Juana Bordas

Scarpino:         As I said when the recordings were off, I’m going to start by reading a statement and then we’ll talk.  Today is Friday, October 25, 2019.   My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI); and Director of Oral History for the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence also at IUPUI.   I’m interviewing Juana Bordas in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.  We’re both attending the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association (ILA).  This interview is a joint venture undertaken by the Tobias Center and the ILA.  We’ll include a more detailed biographical information with the transcript of this interview, but for now I’ll provide an abbreviated overview of Juana Bordas’ career. 

She was born in Nicaragua.  At a young age she moved to Miami, Florida, with her family.  She and her mother and her siblings made that journey on a banana boat.  She was the first in her family to attend college.  She earned her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Florida, Gainesville, in 1964, with an emphasis on the social sciences; Political Science, Sociology and Psychology.  She completed a Master’s of Science in Social Work with a specialty in Group Dynamics and Community Organizing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968.  She holds an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, Ohio, awarded in October 2009.  Following graduation from the University of Florida, Gainesville, she spent 1964 to 1966 as a Peace Corps volunteer in Santiago, Chile.  Juana Bordas moved to Denver in 1971, where she has a long history of involvement in civil rights and economic self-help and leadership, largely directed toward the Hispanic community, especially women.  Some of the highlights include: A co-founder of Mi Casa Resource Center for women in 1976, where she served as executive director for about 10 years; co-founded the National Hispanic Leadership Institute in 1987, which helped prepare Latinas for national level leadership.  She was president of the Institute for about seven years; the first Latina faculty member of the Senate for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, North Carolina; the first Hispanic certified psychiatric social worker in Colorado; in 1993, she introduced the Latino Leadership Development Program; in 1995, she established the consulting firm Mestiza Leadership International, which provides diversity training and leadership programs in the workforce; in 2002, she debuted the Circle of Latina Leadership, runs a nine-month community leadership development course and mentoring program for women ages 25 to 40. 

Juana Bordas is a motivational speaker and the author of numerous publications, including two books: The Power of Latino Leadership: Culture, Inclusion, and Contribution, 2013; and Salsa, Soul and Spirit: Leadership in a Multicultural Age, 2007.  Also, a large body of articles, self-published books, and editorials dealing in Hispanic and multicultural leadership, women and civil rights. 

Juana Bordas is the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions for her work, for example, Nautilus Book Awards recognized the The Power of Latino Leadership with the prestigious Gold Award in the area of Multicultural/Indigenous literature.  The recognition that brings us here today is the Lifetime Leadership Legacy Award given by the International Leadership Association at its annual meeting in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, in October 2019. 

I want to ask your permission to record this interview, to transcribe the interview, and to deposit the transcription and the recording in the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives, also with the Tobias Center, and with the International Leadership Association, where they may allow patrons to use those, and where all or part of them may be posted to the internet.

Bordas:           Yes, please do that. 

Scarpino:         Alright.  Ad as I said, I’m going to start with some bigger picture...

Bordas:           I wanted to make a couple of corrections on the bio. 

Scarpino:         Sure.  Let’s do it.

Bordas:           For Mi Case, I’m not a co-founder, I am a founder with a group of seven women, and then I was the one who took the helm of running the organization.  And then I’m actually the founding president and CEO of The National Hispanic Leadership Institute.  And, then, four years ago, with a group of leadership programs, I launched an organization called Lideramos, The National Latino Leadership Alliance, and have been working with that to enhance and initiate Latino leadership programs across the country.  So my current work is trying to take leadership down into the community and really create -- our vision is a nation of Latino leaders, to have enough leaders since we’re a community of 57 million and are just beginning to get our feet wet with leadership development, to be able to provide those services to communities across America.        

Scarpino:         And I will look forward to talking with you about all those things, and thank you.  I will also point out for anybody who uses this that the Tobias Center has some standard leadership questions that I will sprinkle into the interview just so there’s continuity with all the interviews that I do over time.  Let’s start with the big picture here, and the big question: How do you define leadership?

Bordas:           So I have one more correction.  My family landed in Tampa, Florida, the Banana Port, not Miami. 

Scarpino:         But you moved to Miami...

Bordas:           Never.

Scarpino:         Never?

Bordas:           No, I stayed in Tampa and then went to the University of Florida.   

Scarpino:         Ok, I’m sorry.

Bordas:           There are a lot of Latinos in Miami, though, Hispanics particularly (laughs).

Scarpino:         I’ve been there.

Bordas:           I love the place, it’s sort of the portal to the Caribbean. 

Scarpino:         Ok.

Bordas:           So, how do I define leadership, that’s a beautiful question.  I would say, for me, that leadership is bringing people together.  Sometimes it is a naturally formed group, and other times you become an initiator to help people come together around a specific issue or need that they want to address.  Part of that is based on Robert Greenleaf’s work in The Servant Leader, who said that you always have to address people’s highest priority needs.  So, to me, leadership is not about me and what I want to accomplish necessarily, it is about bringing people together, assessing what their highest priority needs are or what is it they want to accomplish and do, and then providing skills and probably a climate, an environment, where they can begin to work together and to address the issues that really impact their lives.  So, to me, leadership is identifying people’s highest priority needs, bringing people together, giving them the tools they need to work effectively to address an issue or concern they care about, and then achieving those goals collectively. 

Scarpino:         How do you identify people’s needs and priorities?

Bordas:           Well, they have to -- actually you become kind of a convener, I guess you might call it.  You might be the initiator.  You might be the person that has the network to be able to do this.  For example, with Lideramos, I have worked with eight of the top Latino leadership programs together, so we got a small grant from Miller/Coors and they said, “What do you want to do with it?”  And I said, “Bring these programs together and find out what’s the next step in Latino leadership.”  You as a leader, or I as a leader might have the vision that we need more leadership programs, but if you don’t have people at the table that, first of all, have that same vision and say yes we want to do this, you really can’t accomplish it alone anyway.  So I say that the way you figure out people’s highest priority needs is you bring people together around a common theme or a common issue and then you figure out what is it we want to do to address this.

Scarpino:         Is that a view of leadership that mostly applies to direct engagement with people, non-profits as opposed to, say, the police or fire departments or the military?

Bordas:           Yeah, actually the kind of leadership that I am talking about is both community leadership, social activism leadership, social change leadership, it’s about leadership at the community and at the people level, if you want to call it that, where people come together.  I really believe that civic engagement and people getting involved in their own lives and helping to shape the society that they live in, that that really is leadership, that people have a stake in how the society is structured and how things are accomplished. 

Scarpino:         Is it hard to persuade people that they really have a stake?

Bordas:           I think that’s the gift of leadership of the leader.  You know, I’ll tell you a little story.  My mother had a fifth-grade education, she was an immigrant.  She went to the priest and said, “I can cook, I can clean, I can take care of children,” and then she closed the deal by saying, “I came here to educate my children so my children could have a better life.”  But my mother worked six days a week at manual labor.  So, when people say to me, “Was your mother a leader?”  My mother was a great leader.  I mean, I’m educated because of her.  She’s got grandchildren that have PhD’s in chemistry and so forth and so on.  But her leadership project was me.  I am her leadership project, you see what I mean? Her leadership project was to prepare her children to become leaders, if you want to call it that, to become people who contribute at a higher level, right? So she loved children and she loved her family.  I love humanity, it’s a bigger scope.  But I’m actually doing the same thing my mother did, and that is serving the next generation, helping other people to move forward.  And I think, first of all, to have that kind of vision, that I’m here to serve the people that are going to follow or are going to work with me, I think that’s very powerful because you don’t have a self-interest in that way that a lot of leaders in the past have had.  So you’re really focusing on them.  And then, second of all, to give them that hope and aspiration that, yes, we can accomplish it.  In the Latino community we say si se puede, which is yes we can.

Scarpino:         And I’m going to talk to you about that in a minute.

Bordas:           Yes we can, right?  And so to give them that, so, yes, you’re a motivator and you’re an initiator, but it’s always based on getting people to buy in, or to say yes we can do this together.  So I think that’s the art of a leader, is being able to help people get motivated.  I think that’s why leadership development is so important as well, because if you can give people the idea of how do we accomplish this, what do we need to do, what are some examples, what are some leaders who have come before us who have done it, then I think that inspires people, but I do think that’s the role of a leader, to initiate, inspire and convene. 

Scarpino:         Do you believe that leadership is sometimes situational, that leaders arise in certain circumstances depending on the context they find themselves in?

Bordas:           Well, there is a whole field called Situational Leadership, as you know, and that has to do with whether you’re a hands-on leader or whether you bring people and pretty much delegate.  And I think that’s a very useful model to have.  And, yes, I do think that leadership change is based on the climate and the situation.  For example, I’ve started organizations.  When we started Mi Casa, we did a community survey, we went door-to-door to ask people what is it you want, right? We did focus groups, that’s what they call them now.  We actually had cafecito, and we asked the women, what is it we can do? So there were just seven...

Scarpino:         Cafecito means what?

Bordas:           Coffee.

Scarpino:         Alright, I mean I know that, but the recorder doesn’t.

Bordas:           Yeah, you have a little coffee, right?

Scarpino:         I’m thinking about the people who might use this in the future.

Bordas:           And we went to daycare centers and talked to the mothers.  So you want to get that kind of input.  But to start an organization, you have to be a social entrepreneur. 

Scarpino:         Yes.

Bordas:           That’s a different kind of leadership style.  Now, if you only use the social entrepreneur, you’re not going to get people to follow you, because you’re saying we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that, we need the money, we need a plan, we need more board members.  So you’re kind of, you’re kind of steering the ship because that situation requires some hands-on leadership in order to get the organization to a place where you now have a team, you can afford that team, you’ve got some resources.  So yeah, I think it absolutely changes.  I think we’re living today at a time when we’re going through a lot of changes politically and so forth, and we need a spectrum of leadership, and that some of it does have to be hands-on.   

Scarpino:         Do you think that we’re living in a time that’s unique or different from what we’ve passed through before that requires a different kind of leadership?

Bordas:           I see history as somewhat cyclical, but each time it goes around it’s a spiral, you’re at a little bit of a different place.  But I do think we’re kind of in the same dynamic that we were during the early Civil Rights Movement, a time when it’s very essential to mobilize people, a time when there’s a lot of conflict in the sense of people misunderstanding each other and there needs to be a lot of education.  You know in the ‘60s we had these things called teach-ins.

Scarpino:         I remember that. 

Bordas:           Yes, where you would go in and you would learn and you would address the issues and hear speakers and so forth.  So we’re in a period where we need to educate people.  And the thing is, there’s so much complexity now, and we have the news 24 hours a day and it’s coming from all over.  And, so, you know, studies actually show that people are angry, that people are confused, that people feel disempowered.  So I do think that we’re kind of in a place in history again where we have to mobilize the American people.  We have to educate them.  We have to show them the benefits.  We have to have them believe that they can do something about the electoral college or about the fact that the elections are somewhat stolen in these times.  And, so, yeah, I think we’re in a very crucial part in history where we have to increase civic engagement.  And one of the reasons I think this happened was that when Obama got elected after all the work in civil rights, which you know I started in ’63 so it’s over 50 years, a lot of us thought that we had achieved something, only to figure out that, no, we had not achieved something, it was just another step in the journey.  And I think people took a step back, and that that has made it very difficult for us to continue the progress that we made in the last 50 years. 

Scarpino:         How do we get people to be increasingly engaged in the civic arena?

Bordas:           Well, first of all, I think it’s a life’s work.  I mean, I think most of the people that have been very successful at it come from a place of, you know, this is what I want to contribute, this is what I want to do.  And, so, most of the leaders in communities of color, they don’t see it as a position, they see it as a lifelong commitment or a calling, your destiny, whatever you want to call that, this is what I was born to do.  And if you read about any of the great leaders, they have that sense of this is my life’s work.  Your question was about how do you get people engaged?

Scarpino:         Yeah.

