HispanicBusiness

When Thomas H. Castro, president of radio-station company El Dorado Communications in Houston, heard from a friend in Washington that Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) was looking for someone to fill a seat on the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Hispanic business leader thought of his business partner, Roel C. Campos.

Campos had experience dealing with capital markets as a co-founder of El Dorado and had practiced corporate and securities law in Los Angeles, where he also had served as a federal prosecutor. But Campos was unknown in Washington political circles and on Wall Street and had never practiced before the SEC.

SEC commissioners typically "are either really tight friends with the president or they come from Wall Street," said Castro, a Democrat who worked on Capitol Hill in the 1970s for former California senator Alan Cranston. "Roel did not fit that profile."

To help make their case, Campos and Castro turned to members of the New America Alliance, a group of 80 wealthy Latino businessmen and professionals.

Members including Henry G. Cisneros, who was secretary of housing and urban development during the Clinton administration, and Jose H. Villarreal, a San Antonio attorney who served as treasurer of the Gore-Lieberman 2000 presidential campaign, called Daschle, urging him to interview Campos for one of the two SEC seats designated for the political party not in the White House.

"We made phone calls in a low-key way. There were lots of people who had merit and wanted the job, but we made sure he got a fair hearing," Castro said.

In June 2002, Campos became the first Latino SEC commissioner. Daschle spokeswoman Ranit Schmelzer said the New America Alliance played a key role in making that happen.

The New America Alliance also played an active role in pushing for the recent appointment of Fred R. Buenrostro Jr. to head the California pension system, according to alliance members and a spokesman for the California Public Employees' Retirement System. The group's latest big push -- to get more Hispanics on corporate boards -- has been less successful, say members, although they add that the effort is at an early stage.

Campos's appointment is the sort of thing New America Alliance founders Cisneros and Raul Yzaguirre, a civil rights activist and real estate investor, envisioned 31/2 years ago when they brought together some of the United States' wealthiest Hispanics. Cisneros, who left the Clinton administration after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about payments to a former mistress, and Yzaguirre had gotten to know each other attending the same Hispanic meetings and conferences.

In June 1999, they invited 45 other Latino executives to a two-hour meeting in Dallas, where they preached the importance of pooling their wealth to advance the Hispanic community. They decided to form the New America Alliance, with members paying annual dues of $10,000.

Many members had already made millions, often by selling products and services to Hispanics. But getting the attention of the mainstream centers of business power -- banks, the boardrooms of America's largest corporations and institutional investment groups -- was difficult.

They hoped to create a lobbying and philanthropic organization powerful enough to build wealth in the Latino community and to raise the profile of Hispanics. Cisneros and Yzaguirre said the group was modeled, in part, on the Washington-based Executive Leadership Council, a 17-year-old networking, lobbying and philanthropic group of top black executives.