Last week, Gov. Bill Lee announced that Dr. Ralph Alvarado will be starting as the commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Health on Jan. 16. Alvarado is a sitting Kentucky state senator, and he was contemplating a run for governor of Kentucky as recently as May, according to news reports.
Alvarado, along with his successful, ongoing career as a Kentucky politician, has a three-decade medical career in Kentucky and, according to one report, a successful hemp farm. He was also the darling of the 2016 Republican National Convention, the same year he served on candidate Trump’s Hispanic Advisory Council — a fact strangely left out of more recent news stories.
Can you believe someone would ditch an established medical practice, a farm and a safe state Senate seat in a conservative district to move to a new state to be the health commissioner? Sure, it’s a six-figure job, but you’re telling me Alvarado isn't already making six figures? Why would he move to take a lower-profile job?
I don’t know. Something to keep an eye on. As a history nerd, I’m more interested in this line that appeared in Frank Gluck’s story in The Tennessean: “Alvarado became the first Hispanic person elected to that state's General Assembly after winning in 2014.”
This immediately struck me as highly unlikely. Or at least a highly contentious claim. I’m not going to come up with a firm definition of "Hispanic" for you here. People have been arguing about that for a long, long time. And there are big disagreements about the differences between Hispanic and Latino, or even if there are any. If we can all agree that Mexico is a Hispanic culture, which seems pretty safe, we can also agree then — based on who all lives in Mexico and has for generations — that Mexicans, and thus Hispanic people, can be white, Black, Indigenous, Asian or multiracial.
Though we have a long tradition of pretending like Hispanic culture is naturally out West or down South, Tennessee’s Hispanic ties go back to the beginning. In fact, Spain was making a claim to everything in this area as the long hunters and the Donelson-Robertson parties were entering the area without Spain’s permission. People, we live near New Madrid. You can easily drive to Lascassas or Santa Fe. The history is right on the map.
If a family moved from, say, France to Mexico in the late 1600s, that family would now be firmly Hispanic, right? And a Zapotec person who called herself "Hispanic" when dealing with government paperwork wouldn’t be wrong, would she, even if her family has lived in that spot since before it was Hispanic? If our definition of Hispanic — a relatively new term, historically speaking — is someone who comes from a place that was claimed by Spain and colonized by Spaniards, and who was aware of that claim and acted as if it was a real claim, who acted as a citizen of New Spain (whether willingly or not), then any Kentucky state legislator whose family lived in “Luisiana” during the time it was a part of New Spain (1763-1800) could rightfully have a claim on being Kentucky’s first Hispanic person elected to the state’s General Assembly.
I couldn’t find a list of all the Kentucky state legislators, but I did find a list of Kentucky state legislators from 1900 to 2005. So at the least, I could see if there were any Hispanic legislators before Alvarado.
Nashville, guess who I found. No, seriously, consider it for just a second. Who do we know who had a wife in New Spain, who may have occasionally spied for New Spain, and who has so many descendants that the chances of one of them having served in the state legislature in any Southern state are incredibly high?
Yep, one of Timothy Demonbreun’s descendants: Almon Demunbrun. Almon’s dad was Henry. Henry’s dad was John. John’s dad was Felix, and Felix’s dad was our dude, Timothy. Almon was really instrumental in getting Mammoth Cave protected, so I guess caves are a family tradition. Like Alvarado, he was Baptist.
Anyway, welcome, Dr. Alvarado. May you be as successful here as you were in Kentucky.