Bordas:           I would have to look at my own life, and I’ve been committed to building organizations that can provide the structure for people to continue to be engaged, because it’s hard to do unless you have that and because communities of color have not had organizations.  Latinos were only declared a minority in 1977, so even the whole concept is very young.  I believe that our organizations help people stay engaged, plus they provide a legacy so that when one group moves on or a new generation comes, there’s a structure by which they can continue to be engaged.  But the truth of the matter is one of our oldest organizations, which was called the National Council of La Raza, it’s only 50 years old.  And that’s not a long time for a community to be moving forward.  But organizations help keep -- they provide the structure, the history, the resources for people to keep being engaged in.  They can also grow constituents and they can form coalitions, so working with other groups in order to make sure that people continue to be engaged. 

Scarpino:         Do you think that leadership is a cultural construction?

Bordas:           I think leadership has cultural overlays, yes, I do.  And I don’t think we can talk about this without looking at the last 500 years, because it’s been Eurocentric, it’s been male dominated, and it’s been hierarchical. 

Scarpino:         That’s where I want to go with this this, so tell me about that. 

Bordas:           Yes, so, I mean leadership started to change.  It was based on the military model, right?  It was based on the industrial revolution, that’s when it started, because before that if you look at indigenous leadership, leadership was a tribal kind of thing where it was, they used the circle instead of the triangle as a symbol of their leadership where everybody’s the same, everybody contributes, and leadership rotates.  Even though you might have a chief, what the chief’s job is, is to make sure that everybody’s there, that everybody stays engaged, that everybody’s listened to, that he states or she states the problem because we do have some female leaders in that, but people get an opportunity to engage.  So when leadership became hierarchical based on the industrial society, based on the military, we had leadership by the few and leadership by hierarchy and leadership by position, and leadership by heritage.  You know, the kings were heritage.  And so this only began to shift, believe it or not, when James MacGregor Burns wrote Transactional Leadership, when Robert Greenleaf wrote The Servant as Leader, they switched the paradigm.  Because, Robert Greenleaf said the leader is the servant, the one that helps people achieve what they want to achieve.  And James MacGregor Burns said leadership is about creating the right society, you have to transform the society, you have to transform yourself.  So they began to write about leadership in a whole different way.  Now, Robert Greenleaf took a very indigenous form of leadership and brought it into a modern context.  Indigenous leadership is servant leadership, that’s what the chief and even the warrior, the warrior is there to protect the people. 

Scarpino:         Did he make that connection himself?

Bordas:           He did not. 

Scarpino:         I mean I don’t remember reading it/

Bordas:           No, but if you read, and this is interesting to me because it’s very rarely quoted, but at the end of his pamphlet, which is another reason I think it’s so, and I tell people these are two white males – one coming out of the universities, one coming out of, he came out of AT&T, Robert Greenleaf, and it was the largest corporation on the face of the earth at the time.  And he said, “I don’t want to be vice president, I want to stay as director of training because I want to be closer to the ground, closer to people.”  And then he left and he said, “That was not leadership.”  And that’s what inspired him to write The Servant as Leader, and I do believe it’s inspired work.  At the end of that pamphlet, he said, “It may be time now for the privileged…” – and he might even use the word ‘white’, I don’t remember that – “…to step aside, and to assist people of color…” -- he didn’t call them people of color because that’s not what you call people – “…to become the leaders of the new society.”  He actually said that.  And if you read his work, that’s where he finishes his thought.  His thought is that people of privilege and people that had been raised in that kind of leadership now had a responsibility to train other people to become leaders as well. 

Scarpino:         How do you think we’ve done on that score?

Bordas:           It depends where you look, I guess you might say. 

Scarpino:         Where do you look?

Bordas:           I’m very fortunate because I have worked with communities of color for so long.  I was just in a class at the University of San Diego where the diversity in the class studying leadership was absolutely amazing.  There were several that they were the first to go to college, just like I was in my family, so I think we’ve had this incredible paradigm shift.  When I went to the University of Florida, I never met a Latina.  And when I was a junior in 1963, I marched to integrate the University of Florida.  There were no blacks on campus, no African-Americans on campus.  I was invited back five years ago to address the opening class, the freshman class that were Latinos.  It was a 1,500, and that year, they elected a Latina president of the student body.  So when you start looking at those kind of changes, the demographics in college now, Latinos are the fastest growing group going into – they go into junior college first.  So I see tremendous change in the number of people in communities of color that are now being prepared for leadership, particularly in the millennial generation.  So I think there’s this wave coming of educated, and millennials have a different sense of social responsibility, I think, than other generations.  They volunteer more, they’re more engaged in environmental issues and political issues.  Now if we can just get them to vote. (laughs)

Scarpino:         Then there’s that.  My students don’t vote (laughs).

Bordas:           Well, they have a systems problem that we need to talk to them about, because if you don’t, you know, politics really rules most of our public resources.  But it’s there, it’s there.  And because I’ve been able to see the growth in our communities, both in the African-American community and their consolidation of power and influence, and now with the Latino community, it’s more bottoms up.  It’s happening at a community level, not so much the national level.  But we are on the move, and there’s a certain excitement about what we can do if we keep educating our youth and keep working together and bringing people together.  And most of the work that communities of color do is all around housing, education, immigration.  I mean it’s a very issue-oriented leadership style because we need to bring our people into parody and into inclusion. 

Scarpino:         If leadership is at least in part a cultural construction, are there some qualities of effective leadership that vary from culture to culture? You’ve got a foot in at least two cultures.

Bordas:           Three actually, indigenous or Indian.  Yes, that’s mainly what my work has been about.  Many, many years ago when the International Leadership Association hadn’t started yet, the Kellogg Foundation had a group called the Kellogg Scholars, and I was invited to be part of that as a practitioner.  So, in the leadership field they really have, in the past, separated practice from theory and research, right? I think that’s coming together more now, but I was actually brought in as a practitioner because I do leadership.  So, when I worked at the Center for Creative Leadership they were never very happy but I used to say, “I don’t teach leadership, I am a leader.”  And there’s a difference: You can become a scholar and never run an organization, never had a community meeting you had to put together.  You can become a scholar and not have that kind of practical experience on how do you organize people. 

Scarpino:        Does the field need those scholars?

Bordas:           Well, they say that scholarship serves practice, and practice informs scholarship. 

Scarpino:         Do you think it does in this field?

Bordas:           I think we’re getting there.  I think in the past there’s been a real division between scholarship and practice.  And that isn’t a healthy way to do leadership.  It should be combined, both of them learning from each other.  In communities of color, when I was part of this scholarship group, they would talk about the fact that in America people have lost a sense of community.  And I would say that’s not true.  I think the Anglo community doesn’t have that sense of community.  I think they don’t have that identity of where did I come from.  They can even say I’m a Heinz 57 or whatever, but that’s not true in our communities.  In our communities, I come from an intact community.  Whether I’m here, or whether I’m in Florida, or whether I’m in Chicago, or whether I’m in New York, I can go to Hispanic events and I know people there, or know of people, or they welcome me, we have that sense of connectedness.  That’s true in black communities, indigenous communities and in some Asian communities.  We have that sense of connection that we belong to a group that’s very strong.  The other thing is, when you talk about leadership, that whole idea of team and collaborative leadership, and this big change we were making from hierarchical to participatory and democratic leadership, well that’s the kind of leadership that I had in my community, where people had to contribute.  Everyone needs to do something to help the family.  Everyone needs to do something to be involved in your community or your church.  And for my family a lot of it was around the church. 

Scarpino:         Catholic Church.

Bordas:           Yes, Catholic Church.  But we do have that sense of teamwork and working together or we wouldn’t have gotten here.  

Scarpino:         I’m going to insert myself in here  and ask you a question, because I was raised Catholic.  The Catholic Church does not strike me as an institution that’s collaborative and participatory, and particularly with women.  Is there any cultural tension there in the community where a large percentage are Roman Catholics and yet you’re in a sense preaching the gospel of cooperation and...

Bordas:           Yeah, I know, and I’m glad you clarified that, because now that I’m in my 70s, I do not belong to the Catholic Church because... 

Scarpino:         Nor do I, by the way.

Bordas:           Father Marshall said to me, well Juana when are you coming back? I said, you know give me a call when you ordain women and I’ll think about it, right? So, no, what I’m saying is that my mother, for example, sewed the bluebird costumes for our first-grade play.  My mother would make cookies and bring stuff.  I mean, in other words, it was more around the school because I went to Catholic school.  It was more around the school and doing things to make our class and the things we were doing better whether it was -- she actually would take care of kids whose parents weren’t around.  My mother really contributed in her way.  So that’s where she kind of built her life.  And she used to do the church nursery on Sundays while people went to mass.  So she was making a contribution around that institution, because it was the only institution she related to really, the church and the school.

Scarpino:         In a different life I lived in San Marcos, Texas, which is between Austin and San Antonio...

Bordas:           Of course, yeah.

Scarpino:         …and I went to St. John’s in San Marcos.  And one of the things you immediately notice is that there are almost no men there, because the population that went to mass there was about 80 percent Hispanic, and heavily women.  There was me and a few other people.  I was thinking about that when I did my background work to get ready for this interview today, that somehow there seems to be a tension between Catholicism and the kind of leadership that you preach.  And the fact that the men weren’t at mass indicates they were not participating... 

Bordas:           Right...

Scarpino:         ...  at least in that part of the community endeavor.  So, how do you make those things fit together as you work with people?

Bordas:           I do want to say one other thing about the church, though, that my mother was engaged in, and that was like whether it was Thanksgiving baskets or -- it’s very interesting to me because I have a quote in one of my books by a Hispanic immigrant who said to his mother, “Why are you always putting in cans and fixing the food bag and everything else when we really don’t have that much?” And so there was that sense of giving, and part of that was reinforced by the church and the school that we went to.  But you have to remember this was the ’40s and ‘50s, and things have changed.  Today I think, especially for Latinos -- and you have to understand that the Catholic Church was imposed on indigenous people in this hemisphere.  It wasn’t their original religion.  And one of the ways that happened, that integration happened, was because of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and also because the Catholic Church, even though it’s Virgin Mary which I don’t believe in either, but they do have the female deity.  Protestants don’t have that.  So the indigenous culture had the Earth Mother and the sky or some god which was Father, Son and Mother Earth, and so there was sort of a connection there, but it was imposed on them.  The Spanish came over here to colonize, but also to quote unquote ‘save the souls of the indigenous people.’ So it’s more, I think, about history than actual some spiritual connection.  It was more that this religion was imposed on them.  And if you go to the Catholic Church in Central and South America, it’s very ritualistic, it’s very different.  It has that integration of -- because indigenous people actually practiced their religion through ceremony, and the Catholic Church has a lot of ceremony, and it has the incense and the candles and all that stuff.  So there was a connection between the indigenous people and the Spanish people.  I don’t think that serves Latinos anymore, and I work with groups where I ask them about their spiritual tradition.  And many Latinos go to the Catholic Church but they don’t believe in it in the way their grandparents did. 

Scarpino:         I’m going to come back to talk to you about spirituality in a bit.  But, again when you’re talking about leadership as a cultural construction, are there qualities of leadership that bridge cultural divides that are constant from one culture to another?

Bordas:           (Pause) Well, you asked me about some particular principles, I don’t if we’ll get back to this, but I’m going to point out a principle I think that is very different in communities of color than in Anglo culture.  One of the principles that I learned from Dr.  Jim Joseph, who is a renowned scholar in the African-American community, we talked a lot about public values and ethics.  And public values are the values we hold dear, such as justice, equality, pluralism, the common good.  When you look at the values we have espoused as a nation, those are public values.  So public participation, for example, having not only accessibility to the ballot box but making sure that our elections are fair and that people have access.  In some countries it’s a national holiday so you don’t have to struggle if you’re poor and don’t have child care or you have to work late... 

Scarpino:         And they vote on the weekend...

