been undaunted by being in new situations."

She attributes her comfort level to her upbringing in Del Rio, the city on the Texas border where her family had migrated to during the Mexican Revolution. She says it was "very socially conscious, very intellectually curious." She remembers a household with long conversations about Mexican, American, and world events, as well as many other topics that "were the subject of heated debates in which both the men and the women participated at full throttle."

Cardenas also remembers "tamaladas"(tamale feasts) as fundraisers almost every weekend at her home in support of her local school district, which had seceded in favor of "community ownership" after Del Rio schools were segregated on the basis of language despite a court ruling.

"I grew up with a sense that you could do anything if you'd just figure out a way to do it," she says. Blandina describes her childhood as privileged, even though there was little money and her home was on an unpaved street. "I had a very special upbringing," she says. "But the inequities were very clear to me. I saw myself as a leader from a very early age."

After spending several years in Chicago, her sense of commitment and responsibility brought her back home to Texas in 1967, but her experience in journalism and public relations didn't produce any jobs. "I came back to Del Rio, and the only job that I could take was as a teacher--and I fell in love with my students," she says of her career move to education.

She started that career as a preschool teacher for migrant children and later worked in San Antonio at the Edgewood school district. She says she turned out to have a special expertise at designing educational programs that attracted national attention. Blandina went to Washington,

D.C., to work for then-Senator Walter "Fritz" Mondale, who turned out to have an interest in border issues and migrant education. "I was the only one on his staff that he could really talk to about that, so we developed a great friendship," she says.

Blandina has a degree in journalism from the University of Texas and completed her doctorate in educational leadership at the University of Massachusetts. She has one son. She says she advises young people not to make decisions based on career choices, but instead to decide on their mission--and she clearly has been on a mission throughout her career. "I really encourage people to be mission driven, not career driven," she says. "I have now been given the gift of this field down here in South Texas, and I've got to plow it."

Cardenas has noted the change in the presence of women and the presence of Latinos in leadership positions since she started her career. "For the first ten to 15 years, I was almost always the only woman and almost always the only Latina," she says. "The challenge was to bring Latinos into the room by my presence without being a Johnny-one-note about it ... It was very much an uphill battle to get anyone to pay attention to Latino issues."

Blandina says that virtually every institution in South Texas has significant Latino leadership now, so the focus on breaking barriers has changed to making everything function well and to develop human capital. UT-Pan American is second in the United States in the number of bachelor's degrees awarded to Latinos and fourth in master's degrees bestowed.

"The challenge now is to make it all work," she says. "More and more Latinos have the opportunity and the obligation to lead for the whole, rather than just the part."