Nominee a statistician with social justice heart
Author John Phillip Santos, the first Mexican American Rhodes scholar, has written about his magical, haunting family saga and about the big brood of first cousins who grew up “like brothers and sisters” in San Antonio.
On Friday, he recalled a scene from his memoir, “Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award.
It took place on a family ranch in Pleasanton and zeroed-in on a primo hermano and an ornery Shetland pony named Brown Beauty.
The pony had a tendency to flip riders into cactus stands.
That first cousin has become President Joe Biden’s pick to head the U.S. Census Bureau.
If confirmed by the Senate, Rob Santos will become the first person of color and first Mexican American to serve in the post.
While I couldn’t interview him — the White House asks its nominees to lay low until after confirmation — several San Antonians recalled a home-grown talent and brilliant statistician with an international reputation.
He wants the job, willing to take a pay cut for it.
Santos hasn’t lived in San Antonio since 1976, but grew up on the city’s West Side. His parents have died, and the family lost his brother in the Vietnam
War. Lots of relatives remain in town.
He’s vice president and chief methodologist for the Washington, D.c.-based Urban Institute and is reportedly doing the job from his dining-room table in Austin.
He was influenced by values instilled in him by his parents, civil servants who worked at Kelly AFB; the Irish nuns at Little Flower School; and the Brothers of the Holy Cross, where he graduated in 1972.
Santos didn’t know he had to apply for college admission before fall attendance, so he went to San Antonio College before enrolling at Trinity University, majoring in math.
He earned a master’s degree in statistics at the University of Michigan. In a 2017 interview, he thanked affirmative action for that.
His résumé includes jobs as senior study director and sampling statistician at Temple University’s
Institute for Survey Research; director of survey operations at the University of Michigan; vice president of statistics and methodology at the research center NORC at the University of Chicago; and executive vice president at the Austin research firm Nustats.
He’s president of the American Statistical Association and past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
Rogelio Saenz, professor of demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio, remembers Santos was involved in one of the first national surveys of Chicanos and knows intimately what the Census Bureau is facing.
Saenz said Santos opposed the Trump administration’s attempts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census and its push to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count.
“He sees (the census) as a fundamental part of our democracy,” he said.
Juan H. Flores, policy analyst and former executive director at the La Fe center, who has known Santos for 35 years, says his “expertise cuts across several disciplines: healthcare, housing, employment and economic development and how they’re interconnected.”
Sister Gabriella Lohan, a COPS/METRO leader who was Santos’ sixth-grade teacher at Little Flower, recalled a bright, analytical student.
Lohan said Santos has joined other Little Flower graduates who’ve reached national heights, citing Santos alongside former mayor and housing secretary Henry Cisneros and political activist Rosie Castro, mother of Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro and U.S. Congressman Joaquin Castro.
In an interview with the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Santos spoke of being an adventurous latchkey kid who learned to fish at Woodlawn Lake using his mother’s tortilla masa for bait.
Wearing his long hair pulled back in a ponytail, he laughed about summers in which “we literally vanished from the face of the Earth,” getting home in time for supper.
Santos described himself as a person who may not have been upfront until recently, choosing instead “to be the person that provides the best sound counsel and makes sure that things get done right.”
A passion for mathematics might have been “built into the genes,” noting his father, Raul, an aircraft tool maker who loved math and trigonometry but didn’t get past junior high.
Rob Santos has reached heights his father might have never imagined for him. He would have been proud of a statistician with a social justice heart, one who has translated numbers off the page to people on the ground.
He has been involved in research on Social Security beneficiaries; drug abuse; housing discrimination; mental health; the impact of federal raids on undocumented immigrants; and survivors of the World Trade Center collapse.
His primo hermano John Philip is proud that Santos answered the census by checking off “Hispanic” but writing-in “Mestizo” in the race category, to emphasize it should be part of census’ nomenclature.
He couldn’t help but laugh about the memory of an ill-tempered pony that Rob Santos rode bareback into the sticks. He came back 40 minutes later, on foot, smiling.