Bordas:           ...  and they vote on the weekend, and it’s powerful.  So one of the things that communities of color are very concerned with are not individual values in the sense of, you know, who you are going to marry or who do you love or -- I know the Catholic Church is on abortion issues, and so sometimes Hispanics are there on that one.  But what about the public values, which is inclusion, pluralism, which is community, which is the common good?  And you can’t have the common good when you have the kind of separation of wealth that we have in this country today.  You can’t have that if 47 percent of Americans make under $15 an hour.  So leadership in communities of color is concerned about the public good, about our public values.  So that’s a principle in my book, Salsa, Soul and Spirit,” that as a leader you are a guardian of the public values that your society or your community or our democracy is based on.  And so that lens that was very well articulated during Civil Rights is one of the distinctions in our leadership.  So when you look at leadership across cultures, I would say that there’s nuances in each culture depending on their situation.  Some of it is historical and some of it comes out of their cultural background.  But the idea that you have certain people that help the community move forward, or certain people that are in charge, or certain people that take a, quote ‘leadership role,’ I think that has been true in communities regardless of culture.

Scarpino:         You teach leadership and you’re involved in community engagement.  How do you persuade people who you’re encouraging to become involved in their communities that they don’t have to be you to do it?  I mean, you have a very dynamic personality.  You walk in the room and you fill up the room, most people aren’t like that, so how do you persuade people that they can do it?

Bordas:           Ok, let me think about this.  I hate to pause because I know we’re interviewing, but...  (pause)...  So, when I ran the Circle of Latina Leadership program in Denver, we had 165 graduates over the 10 years.  We tried to get other organizations to continue, it but it didn’t continue.  I thought to myself, you know, I think that’s okay because if you have 165 young Latinas who have been through a nine-month program, who have done community action projects, which is real important that they actually apply their leadership skill they’re learning, they work in teams to do that.  And some of our projects were absolutely amazing.  And the same thing with the Hispana Institute, they had to do a project and some of those are now national organizations.  So I think what you do with people is you provide not only the skills and then the collaboration, because leadership is a collaborative process, but you also give them an opportunity to flex their leadership muscles and to do something that identifies them as a leader.  The other thing I learned is that a lot of leadership programs just keep going and going and going.  Like, I was in Leadership Denver in 1984 and they graduate like 60 people every year and I say that’s bullshit, you know what I mean? You’re not going to have that many leaders.  And so many times when you have a group of 24, say, or a group of 30, out of that 20 or 30 you’re going to have maybe five or six outstanding leaders.  You need all 25 and 30, you see what I mean? So leadership, yeah, I’m a front person for leadership.  That’s why I was born, to be like a front person to motivate things.  People call me the Energizer Bunny and stuff, because that’s my role.

Scarpino:         I can see that.

Bordas:           But I can’t do that by myself.  I’m just one of many, because that’s one of our principles of leadership, leadership by the many.  Leadership by all of us.  Leadership by the collective.  And people recognize my role, they might even ask me to speak because they know I can do that, but then I have to take a step back, and when I’m working in community, I could just be one of the leaders equal.  I’m just one of the leaders in the group. 

Scarpino:         Do you think that a mark of an effective leader in a community situation is knowing when to let go?

Bordas:           Yes, I do.  But I was just going to go back to the leaders equal, because those two principles stand side-by-side.  The leader is equal means that a leader can never think that they’re more than anyone else.  You have to have that sense of humility.  Remember, in communities of color they say never forget where you came from. In communities of color, so if -- I find this part really interesting: People don’t respect you because you have a bunch of money, never have.  People respect you because of what you’ve contributed to your community.  People respect you because you’ve done for others.  People respect you because you’re willing to lend a helping hand.  I remember when I went to the Connecticut conference and they were stuffing the bags the night before, and I was down there stuffing bags with them, and the head of the conference came up and she says, “I’ve never met anybody like you.  Most of our other speakers are divas.” I’m not a diva, and I never will be, and I don’t even, you know -- if our leaders think that they’re better than someone else, they have fallen from grace. 

Scarpino:         That’s true.

Bordas:           And I’m very proud that all of the leaders that I’ve interviewed for my book, the blacks, the Indians, the Latinos, none of them have fallen from grace because they know who they are and they know what their role is.  And their role is not to say, “I’m the leader, I’m better than anyone else,” it’s “It’s my turn to lead because I’ve been given certain gifts and the opportunity, and maybe I even have the time to do it now.”  But you’re always supposed to stay as the leader is equal, and you’re always supposed to recognize the fact that every single person has something to contribute to leadership.  Whether it was my mother cooking food for the class or sewing costumes, she had those skills, she could cook and she could sew.

Scarpino:         She inspired you. 

Bordas:           She was a leader. 

Scarpino:         Your mother inspired you. 

Bordas:           Oh, she totally inspired me.

Scarpino:         In the United States, is there an understanding or style of leadership among Hispanics that is different from what we would call the traditional model of leadership, the Anglo-American model of leadership?

Bordas:           Yes, but will you repeat the question before that, because I don’t think we actually ... 

Scarpino:         I asked you if there were qualities of effective leadership that were constant across cultures. 

Bordas:           Yeah, well we talked about that.

Scarpino:         And I don’t mean just, you know, Spanish speaking and Anglo-American, but India, and China, France.

Bordas:           Right.  Well, I begin most of my work with history.  Both of my books begin with history because if you don’t understand history, you don’t understand where leadership is today. 

Scarpino:         I agree with that.

Bordas:           Right.  So, for Latinos for example, we start with, if you look at the conquest and Spain, they imposed a certain kind of leadership style which still exists in South America today.  So you had two styles of leadership: You have the galrio (spelling???), the guy that was the head, and you had the old indigenous form that was a little bit different in that more people were engaged in the leadership process, it wasn’t so top down.  I think you have to understand history to understand where Latino leadership is.  The first thing to understand is that in the United States, a third of the United States was Mexico, and that does not include Florida or the San Juan Islands or Oregon.  I mean the Spanish were here a hundred years before the Ango settlers came, and so they had a very heavy footprint.  And the way Latinos were born was through the mixture or it was rape of Indian women, so we are a mix of Spanish and Indian, of the Old World and the New, of the European and the indigenous.  I mean we’re a mixed people and we actually have an identity around being mixed.  I believe that Latinos are the prototype for the multicultural age, because like I’m Spanish, French and Indian.  So I’m already a mixed person and then I learned the Anglo culture very well.  I went through 12 years of education and then six years in the universities and so forth, so I have that culture too.  So I’m a multicultural person.  And most Latinos are, they come from different cultural perspectives.  When you look at our leadership, it’s also still a bit mixed with that.  We admire the charismatic leader, which I would consider myself one of those.  But at the same time, we don’t want the Galrio (spelling??) or the person that’s in charge.  We want our charismatic leader to be an inspirer or a motivator, but then understand that you have to cultivate...  (cell phone rings) I had this off, that’s why I don’t understand.  Oh, I turned it on to call you, see... 

Scarpino:         (Laughs) Oh, those things happen.  I can’t tell you how many recordings I have with cell phones ringing on them. 

Bordas:           Well, let me see if I can turn it off.  What I was saying was that you can’t understand Latino leadership unless you understand our history.  So after the Mexican-American War where we gained a third, Mexico lost half its territory, we’re still having problems on the border.  We’re still having, that’s the frontera, frontera where -- you lived in Texas so you know, it is not Connecticut.  It is not northern United States. 

Scarpino:         I also lived in El Paso in a different life, too.

Bordas:           Yeah, so it’s a mixed culture. 

Scarpino:         Yeah. 

Bordas:           And that’s actually the future.  I mean when you look at one out of five people today in the world are refugees, and I think it’s one out of five Americans move every year.  We don’t stay in the communities that we were born in, so there’s going to be more and more mixture as we go forward.  This is the multicultural age.  This is the age of cultures of coming together.  Millennials actually believe, like 80 percent of them, that you should marry out of your culture, and you should have multicultural experiences.  And I believe it’s the next step in human evolution.  The next step in our evolution as a human race is to really look at the beauty of all the different cultures and races and nationalities to find the best of the best in all of them, and to bring that forward into the new age.  So, Latinos, when you look at our history in this country, our first organization was founded in 1922 and it was LOLAC, The League of Latin American Citizens, which is interesting because now we’re back to Latin American connection, and that was back in 1922.  And it was to protect laborers.  It was like a labor union, a sindicato is what we call them.  It’s still around and it protects the rights of people, it’s a social justice/civil rights organization.  And the second organization that was founded was right after World War II, and it was the GI Forum, and that was founded so that -- because when Latino or Hispanic veterans came back from World War II, they couldn’t be buried in Arlington with Anglo soldiers.  And so this second organization, which also still exists today, was to bring equity and respect to Latino fallen soldiers.  In Vietnam, we had a third more Latinos dying then were in the population.  So we’ve always, I like to say we’re Aztecs (laughs).  That’s a joke.  But anyway, so our history of leadership is about civil rights, about protecting people.  The first lawsuit that was ever filed by a Latino was called, a separate class I think it’s called, but it was around the fact that Latinos couldn’t go to the same schools in Texas, and the Texans said, “Well you’re not black so we’re not discriminating against you.” And the Supreme Court ruled we were a class apart.  But the interesting thing about it is that Latinos raised the money to send Hernandez to the Supreme Court by selling burritos, by having your grandmother give a dollar, a peso or two.  We raised the money collectively, and that’s still our model of leadership. 

Scarpino:         Hernandez is the one who argued before the court.

Bordas:           Yes.  And here we were, you know, we pool our resources together, we protect the rights of others, and we build organizations, both the GI Forum and LOLAC are coalitions.  They have chapters across the country, and they work with other organizations in order to promote equity and inclusion for Latinos.  But the important thing in this is that our vision, Latino vision, is not just about Latinos, it’s about protecting the rights of all workers, or protecting the rights of all veterans.  So it’s a more inclusive vision than just what’s good for Latinos themselves. 

Scarpino:         If leadership is a culture of construction, and there are differences among cultures in the way people understand and practice leadership, what does that say about what leadership training should look like?

Bordas:           Well, the interesting thing to me is that, you know, like I like to say to the Anglo community, “Thank you for what I’ve learned.” I learned organizational charts and budgets and all kinds of ways of leading that were outside of my cultural context, which I think one of my jobs is to learn as much as I can, and to translate it so it can be used by my community.  I forgot the question, I’m sorry.

Scarpino:         I said if leadership is a cultural construction, and there are differences, then what does that say about leadership training in the modern era?  What should they be doing at Jepson?

Bordas:           Well, here’s the thing, and I do think it’s changing.  I just went to a great thing from the University of San Diego, where their Hispanic students were doing some work.  It is changing, I want to acknowledge that.  But I think in the past it’s been very Eurocentric and very male dominated.  Even if you look up the top 10 books today on the New York best sellers, it’s going to be eight men, eight white men.  Here's what I want to say.  I’ve learned white male leadership.  I’ve been to your universities.  I’ve studied, and it has made me stronger, more powerful, wiser and more able to lead my own people.  But it should be both ways.  Because if white leaders do not think that people of color who have motivated people without paying them, who have asked them to do things that they may not see resulted in their lifetime -- I will not see my work in multicultural leadership come to fruition in my lifetime, but I want to continue working on it.  Women will have had the vote 100 years next year.  So social change, the kind of change we’re talking about that communities of color are committed to is a long-term process where people have to commit, not based on self-interest, but based on what is good for los le mas, the rest of the people.  How is it good for the community? How is it good for future generations? And so Anglo leadership has so much to learn from the exquisite, dynamic and powerful collective ways that communities of color have led.  Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.           

Scarpino:         What should leadership training programs be like?

Bordas:           Leadership training programs should take a very close look at not just how Latino leadership principles show up, you know, how are they different.  But I think they need to take, also, a good look at the way we implement leadership at the community level.  One of the organizations I’ve worked closely with is the Latino Policy Forum in Chicago.  When they wanted to write the agenda for what they were going to focus on, they brought 450 people together to form this agenda.  They then have brought a hundred organizations in the state of Illinois together to work on this agenda.  They then have these acuerdos, which are called agreements.  So you and I agree our issue is daycare.  So, they have these daycare groups or immigration groups or education groups or housing groups that work on a particular issue together in order to change that issue for their state and for their city.  We have a very applied type of leadership that has -- I mean one of the reasons that we’re in a mess in this country is because leadership was not seen as we’ve got to get every single person in this democracy to vote.  That’s leadership.  We need to get everybody engaged civically because that’s our role as leaders, is to make sure that our society, back to public values, back to what kind of a society do we live in, back to is it okay that 47 percent of Americans make $15 an hour.  When you look at leadership in communities of color, it’s about changing the social dynamics to have an inclusive, to have an equitable, and to have a pluralistic society.  So I think teaching both is going to be very powerful.  So, yes, I think leadership education programs not only need to look at leadership in communities of color, but they need to look at how we’ve implemented this from the bottom up. 

Scarpino:         How do you think they’re doing on that score? And I realize that’s a generalization.          

Bordas:           Yeah, and I was going to say, I’m not sure.  One of the things that I’d like to do with this new organization LIderamos, The National Alliance of Latino Leadership, is to bring in a group of scholars.  Right now, they’re --  when we say Latino, it can mean anyone can join us, but we just want a Latino focus as well.  And we don’t want to give up majority rule (laugh), because we want to make sure that at last we have something that we started ourselves (laughs)...  but, anyway, to start bringing some of the students that are studying leadership to do their work in community and to study community groups.  And so I want to really sort of format this community scholars idea, where universities are looking at how can -- and I think some of them are doing that -- How can we advance this community.  Whether it’s analyzing and giving them research tools to figure out effective are we, whether it’s helping them do some more strategic planning, whether it’s helping them build partnerships with Anglo communities, what is it that needs to be done so that we can start building a more comprehensive leadership approach that has to do with helping real people and mobilizing our democracy? 

Scarpino:         You made it clear that you see a multicultural model of leadership as an important social goal, and I want to get this in one place.  If you could be, you know, in charge for a day, or a week, how do we get there?

Bordas:           The thing is, you have to, and that’s a very good question because you have to really look at something’s that’s very high level, right? I was thinking of, and this is going to be a little bit political, but I was watching the Democratic debates...

Scarpino:         You can be as political as you want, this is your opinion.

Bordas:           Yes, well, you know, and so, and because it’s time sensitive, but the Democratic candidates really were a picture of the new America in the sense that we have two black candidates, we have a Latino candidate, we have several women candidates, we have a gay candidate, we have a spectrum of leadership up there.  So I was thinking to myself, wouldn’t it be great that they would say, “We’re not going to have a Democratic debate here, what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about how we as a collective can provide new leadership for our society.”  And, so you have Governor Isley from Washington State, and he’s going to be the head of climate control and the environment, “How are we going to get that going?”  You have Bernie Sanders stepping up and saying, “I’m going to get the millennials and we’re going to start millennial leadership here.” You even have Marianne Williamson who was there, “I’m going to be a spiritual director for some of these folks.” And you have Elizabeth Warren say, “I’m going to be the planner, the strategic planner, because I’ve got to plan for that, right?” You have Mayor Pete stepping up and saying, “Okay, gay people, we’ve been doing really well, in fact this is the strongest social movement we’ve had.  How are we going to take this movement and help create a better America for everybody?”  So I see a different kind of leadership.  I don’t see one person standing up there, you have Julian Castro bringing up the immigration issue and saying, “Wait a minute, we’re a nation of immigrants and Latinos have built this country, right, whether it’s the streets or the roofs or the food, we cook it.” So, you know, if I could impose what is leadership, I would say, “Look, let’s bring diverse leaders together.  Let’s bring people with passions about certain things.” I mean, Cory Booker for example, is an incredible orator.  And he’s also a bottom-up person.  He knows how to fix cities on the way up.  So he would be great at helping us look at ‘how do you bring leadership to the local community and move it up, you know, like he’s done into national politics.  My vision of leadership is very different: it’s how do we take the talent, but it has to be diverse, it’s intergenerational.  We’ve got three seniors up there, including Joe Biden, and then we’ve got a millennial standing up there, and we have the great, what’s the name of the Asian guy that’s running?  He should be in charge of business.  He’s the one that’s run businesses that wants to give $1,000.  Why not make him head of entrepreneurship for our country, you see what I mean?  Even if you’re doing that on a micro level at a university, bring your diverse leaders together.  Bring different ages together.  Bring different perspectives together.  Bring different gender identities together.  Bring us all together and look at what our talents are, and then let’s move together as a collective.  That’s how I would envision leadership in the future, very diverse, and very shared, but respecting what each person brings to the table. 

Scarpino:         We’re at the meeting of the International Leadership Association.  And so with that in mind, if leadership is a cultural construction and there are differences among cultures over the ways in which people understand and practice leadership, what does that say about leadership training internationally? In other words, there are people here not just from the United States, but various nations around the world.  What do they take home with them that will influence leadership training in their own cultures?

Bordas:           I think one of the most important words for these times is complexity, and I think complexity is hard for people to deal with.  Another one is ambiguity.  So we’re living in an age that not only changes so rapidly that we can’t -- you have to be able to deal -- well, there was a book called Change Masters, so you have to be able to deal with change, complexity and ambiguity.  And so when I come to a conference like this one, I’m looking for things to put in my toolbox, I’m looking for things to expand my leadership abilities.  But I also think that one of the things you get from this is the idea that you can connect with people across cultures, across nationalities, and come up with a way of relating and learning from each other that respects differences, that says, I learn more when I learn something that’s not in my main -- where I take a risk where it’s not just the way I’ve always thought, but it’s new ways of thinking.  So when people come here, it’s almost like a smorgasbord, they get an opportunity to taste and touch and find out about different forms of leadership.  I was just listening to one, it’s from I think Korea, is that where Toyota is from, Korea?

Scarpino:         Japan.

Bordas:           Japan.  So we can learn so much about Toyota and Japanese leadership on how they get, who are very similar to communities of color, where they get their workers to believe that they own Toyota, and that’s part of what they do and that each specific thing that happens in the car assembly process, they can take ownership for.  I think we can learn from each other.  One of the things I’ve been promoting in my work now is, this year, African-Americans celebrated 100 years of having a black national anthem, which is called Lift Every Voice and Sing. It’s a beautiful thing that connects them, and it’s about looking at their past and realizing that they survived that, and now looking at how that has strengthened them for the future.  I’ve been trying to promote, or I am promoting De Colores, Of Many Colors, as the Hispanic national anthem.  And I’m going to spend this year coming up, because we need that.  We’re in the identity formation stages.  We were only declared a minority in 1977.  We come from 22 countries.  Forty percent of our growth is immigration.  We need to strengthen our identity.  But De Colores is not just about Latinos, it’s the way the world was created.  Many different colors of flowers.  All beautiful.  Some tall.  Some short.  Roses.  Daisies.  You know, we have, lilacs, I mean think about it.  Think about all the beautiful birds that we have.  Everything from the parrots to the blue birds to the toucans to the blackbirds.  And the same thing with the rainbow that is of many colors.  So this song says that love comes in many colors, and that’s why we love love, it’s because you can love across boundaries, you can love across color.  That’s my vision for the future.  I think when people come here, whether they’re coming from Japan, or Britain, or they’re from Canada, here, or they’re from South America, every flower, every bird, every person, every culture, every ethnic group, every race has something to contribute to humankind.  But we can only do that if we’re open to each other and we’re willing to learn from each other.  And every single culture has something to contribute to the betterment of humanity. 

Scarpino:         Maybe the trick is facilitating that openness and communication. 

Bordas:           Yes.  And, hopefully, because the millennial generation actually calls themselves the multicultural generation, this will be something that they will continue to contribute to, because they travel more, they’re more international, they have more of a connection to the earth as, you know, the earth does not have boundaries or, what do you call it, not boundaries...

Scarpino:         Borders?

Bordas:           Borders.  The world does not have borders when you look at it from the sky.  And the whole earth is being damaged today.  I think this new generation may have that sense of purpose.  And I’m not saying that all cultures are good.  There’s certain things in cultures that you don’t want to move forward.  But, again, back to history, that might be colonization, that might be male dominance, that might be hierarchy, we don’t know why it’s there.  But I do believe that every culture has something to contribute to the betterment of humanity. 

Scarpino:         In addition to being a cultural construction, do you think leadership is also, at least in part, a part of gender construction?

Bordas:           Yes, I do.  And the interesting thing to me is like, last night we went to the indigenous museum here in Canada, here in Ottawa, Canada, where we are, and you walked into the exhibit and the first thing they had was a woman there, and she was talking about the matriarchal culture.  I come from a matriarchal culture.  You’re looking at a matriarch here, meaning that my mother trained me to take charge and to take care of the issues in my life, and, greater than that, to contribute to the lives of others.  And I’ve studied how patriarchy came in, it’s not a pretty picture what happened.  I do think that women have a different way of leading.  In the past, when I worked strictly with women and women’s centers and women’s leadership, their style is much more collaborative, relationship oriented.  It is based on what’s best for the family, for the community.  Women built the churches, the schools, the non-profits.  So, there is a different sense in women’s leadership about your responsibility.  And I want to stress the word ‘responsibility,’ because in my community leadership is a responsibility, not a privilege.  And leadership is conferred on you.  People say you are a leader, therefore you are a leader.  You do not take it because you have a position or because you think you’re a leader.  It is given to you.  So that whole sense of how leaders function in the community, whether you’re a woman or whether you’re a person of color, is very different, but there’s a lot of similarities in the two and I would say probably it has to do with the fact that indigenous cultures were matriarchal. 

Scarpino:         I’m going to ask you a question that I’ve kind of asked you before, I’m just going to swap out some words:  If leadership is a part of gendered construction, and if women and men, as you just pointed out, have somewhat different understandings and practices of leadership, what does that say about what leadership training should look like in an increasingly multicultural society?

Bordas:           Well, you know I have to say that we’re talking in generalities, so of course it’s very different.  And today, with gender fluidity, it’s very different as well.  And I’m going to take an example from that.  I had someone who is a they come to help me with my computer stuff.  And I said to her, I said to they, “While you’re here, I want you to take a look at my car because I had two gentlemen, one who worked for IBM and one who was a computer person, look at my car and couldn’t figure out...” -- because I got a car with a computer because, you know what I’m talking about.

Scarpino:         It’s the world we live in.

Bordas:           Yes.  So, she goes out, or he/she goes out, and she fixes it.  She fixes it.  And I said, “Well, how come you could do this?” She said, “Well, because, I know technical skills like both of those men, but I read the instructions.” She said, “That’s the advantage of male and female.” You know like the old joke that men wouldn’t ask for directions.

Scarpino:         Right.

Bordas:           But the whole thing is, can you bring them both together?  The incredible thing about hierarchical leadership is that it’s needed in a crisis.  It’s need when you’re the expert and you’re the engineer and you’ve got to fix the bridge.  It’s needed when you need to lead troops for whatever reason, even though I’m a passivist.  Ok, so...  it’s not that it’s wrong, it’s in context.  It’s in the environment.  It’s based on the needs of the people that you’re serving.  And maybe at that point they need hands-on leadership, but you can’t keep that up or you are disempowering them. 

Scarpino:         Well, you did get away from the military if you’re leading a fire crew in Southern California, you’re probably not going to vote on ...

Bordas:           That’s another one.  Any kind of crisis, right, right.  The important part there is preparation.  Preparation, because right now we have a president who was not prepared for the job, meaning the internal preparation for leadership.  You know, Frances Hesselbein says leadership is how to be, not how to do it.  This, when you’re looking at leadership education, like I just did a class for the San Diego and I asked them the question, “What kind of an ancestor do you want to be?” let’s think about these deeper questions about why you’re being called to leadership.  Let’s think about these deeper reflections, what are my gifts to leadership? Let’s think about why do I want to be a leader? What inspires me to do this? You have to get into the intention.  American Indians believed your intention was the most important thing.  Why are you doing what you’re doing? What is your personal purpose? The first article I had published in Reflections on Leadership was called ‘Power and Passion: Finding Your Personal Purpose.’ So, if you get a leader who takes over and has not been prepared, you’ve got a problem, because they think leadership is about them.  They’re going to do leadership of what they think is right.  They think they might know more than other people.  They might think that people are supposed to do what they tell them to do.  But if you have leaders who have really been prepared and understand that this is something you’re doing as service to other people, that this is something you are doing because they have asked you to do it in a sense.  In most of my leadership positions, I have not applied for a job since 1977; I have been asked to do what I’m asked to do.  I might bring people together and say, “What do we do now?”  But it’s not me saying, “I know where we’re going and what we’re going to do,” even though I’m very comfortable being a social entrepreneur and getting things going.  Once people say, “This is what we want to do,” I say, “Okay, XYZ, we’re going to get this done and then we’ll continue.”  So, the preparation for leadership -- and I’m not sure that that’s something that universities and leadership programs do as much as they need to.

Scarpino:         That’s where I wanted to end up with this, so what do you think they should do?

Bordas:           Yeah.  I do think, you know, I didn’t take any assessment instruments about my style until I was in my 40s, kind of.  I think that was very enlightening to me.  For example, to know I’m a big picture person is fine, but to know that what I need beside me is someone who is very detail oriented, very structured, very buttoned-up and has Plan B.  Because I don’t have Plan B, right?  So, to understand how my leadership style is good in this particular situation, but in order to really be an effective leader, I need this.  Today, in order for me to be an effective leader, I need to be around millennials because otherwise I’m irrelevant.  I need to be around a younger generation.  I now know that -- like we just had a panel of young leaders, they talked about climate change, they talked about immigration and DACA because there’s an un-immigrated student, and they talked about LGBTQ rights.  That’s what’s important to that generation, and we have to respect that.  And so I know now that in order for me to be an effective leader, I need to have like a cadre or an understanding that, how do I balance out my leadership style?  When is my leadership style useful? And when is it getting in the way, actually, if I don’t step back and let the project take over itself, you know, with new leadership?  I do think that leadership training around the self is important.  Assessments are important.  Who am I?  What should I do with my life?  There’s a lot of work done on personal purpose and really figuring out who you are.  The other thing that’s important in that is that it’s an organic process.  As you serve, as you grow, as your leadership skills get stronger, you will be given greater impact and more things to do.  You don’t need to know what you’re going to do when you’re going to die, but you need to know where am I going and what is my legacy?  Stephen Covey asks you to think about the end in mind, to think about your funeral.  Those kinds of questions are so important, particularly for young people so they put leadership in the context of their life, and in the context of what were they born to do?  Because in communities of color, whether you’re talking about the black community that says you have a calling, or the Latino community that believes you have a destiny, a destino, or the indigenous community that believes that you were sent there to do something for the tribe, all of our leadership forms have to do with that the individual was, in a sense, brought here at a certain time in order to accomplish certain things for the benefit of their community and people.  Does that make sense as far as teaching?

Scarpino:         It absolutely does.

Bordas:           But it’s soft skills.

Scarpino:         When I was listening to you wrap that up and tie a bow in at the end, it doesn’t sound much like the leadership programs that I’m familiar with. 

Bordas:           Uh-huh.

Scarpino:         What I would ask you is, what should leadership training programs do to have the leaders that they are helping to produce turn out more like the people you just described?

Bordas:           Right.  Well, the leadership programs that I do have much more of a interpersonal -- see, you can learn leadership skills, I really believe that if you know why you’re here, what your skills are, what you want to do, what your passion is.  I call it your destino backpack, your backpack that you were given to do.  And so you can teach people, I think.  Like we just had a decision-making workshop.  You can teach people how to make good decisions and when do you bring in a team and have them solve the problem, or you know what I mean, when do you consult?  But what I believe in leadership programs, and we start all of our leadership programs usually with a personal retreat, is that it has to do with preparing the individual.  We call it personalismo  – the person, how do you prepare the person for leadership?  Because that’s where we get in trouble, because if you get a university president that’s into it for the power and the prestige or because I’m a PhD, which is a total -- just having a PhD is an issue in itself because it’s a hierarchical form. 

Scarpino:         It also doesn’t make you a leader (laughs). 

Bordas:           Exactly, but it does; at some level, you become a leader when you have a PhD.  But you have somebody who gets there without the personal preparation or that I’m here to serve these students, I’m here to see what I can do to build partnerships and coalitions with our communities so the university is not an ivory tower, but it’s an integral part of what we’re doing here.  I’m here to make sure that we have the resources so kids that don’t have enough money to go to college, we have endowments to help them.  Whatever that leader wants to do, that leader has to be prepared before they get into positions of power.  I think the public sector, the elections, are the best example of people that run for office who have not been prepared and that end up being in the highest places, and that’s why we have corporations ruling our government today. 

Scarpino:         You obviously had a pretty broad-based career, particularly at this point in your life, but you have always, based upon my reading and studying, had a particular affinity for working with Hispanic, Latinas.  What initially drew you to do that?  I assume you had choices, there were things you could have done with your life and…

Bordas:           I do want to say that, there was something I wanted to add to that caveat, but I don’t remember right now.  Oh yeah, I know what I wanted to say.  Interesting in my bio, you had that I passed my psychiatric social work test in 1979 (laughs)...  and, the interesting part to me, was that I studied psychology in order to figure it all out.  Because coming to this country at three years old, and having the kind of -- you can’t even imagine the kind of discrimination that my mother felt in 1945, or my sister who was 20 years old and spoke with a real thick accent.  Everybody older than me in my family has an accent.  When you see that kind of discrimination against the people that are really your heroes, they’re really the ones that are nurturing you and taking care of you, and I saw it in their eyes.  I mean, I have a sister who’s 10 years older than me, and when I was 13, she was 23, and she got the money together to fix my teeth so I wouldn’t have crooked teeth.  She got me braces.  These people were preparing me for what I’m doing way back then.  My mother helped me get a scholarship to an academy, and I worked with her on Sundays to earn money to pay tuition so I could go to a good school. 

Scarpino:         Catholic girls’ school?

Bordas:           Yeah, all Catholic girls’ school.  So when you see that kind of commitment from your own family, you have that sense of responsibility.  I had seen the discrimination that my family suffered and didn’t want anyone else to go through that again.  I had this sense that they were noble people, that they were -- all they were doing was trying to do good.  My sister Rosemary, by the way, the one that was 20 years older than I, went into real estate, and when she died she called her husband and said, “I want to give all my houses away to immigrants.”  She had already educated her children.  She had already bought them each a house. 

Scarpino:         Did she do that?

Bordas:           Yes.  And my mother, when she died, my mother never went anywhere except to Jerusalem to see the Holy Land with my sister, she wanted to see the Holy Land.  She left her children 33 years ago $150,000 that she had saved, which today would be over a half-million dollars, to educate her grandchildren.  I had a child that was three months old when my mother died, and 18 years later I said, “Here’s the money that your grandmother left because she knew that you would be an educated woman.” That kind of vision, that kind of sacrifice, that kind of idea that they’re living for the future, it inspired me so much to do my work, and when I -- and because I believe I was born an Hispanic woman, that I was given the opportunity to get educated, I got scholarships and then I worked my way through college.  And that leadership in my community is a responsibility to give back.

Scarpino:         When you talk about your mom and your older sister, you said everybody older than you in your family spoke with an accent...

Bordas:           Yes...

Scarpino:         Which, obviously, identified them as...

Bordas:           Immigrants and Hispanic, yeah...

Scarpino:         How did you avoid just not getting angry?

Bordas:           Oh, I was very angry.  Somebody heard me speak in my 30s and they said, “We couldn’t figure out if you were powerful or if you were angry.” I said, “I’m angry and I’m powerful.” (laughs) Yes, I was very angry.  And, you know, that’s not bad.  Gandhi said take your anger, use it, control it, and let it be the engine for social change. You know, he didn’t say it quite like that, but that’s what he said. 

Scarpino:         It’s a good paraphrase.

Bordas:           Yeah, that your anger’s a tool for change, right?  And you know, even Christians can remember that Jesus went into the Temple with a whip because of the Pharisees.  So I think anger is a natural reaction to injustice, but that you can’t let it eat you.  It has to be used as an engine, or a force.

Scarpino:         Is that ability to take that anger and channel it and use it as a force something that separates the leader from the others?

Bordas:           I do, but I was going to...

Scarpino:         I mean you can be consumed by anger instead.

Bordas:           And I was going to finish the fact that the reason I became a psychiatric social worker is I went through at least, probably, I don’t want to say years of analysis, (laughs) but I had my time on the couch even though I didn’t go to people that put you on the couch, to work those things through.  That’s why I say the personal preparation for leadership is so important.  I did not step into leadership.  When I went to Mi Casa, I was 40, maybe, and I had spent my early years in Chile in the Peace Corps working in daycare centers, working in health clinics.  I did my work, working on the ground to learn leadership, to learn how to work with people, to learn how to motivate people.  And I actually went into psychology to figure that out; what is it that motivates people?  I finally came up with the idea that, you know, in the Anglo culture, they say people are motivated by self-interest.  And I completely disagree with that.  I believe that’s an overlay of the culture.  I think people feel the best about themselves when they have enough to give, when they’re empowered, when they feel strong, when they feel like they’re doing something with their life.  I think it has more to do with self-efficacy than self-interest.  It has to do with developing yourself, but developing yourself in a way that -- and the only way you know that is if you’re having a positive impact on those around you, you know what I mean?

Scarpino:         Do you see part of what you do as a professional person is opening those doors for people so that they can think that way?

Bordas:           Yeah, let me give you an example of how you take something from one culture and put it into another.  During my personal purpose workshops, where I work with people to figure out why am I here and what am I doing -- and it’s going to change, it’s going to grow, it’s going to become larger -- we do a letting-go ceremony.  Because what I learned when I was a therapist was that good health, good mental health, good physical health, good self-image has to do with letting go of your baggage and what you don’t need anymore, and adding and building and learning and growing with what you do want to become and be.  So you do have to have that letting-go process.  You can’t carry that with you.  In the Cherokee tradition, the Cherokee Indians, at the beginning of the year they would go down to the stream and they would pick up water and they would swirl it around and forgive anything that had happened in the past year.  Let go of any hurts or sorrows, forgive themselves.  And the tribe would do that in order to start anew.  The Jewish people have a very similar tradition.  The Catholics have confession.  There has to be a way for you to let go.  So during our personal purpose ceremonies we talk about what you have to let go of.  I remember one woman had a very difficult relationship with her father, he had abandoned her and her mother, and she was crying.  But she went up and we have a big fountain there where you pick up the water and she cleansed herself and she said, “I forgive my father. I’m a much stronger woman because of what happened to me and my mother,” etc., etc.  She has told me over and over again how that one piece of making peace with her father and not blaming him, forgiving him, he was wrong, she forgave him, she saw -- changed her life because she no longer had to carry that burden with her.  Sometimes it’s the self that you have to forgive.  Sometimes it’s other people.  But you have to take what psychology has taught us, what leadership has taught us, what indigenous people have taught us, and then you bring that into leadership in a way that helps people heal themselves, because we’ve come to leadership in order to heal ourselves first.  You have to heal yourself first so that you may be able to serve your people. 

Scarpino:         I want to follow up on some of the things we’ve been talking about.  Based on what you’ve said about leadership, as both a cultured and gendered construction, what does a successful model of multicultural leadership look like?

Bordas:           So multicultural leadership is, first of all, studying, or understanding, or interfacing with leadership in different communities.  And I would include in that gender.  One of our principles in the Latino community is intergenerational leadership.  And like I said, I don’t want to do anything if I don’t interface with millennials, because I want to be relevant to their future.  That’s why I’m here.  So you have to have a respect and then you have to learn.  We’re all on a journey together.  I don’t know your culture.  You don’t know my culture.  But together we can learn from each other what are the benefits that you have in your culture, and what are those that I have from mine.  So multicultural leadership has a deep respect for different cultural paradigms and how they lead.  And then they integrate the best of each of these into a multicultural model, or an inclusive model, that is back to the flexibility and adaptability that you need in a very ambiguous change-oriented world where we don’t know the answers.  You really have to have kind of an adaptable form of leadership that you can use in different aspects.  So when I talk about the Cherokee cleansing ceremony, for example, that’s an example.  Because, you know, you were raised Catholic.  There’s nothing more powerful, a sacrament is an outward sign of an inner or a spiritual reality.  Most communities of color do ceremonies, whether it’s like I always begin and end my programs with a circle, with each person sharing something, a word or what I learned or whatever, to symbolize that it was a process we did together.  You have to incorporate the physical into the leadership.  It can’t be just an intellectual thing, it has to be in form.  So we just did a conference and we had at the conference all the herbs that our grandmothers used to heal us.  So when we talked about healing, which the Center for Creative Leadership calls resiliency, we talked about how our culture heals, and how we can heal each other – through eating good food, because, one of the reasons I’m so resilient is because my mother cooked every single meal I ever ate, from scratch.  And it was usually rice and beans, right?  So even what you eat is a leadership act and how you prepare yourself to lead by being healthy.  So how do you take those principles of leadership and bring them into a concrete form so people remember them?  They never will forget that. 

Scarpino:         There’s a kind of irony, isn’t there, in the people who make do because they don’t have a lot of money and eat rice and beans are they’re actually doing better for themselves than the person who can afford steak every night. 

Bordas:           Exactly.  And when I went to China, the way they take one crab and cut it up into little pieces so everybody has a bite.  Or they take a piece of meat and make a huge dish.  And that’s been proven that it’s better for you. 

Scarpino:         Did you teach leadership in China?

Bordas:           I learned leadership in China.  And let me tell you one thing that I learned from them that would be interesting for this.  One thing I learned, we had a teacher there who brought out some pictures that someone had drawn about leadership.  One of them was, the leader was in the back of the boat kind of steering while everybody was in the front, right?  Another one was a leader going across the river to find out where the rocks were so people could follow.  But they were pictures and they were very concrete about what leadership was.  And I said, “I cannot believe that you can draw like this,” I said to the guy who was teaching.  And he said, “Oh, in China, we believe that you have to develop your artistic self.  You have to have some way to express that artistic part of you to be a full person and to be a leader.” And that’s so interesting, isn’t it, the idea that when you play a musical instrument, or you write, or you do tai chi, or you do yoga, or they have gymnastics, they teach the children how to play instruments, you have to have a way to express your artistic nature.  And I thought what an incredible way to lead?  And so one of the things we do in the programs that I have is that we completely decorate the place with art and hangings and -- in indigenous communities, a vase was beautiful, but it was useful.  A rug was beautiful, but it was useful.  My poncho, beautiful but useful.  You know, the hat, beautifully woven.  The basket, beautifully woven.  They were all pieces of art.  So art as leadership, or leadership as art, but the Chinese were saying to me, everybody should have a way to express their artistic nature. 

Scarpino:         Where were you in China?

Bordas:           Oh, we went everywhere.  I was with the Kellogg Foundation at the time.

Scarpino:         Let me get myself oriented to my bifocals here.  In June 2016, you published a piece, “El Poder De Las Latinas en Los Estados Unidos,” in IMAGEN NY.  If I did this right, the English translation is “The Power of Latinos in the United States.” What is this IMAGEN New York?

Bordas:           How long ago was that?

Scarpino:         2016.  But the real question I want to ask is the title, “The Power of Latinos in the United States,” what do you see is the power of Latinos in the United States?  I read the piece, but, but...

Bordas:           I want you to send it to me because I don’t remember it.

Scarpino:         (Laughs) I kind of liked this one...

Bordas:           I had three or four pages of the things that I’ve written...

Scarpino:         (Laughing) I really liked it...

Bordas:           It what was really funny, I went to a PowerPoint last night and I thought when did I do this?  It’s age.  So, I’m going to tell you two things in closing.  This one is, I’m going to tell you the vision for Latinos, and then I’m going to tell you about what I did for my 77^th birthday to get a feeling for what I’m doing.  So the first one is, is that, I talked a little about De Colores and the many colors and that Latinos are a prototype for the multicultural age, that we come from 22 countries.  We’re united by the Spanish language, by the conquest and being oppressed people.  We do have a common spiritual tradition that is a mixture of the Catholic and the indigenous.  And we have a set of core values that have come out of that experience.  A very well-known one is mi casa su casa, my house is your house.  So that sense of collectiveness that I talked about in leadership also refers to personal possessions.  Possessions were much more fluid in indigenous cultures.  They would, the Comanche, instead of you giving me a present for my birthday, I would have a throwaway where I would give everybody presents for raising me and taking care of me.  It was a whole different idea.  And in my family, if somebody liked something, you were supposed to give it to them.  But it was reciprocal.  That’s the important thing.  Reciprocity and mutuality means I give you and you give me, so it’s a whole different way of dealing with the material world.  So mi casa su casa, is one of our -- I consider it the commandment, what do you call it, the first commandment of Latino culture.  And another one is hard work.  And hard work in the sense that everybody has to work.  There’s a saying donde come uno, come dos.  I’m sorry, that’s about sharing.  If I have food, I’m going to give you some because I don’t want to eat by myself, it’s not right that you don’t have food.  But the other one is los que no trabajan no comen – if you don’t work, you don’t eat.  Everybody has to work, everybody has to eat.  So there’s a whole sense of leveling the playing field, everybody’s in this together.  So we have these values that I think are the antidote to materialism.  Latinos are a humanistic culture.  They are not a materialistic culture.  I get more pleasure, it really is true, out of cooking dinner for people and serving them than I do eating by myself or going to a fancy restaurant.  So there’s a whole different world view there.  So we’re multicultural.  We have values that can be the antidote to the raging materialism that’s tearing humanity apart, not just our country, but humanity apart when you have these refugees and these people without homes, and 40,000 counted homeless in Los Angeles – counted!  So those kind of things wouldn’t exist in certain communities.  Native Americans told me it was always recognized in communal communities that if somebody took more than their share, it damaged the whole.  It damaged the whole.  That doesn’t mean you can’t have a little bit more, but it means that you don’t take so much that other people don’t have.  I believe that Latinos have inherited the indigenous traditions, that we have values that can really heal America and the world, and that we are the prototype for the multicultural society.  And so what I believe that Latino destino is, Latino destino, is to help create the multicultural world and to help bring the humanistic values for humanity.  In the Latino community, people come first.  Even in the language.  Da me lo...  the lo, the thing comes after the we.  So, people are central to our community.  We recognize that the purpose of life is your relationships with people, your relationship with your family, the ability to create that kind of community where people are taken care of.  So I think that the future for Latinos, if we can really...  and the other thing about Latinos, one of our huge values is inclusiveness.  Mi casa su casa is inclusiveness.  Bienvenido is inclusiveness.  The way we hug each other and hug people, that’s inclusiveness.  So we’re not talking about Latinos saying oh we’re the ones, we’re the chosen race, not at all.  We’re saying, we have come to a certain place in history.  We are the merger of the old world, the European world, and the new world, the indigenous world.  We are the international people that have Spain, that have the Philippines, and have two colonies in Africa that speak Spanish, that have all of South America, that have the United States, Spanish is the language spoken in most countries in the world.  There are certain ages and evolutions in humanity, and so what I think for Latinos today is that we’re here to help build that multicultural humanistic society, and to merge back the indigenous world view with the modern world view, to bring them together, and that in that is more strength than one dominating the other. 

Scarpino:         You mentioned destiny, or destino, a few times, and I also read some of the things that you wrote about that.  What role do you think that destiny, or destino, has played in your life, in your career?

Bordas:           Oh, it’s unbelievable to me.  First of all, the example I use in my book, which I   thought was incredible – well, sometimes destino is just a feeling.  Like, when I was sitting at the University of Florida, I thought to myself, ‘What do I do now? I am the first educated person in my whole lineage.  My whole ancestry, I’m the first educated woman, right? What do I do? What do I do?’ And that was when John F.  Kennedy started the Peace Corps.  And it wasn’t even like I wanted to do it.  I was kind of like, oh God, going to Chile in those days for a young girl in 1964 was like going to the other side of the world.  I only talked to my parents a couple of times, and yet I knew it was the right thing to do.  And what happened was, and this is an interesting thing for older Latinos, was for me to be successful, I had to assimilate when I was young. 

Scarpino:         Assimilate into...

Bordas:           Into the Anglo culture. 

Scarpino:         Anglo culture.

Bordas:           I mean my mother couldn’t teach me how to do it.  Nobody could teach me how to do it.  So was seven years when we left West Tampa, which was Hispanic, and my sister with her GI Bill bought us a little house out in the sticks in Florida, which is you know...  and so I walk into this Catholic school and I’m the only Hispanic.  So I had to, at seven years old, and not even knowing the language very well.  So for me to become successful and to get to the University of Florida, I had to really learn the Anglo system, and I had to do it within the school system.  So when I went back to Chile, I relearned Spanish, because my Spanish was very broken, I connected to my culture.  But what was so important to me was I had never as a child seen anybody of my culture in any leadership position.  Now in West Tampa they owned the bakeries and stuff like that because that’s where the immigrants went, but I never saw a bus driver, I never had a teacher, I never had a professor, I never had somebody who owned a big business, a corporate person, nothing.  And I go to Chile, and here’s this beautiful country, and everybody’s Latino, the presidents, the senators, the business people, LAN Chile is owned by a Chileno.  You know and I’m like, now this seems very, yeah of course Juana, but can you imagine a 21-year-old girl going, “There’s nothing wrong with my culture.  It is the position that my culture has been put in.”  And I grew up in Florida where there were some Latinos, right?  But why was it that there were no Latinos at the University of Florida in 1960?  I met three people that were there around the same time as me.  So, I mean, you know maybe there were 15, but out of 14,000 students... 

Scarpino:         They disappeared.

Bordas:           Yeah, you didn’t see them.  And no blacks.  So I knew immediately what racism, what discrimination, what exclusion had done to the other people in my community.  And what I stand really firm on my ground, is that people will look at me and say, “Oh she’s exceptional, right?”  And I’m like, “No, I am not exceptional.  I am lucky, and I followed the sense of destino.”  There were many, many Latina girls at that age that were smart, many of them that could have made incredible contributions if the doors had been open to them.  And my commitment is to open the door for others to follow me.  So, it was really interesting to me because that was my destino calling me forward, and I said yes.  Then I come back here to the United States, this is my second example for you.  And I had married this fabulous Irish guy from Wisconsin.  So I was going to work while he went to law school.  And so I go to the state social services department and I have this interview with them. 

Scarpino:         In Wisconsin?

Bordas:           In Wisconsin.  And I have a portfolio from the Peace Corps, because when I was in the Peace Corps, I did my core enterprise work, which back then was totally new.  I had a bakery, and I had pictures of my women with their bakery items at the capitol in Chile feeding all the Congress people.  I mean, I was like on fire.  And so I had all these papers and I was showing them, and the guy says to me, “Wait,” he says, “I can see that you are very dynamic and that you’ve accomplished things and you have a passion for this,” he said, “but we don’t hire anybody that doesn’t have a Master’s in Social Work.” Well to me that I was like a glass shattering because, hey, I went to college and I was just two years in an international setting.  So I picked up all my books and I put them down, and I said, “You don’t understand.  I was born to be a social worker.”  And he looks at me, and says, “Look, if you can go down to the University of Wisconsin and get in the graduate school, we’ll pay for you to go.  We’ll give you a stipend if you’ll come back and work for us.”

Scarpino:         And, did he do it?

Bordas:           That’s exactly what happened.          

Scarpino:         What was the name of this company?

Bordas:           This was social services in Wisconsin.  They had stipends for people to go to school.  So I’m looking at him, and he’s looking at me, and I tell people now, it wasn’t even my idea.  But do you know that a Hispanic young woman, who knew Spanish, who had worked in Chile, who had a Master’s degree, I’m 26 years old, even today only like two or three percent of Latinas have Master’s degrees. 

Scarpino:         But maybe the thing that set you apart in that situation is you didn’t take no for an answer. 

Bordas:           Well, but that was part of my upbringing, too. 

Scarpino:         I mean, but it’s also a character trait that not everyone has. 

Bordas:           Um, that is true, but the result was that I got a Master’s degree. 

Scarpino:         Right.

Bordas:           You know I did a teaching assistantship in addition to my stipend, I went back and worked for them for two years.  And the thing is, when your destino calls you, it will give you the tools that you will need to fulfill your mission on earth, if you want to call it your mission or your destino.  It will give you the tools you need to do that if you say yes to serving at a higher level each time, if you say yes, I will do this, I will prepare myself.  And I’m just saying that I believe that those doors are open for people, whether it’s getting into a university, or whether -- and when I do work with people, I ask them to think about a moment in time when opportunity knocked, when somebody came to their house.  Annika Barral (spelling??), who ended up being the treasurer of the United States under George W.  Bush, she wasn’t going to go to college because she was the oldest in an immigrant family.  I’m the youngest so I could go.  And her father used to gather junk and take it apart and she was his helper.  There were kids that were younger than her.  The college counselor came to her house and said to her parents and her, “She can help more if she gets an education, and I’m willing to help her do that.” That was her destino calling her forward.  And when you work with people and ask them, “Think about an opportunity that was offered you, think about somebody who opened a door and you said yes, and that set you on the path to accomplishing that which you wanted to accomplish with your life.”

Scarpino:         Is part of the training you do empowering people to say yes?

Bordas:           Yes, I think so.  But, you know, even Greenleaf said, “The most powerful tool of the servant leader was the intuition,” which is a female aspect, the intuition.  You know, theoretically women are the ones who are more intuitive. 

Scarpino:         I’ve heard that. (laughs)

Bordas:           Yeah, and so having that sense of -- like I said, I really didn’t want to go in the Peace Corps, it was scary.  It was really, really scary.  I had only been 120 miles from my home.  The university was 120 miles from my home.  My parents when I went said, “Are there going to be chaperones?” They really thought it was a scandal when I went to college. (laughs)  And so I’m just saying, you know, it is a little bit scary, but my intuition was saying you’ve got to give back, you’ve got to do this. 

Scarpino:         I’m going to ask you a question before I start something.  Do you have about 15 more minutes?

Bordas:           What time is it, I don’t know?

Scarpino:         I don’t know what time it is.

Bordas:           My poor daughter showed up this morning after being on a redeye, and I left her.  (laughs) 

Scarpino:         Let me check the time, I’ve got counters on the recorder, but not -- it’s 3:30.

Bordas:           We should probably, one more question and then I’ll run, is that good?

Scarpino:         Well, what I’m trying to figure out is do you have like 10 or 15 more minutes, or we could wrap now, because I’m going to start something that I don’t want to stop in the middle of.  So if you need to meet your daughter, we’ll just pick this up another time. 

Bordas:           I probably should just because it’s been two hours.  I came about 1:30-ish. 

Scarpino:         Yeah, we’ve been talking for an hour and 40 minutes.  I’m going to shut these things off.  But before I do that, on behalf of myself and the Tobias Center and the International Leadership Association, I want to thank you for being gracious enough to sit with me this afternoon. 

Bordas:           My pleasure.

Scarpino:         Alright.  I’m going to shut these guys off so we don’t have live mics.

Scarpino:         Alright, we’ve got one live mic, and we’ve got two live mics.  Alright, so, as I said when the recorders were off, this is the second interview with Juana Bordas.  Today is Monday, July 12, 2021.  My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History at Indiana University/Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI); and Director of Oral History for the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence also at IUPUI.  I am interviewing Juana Bordas at her home in Denver, Colorado. This is the second recording session with Juana Bordas. The first took place at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association October 25, 2019, in Ottawa, Canada, at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association (ILA).  The length of time between recording sessions is the result of the global Covid19 pandemic.  This interview is a joint venture undertaken by the Tobias Center and the ILA.

Biographical information on Juana Bordas is with the first interview, which is in the IUPUI Special Collections at Archives in the Tobias Center.  So...  among your many honors, the recognition that brings us here today is the International Leadership Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award presented at ILA’s annual meeting in Ottawa, Ontario Canada, in October 2019.  I’m going to ask your permission to record this interview, to transcribe the interview, and to deposit the recording and transcription in the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives and the Tobias Center.  I will that among your many honors, the recognition that brings us here today is the International Leadership Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award presented at ILA’s annual meeting in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, in October 2019.  So I want to ask your permission to record this interview, to transcribe the interview, and to deposit the recording and transcription in the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives, with the International Leadership Association, and with the Tobias Center, where any or all of the recording or the transcription may be posted to their websites and will be available for the use of their patrons.  Can I have your permission?

Bordas:           Yes sir. 

Scarpino:         Ok, thank you very much.  I will say for anybody who is looking at this recording that in our first recording session we talked a great deal of big picture questions.  We talked mostly about leadership for the time we spent together.  I’ll follow up on that.  But there was one thing I wanted to follow up on that we talked about last time, most of the way through the first interview.  In that first interview, you said the following thing about Latinos, and I’m going to paraphrase you because this is not a direct quote.  You said:  We have these values, I think they’re the antidote to materialism.  Latinos are a humanistic culture, they’re not a materialistic culture.  We have values that can be the antidote to raging materialism that is tearing humanity and our country apart.

 And the question I have is, what values do Latinos have that serve as an antidote to materialism?

Bordas:           Oh, good question.  Well, first of all, Latinos are a collective culture.  They’re a ‘we’ culture, and they’re not an individualistic culture.  The Anglo culture that formed this country is about the individual and self-worth, and also accumulation of wealth for the individual, which was pretty much based on the WASP background, the white Anglo Saxon protestant where they even believed that if you had money, you were closer to God, you know, that whole (inaudible) thing.  So, Latinos don’t have that kind of concept.  In fact, a leader, for example, is respected by their contribution to others, including whether they’re available, whether they’re generous, whether they contribute, whether they see their calling as something that’s going to advance their community and their people.  So, it’s much more centered on, what have you done for others?  What is your contribution?  That’s how you gain respect.  So, the ‘we’ cultures focus on people.  Even in the Spanish language, damelo, the me comes before the thing.  Same thing with an adjective, the person comes before the adjective.   

Scarpino:         I was going to translate damelo.

Bordas:           Damelo means give it to me. Give it to me, or give me it in the Spanish translation.  So, collective cultures care more about getting along, helping one another, collaboration.  Latinos are great team players or collaborators because we’re a ‘we’ culture.  It’s about the family.  It’s about the collective.  And so that’s very different.  And that’s what’s needed in our country today.  The raging materialism that has produced -- I was just talking with somebody about how before Reagan and before the ‘80s, we didn’t have this gap between the rich and the poor like we do now.  It has exasperated in the last 40 years.  But the fact is that, in our society today, we have this, you know, the 1% and the 20% really that own the majority of the wealth.  In a collective culture, you’re not supposed to take more than your share.  The whole idea, there’s a saying in Spanish, donde come uno, come dos – where one person can eat, two people can eat.  If I have a plate of food and you don’t have food, it’s going to make me feel better to share my food with you than for you to go hungry.  There’s a whole different concept of what not only respect is, but what is material wealth and where it’s for.  I’ll give you two examples from my family:  One is that my sister Rosemary was in The Waves in World War II...   

Scarpino:         Good for her (chuckles).

Bordas:           ...  and when she came out of Waves, she used her GI Bill to buy our family our first home.  As the eldest daughter, she knew it was her responsibility to take care of the rest of us.  And she did that.  And then when she died, by the way, she had been in real estate and she gave away seven homes to all of the recent Nicaraguan immigrants that have come from my family.  So, that whole idea that you’re respected because you’re generous because you give, and that material wealth is to be enjoyed and to be shared.  I was going to give you a second example from my family; let me think what it was.  Oh, my brother John became the most, I guess, successful person in the family because he became the vice president of CBS Records.  He was a record person and a music person.  And so, his job was to - if somebody didn’t have airfare to a family reunion, or if I needed something when I was a single mom, I would call him up, and like one time he sent me a whole stereo set because I told him my stereo set had broken.  So, your role is totally different in a collective society.  And the more you have is the opportunity to be generous and give.  So that’s one.  The second one is generosity.  The golden rule of Latino culture is mi casa su casa, my house is your house.  There was even in the old tradition that if you said you liked that painting, I had to give it to you.  That was a very old tradition.  I remember once I was in Guatemala with my sister and I went to a party and the hostess opened the door, I wasn’t even invited to the party except in a collective culture you bring people and it’s okay.  I said, “What beautiful earrings,” and she took them off and gave them to me.  And I was like stunned.  But then I had another example of when I was home and someone said they liked something in my house, and I didn’t give it to them and I got scolded (laughs).  So, the old tradition was that possessions were more fluid, that it was about sharing, that it was about generosity.  I’ll give you another example.  Latinos have the participation of anybody in the labor market.  We love to work.  But work is not just work, it’s a way to contribute.  So, we want to do a good day’s work.  You’ll see Latinos putting on roofs in the searing sun and digging ditches and doing things.  My mother cleaning floors so her kids could get an education.  So, we contribute through work.  If you work at the work ethic, if you look at generosity, if you look at taking care of each other and building a social contract with people where we have a society that takes care of people, those are Latino values.  Hard work, generosity, family, faith, and all those things are things that America espouses, but Latinos live them.   

Scarpino:         It sounds like the Protestant ethic. 

Bordas:           Well, no, because the Protestant ethic was still about the individual accumulating wealth. 

Scarpino:         That’s true, it is, yes.

Bordas:           The other thing you have to realize is that one of the ways collective cultures stay together is through celebration.  So, at the same time that Latinos have the highest participation in the labor market, they spend more money on food, going out to eat, fiestas.  We’re a celebratory culture, right?  So, we’re always feeding and helping people, which is another thing.  When people come to your home, you’re supposed to offer them something to drink or eat. 

Scarpino:         And you did, by the way, I’ll say it with the recorder on.  (laughs)

Bordas:           Yeah, I did.  So that’s a whole different perspective than the Protestant ethic.  We love to work, but not because it’s going to bring us more wealth, necessarily, but because that’s the way we contribute.  That’s the way we take care of our families.  That’s the way we give our employer a good day’s work.  So, it’s more of a - it’s mutuality, is one of our main values.  I help you, you help me, we help each other, and that way we all advance together.  But it’s that sense of togetherness that wasn’t in the Anglo-Saxon culture. 

Scarpino:         I’ve kind of had a question forming in the back of my mind as you’ve been talking, and it’s kind of a bigger question.  To give this some context, I’ve been to Mexico, including Mexico City.  I also lived in Colombia, in Bogota, for almost four weeks.  Taught at Universidad Los Andes - English.  Nobody wants to hear me speak Spanish.  But, one of the things that struck me about both Mexico City and Bogota and Colombia was just the abject poverty outside of town, you know, as the people move in and you can see the shacks up on the hillsides.  Is that a failure of leadership?

Bordas:           Well...

Scarpino:         Because that’s certainly not one helping the other.  I mean it’s just mind-numbing poverty.

Bordas:           Yes.  And the Latino culture is a fusion between the Spanish and the indigenous culture and other cultures.  I have French blood.  Some people have German blood.  But we are a mixed culture.  And that’s a much more complicated question as to why there’s poverty in South and Central America, and it has to do with colonization and imperialism which was brought by the Spanish.  Now, there were a lot of reasons why the Spanish and the Indian cultures were able to merge, and the Spanish do have a sense of collectivity internally.  You know, they’re very close to their families, they have very extended communities and so forth.  But when they came here, they did conquer the indigenous people.  And there’s also the fact that, until recently and it’s still true, that the United States, also like when I lived in Chile, they owned the copper mines which was one of the Anaconda copper mines, which was one of the resources.  So, there’s been a real drain of resources from South and Central America by the United States and by others.  And then there was the imposition of Spanish rule.  So, within that, I think I’m talking about the context of indigenous cultures, which are collective, tribal cultures.  And I’m also talking about the Spanish culture internally was very collective.  They had large families and they were very different.  And they also, because the Spanish were mixed, you know we had the Arabs, we had the Muslims, we had the Celts to the north, we had the Romans, and they were already mixed.  They had a propensity to mix their blood here, which the Anglo-Saxons did not do.  The Anglo-Saxons had a racist, and did not mix their blood, but the Spanish did.  So, it’s a complicated story, but the values that Latinos hold dear - faith and family, hard work, generosity, collectivism, mutuality - those are all different than the ‘I’ culture. 

Scarpino:         When you talk about these values that serve as an antidote to raging materialism, how do you connect that to leadership, to your understanding of leadership?

Bordas:           Well, my understanding of leadership, for example, is that leadership has, of course, shifted from an ‘I’ orientation that came out of the industrial society where you had leadership by the few and you had the industrial, where you had people on, what do you call those?

Scarpino:         Assembly lines.

Bordas:           Assembly lines, exactly, I was watching...

Scarpino:         Well, I was watching your hand go, so I figured...  (laughs)

Bordas:           You had people on assembly lines.  You had an uneducated workforce, and you didn’t have diversity.  A lot of things have changed, including technology and communication, so that that form of leadership is no longer - it’s good in a crisis, it’s good if you’re an expert and you’re going to tell it how it is, but it’s not a form of leadership that can create organizations that function effectively where people are committed, where people do their best and all of that.  So, leadership is moving toward a more collective form, and we know that.  All the leaders at ILA Honors are all collective leaders.  We all believe that you develop people, and that leadership is a people business.  Well, Latinos are a people culture.  When you look at how, and I think this is really important - you know, since we’ve spoken the last time, the racial reckoning and what’s going on in America, that has to do with a different cultural perspective.  And so what we’re seeing today is that there’s this total inclusivity and diversity, that leaders have to be able to lead a multicultural workforce, a multicultural society.  Anglos and people from an ‘I’ perspective are not capable of doing that.  That’s going to be the hardest shift. 

Scarpino:         Can they learn? 

Bordas:           Well, they can learn, but they have to understand that they can no longer be the ones that are in charge.  The table has to get wider.  It doesn’t mean -- because white supremacists say, “We will not be replaced.”  We’re not replacing anybody.  We’re just making the table bigger.  And hopefully you’ll bring your manners because that’s another thing Latinos have.  As a people-centered culture, we are told to be simpatico, to be easy to get along with, to help people out, to have harmonious relationships.  Well, everybody can be at the table as long as they have that kind of perspective.  So, leadership is changing to a collective form because of all of these different things.  And ‘we’ cultures, particularly Latinos, have the capacity to really build that kind of a society and to cultivate those kinds of organizations. 

Scarpino:         Again, right at the end of our first interview we did, you said a few things that caught my attention, and I’m going to paraphrase again.  You said:  Latinos have inherited the indigenous tradition.  We have values that can help heal America and the world, a prototype for the multicultural society.  Latino destino is to help create the multicultural world and help bring back humanistic values. 

Two questions: What are the humanistic values you’re talking about?  And how do they help heal?

Bordas:           I think we’ve been talking that, is that it’s different than materialistic values.  So, materialistic values in the ‘I’ culture is about numero uno, about me succeeding.  And so, you have humanistic cultures that care about their people.  I would say that the Scandinavian countries have been able to forge humanistic societies that take care of people.  My niece went there to study and didn’t want to come back because she said -- and I don’t, I never saw a homeless person until I was 30.  And when my car got stolen - we think it was some homeless people - I was, like, I don’t want to live in a society where there’s 70,000 homeless in Los Angeles and 10,000 homeless in Colorado.  That’s not a humanistic society. 

Scarpino:         Very prevalent on the streets of Denver.

Bordas:           Yeah, and so what we’re talking about is a social safety net where people take care of each other.  And I think that when you look at the traditional Latino culture, that’s what we did.  That’s what my family did.  That’s how the 40% of the immigrants that are here get ahead; they help each other.  And so, it’s not an every-man-for-themselves kind of society. 

Scarpino:         I’m going to try to anticipate what somebody might be thinking when they listen to this or read it.  So how is that different from socialism?

Bordas:           Socialism is a form of government.  We’re talking about cultural values, first of all, that of course would drive -- because the individualistic values have driven this gap between the rich and the poor, all of the conflict that we’re having politically about people being able to even vote, you know.  So that drives that kind of a political environment.  It’s not socialism in the sense that what I’m talking about is the way cultural values and the way people relate to each other that would then result in creating a government that -- what they call it in South America is social democracy.  So, you have democracy, but you have a safety net.  You take care of people.  It would be a combination.  We’ve moved a little bit towards that with Medicare, but you have to, again, look at the fact that we’re the -- or, not Medicare, Obamacare -- you have to look at the fact that we’re the only country, when you look at the difference in how we take care of pregnant women or when you look at our health system, or you look at housing, or you look at the fact that Latinos have one-eighth the wealth of white people, there’s something going on here where we’re not really sharing the wealth, and that there’s been this accumulation of wealth in the last 40 years that has pretty much destroyed a lot of the social fabric. 

Scarpino:         Through the lens of what you’ve just been talking about, and through your standing as a leader and your knowledge of leadership, what do we do about it?  Is there any hope that this...

Bordas:           You asked me how leadership is different.  First of all, leadership is different because the focus is on those that are led and not the leader.  You know, it’s not follow-the-leader.  It’s like, how does the leader serve, servant leadership, which is key in our community.  Even the way Mexicans greet each other, they say, “como puedo servirle?” “How can I serve you?” There’s that whole idea, right?  So, I’m having trouble focusing, so hold on.  So, the idea of servant leadership, the idea of growing people, the idea of everyone being a leader, which is - in the culture its everyone contributes.  In leadership, it’s everybody is a leader because they can contribute.  In leadership, it’s my responsibility to grow people, to invest in them, to bring out the best in them, to make sure they have meaningful work, right?  In leadership, those same values come forward, but they’re done more in an organizational context rather than just individually, you and I, or my family, or our cultural groups.  So, you asked me how does this show up in leadership, is that...

Scarpino:         Yes.

Bordas:           Okay, so it shows up in leadership by the leader growing other people, by the leader not taking more than their share.  That principle is called ‘the leader is equal.’  Seeing leadership in all people.  And then, which will be the hard part, is how do you redistribute wealth based on people making contributions?  What’s the minimum wage?  How much can people at the top make?  I think that’s going to be the hardest shift that we make.  Even though it’s not the majority of people that need to make that shift, it’s going to be very difficult.  That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about.  Whether white people with a lot of money, they keep saying, “What are we going to do?” And I’m like, “Well, you could give a scholarship.  I mean, you could start with joining the NAACP or attending a Latino church.”  I mean we had to do it.  I had to do it at six years old.  I had to integrate into the white culture. 

Scarpino:         That’s right, isn’t it?  Yes.

Bordas:           Yeah, so I know the white culture.  I’ve been educated by white people.  But they don’t know my culture.  And if they want to know what to do, they need to start reaching out and learning about the other.  So that’s what a leader would do.  A leader would be inclusive.  A leader would reach out.  A leader would be generous with their time, with their ideas.  A leader would also - the second principle that I work with is called ‘leadership by the many.’  If you really believe that everybody is a leader, then you’re going to be a leaderful organization or we would have a community that has many leaders, not a few.  That’s totally opposite than the ‘I’, where it’s leadership by the few.  So, what I’m saying is that each person, like, you know, it wasn’t just that my sister bought our house, it was that my other sister bought me braces when she got a job, it was that my mother sewed the outfits for the church because she didn’t have money so she would sew outfits, that they would give food for people that didn’t have food.  It was this whole idea that you are there to serve others and to help others as well.  And in that, you grow.  That’s a leadership trait, to be able to grow from service rather than from imposing your ideas on others.   

Scarpino:         I’m going to check on this real quick.

Bordas:           I was going to say that one of the other values, I think, that comes into leadership that I call in my Latino book, “cosa la vida,” “celebrate life,” that Latinos not only work hard, but they play hard.  I was trying to talk a little bit about that.  And I think that’s really important.  You know I did a lot of research in my first book on how more money doesn’t really make you happier.  But the whole idea of being able to – I’m just not keeping my thoughts clear – oh, being able to celebrate success, being able to share the wealth in a sense.  But, cosa la vida is one of the reasons we survived and thrived is because we celebrate life.  So at the same time that we were poor, there was always a party going on, everybody brought something.  Or if there’s a wedding, you pin money on the bride’s dress or you pay for the band.

Scarpino:         On birthdays.

Bordas:           Birthdays, the same thing, you know what I mean?  So, we continued to celebrate.  And even in the celebration, there was that sense of generosity and taking care of each other.  But it’s a really important leadership trait.  If you don’t celebrate your success, if you don’t get people motivated and excited about what they’re doing, you can’t have that kind of success.  The other thing about Latino leadership is that Latino leaders admire charisma.  They are in the oral tradition, they admire leaders who can communicate.  And the reason is that we couldn’t pay people.  A lot of our advancement was through movements and through people working and contributing, being in labor unions and other things.  And, so, the leader had to be a pretty good motivator, because people were working for something, for change they wouldn’t see in their lifetime.  So, you had to say to people, “You’re going to work for this, and it’s for the good of your children or the people that come after you.” 

Scarpino:         I’m going to set up my next question so that anybody who listens to this or reads the transcript will have some context.  In 2007, you published an article called “Seven Ways to Practice Multicultural Leadership.” It’s in a journal called Facilities Manager.  Facilities Manager is a publication of the Association of Physical Plan Administrators, or APPA.  I’m going to list the seven things that you mentioned, so we have them here.  And, then, later on when I read some more of your work, you added an eighth, so I’ll work that in.  And then I kind of want to talk to you about these things.  These are the seven things you mentioned in that piece in 2007:  First, you need a history lesson, history has given rise to ethnocentricity; number two, think ‘we’ not ‘I,’ which you’ve been talking about; number three, flatten your leadership structure, don’t hang on to ‘you’re the leader’ mentality; four, help people learn to work together better; five, minimize conflict by reminding employees that they are truly a family; six, foster a culture that is accepting of spirituality; next, focus employees on a departmental or institutional vision; and then, elsewhere, you added an eighth one, practice generosity, not greed.  And you said in communities of color being generous is an expected leadership trait that indicates integrity and garners respect.  Now, you’ve been talking about some of these things...

Bordas:           Not in a sequential way.

Scarpino:         No, no...  I had the advantage of reading what you wrote and copying it out, but I want to talk a little bit about some of these things.  You’ve been alluding to this, but let’s see if we can get it in one place.  Why do these eight ways that you mention apply especially to the practice of multicultural leadership, which is what you were talking about here? 

Bordas:           Right.  Well, let’s see.  Multicultural leadership means that you would include the perspectives and values of the diverse people that make up the organization or the community, instead of just having one leader or one way.  So, we’ve all been educated in the dominant culture system, where competition, individual success, if you want to call it that, has been valued.  So, when you want to turn that around, things that you’re talking about there, like the interesting one to me is the thing on spirituality, which is becoming more and more a part of leadership, part of the authentic leadership, part of the leader always having integrity and being honest, which is part of being a spiritual person, always telling the truth for example.  You can’t have a collective culture if people don’t keep their word. 

Scarpino:         That’s true.

Bordas:           In the old tradition you would just shake hands and then everybody would know you would do that.  So that type of integrity was really important for people.  And that is what -- it’s the number one trait that leaders want, or have, or people want from their leaders.  It’s multicultural in that it’s inclusive.  It’s multicultural in the fact that each different tradition is valued and asked for and you make allowances for those.  For example, I’ll give you one out of the Native American tradition and out of the Latino tradition.  Because we’re an oral tradition, there’s a lot of talking and going back and forth before you make a decision so that everybody’s voice can be heard.  And there’s a lot of talking, we’re all loquacious cultures.  But once the decision is made, people are committed to it because we’ve all had our chance to share and to speak our peace.  What that means is that decisions take longer to -- the process takes longer, but the implementation might be shorter because everybody’s on the same page, because everybody’s agreed, because everyone’s going in the same direction.  We would rather put the time in on the front end to make sure everybody’s happy, everybody’s on -- and even to the point where I’ll go along with it because people want it.  But that’s at least you speaking your word. 

Scarpino:         Are there any places, institutions you can think of in the United States where that is actually implemented? 

Bordas:           Well, way back when I ran Mi Casa Women’s Center, our social service delivery system was called La Familia, or The Family, and so the staff tried to function kind of like an extended family.  But more than that, we wanted the atmosphere where people came in.  That’s why we called it Mi Casa.  And there was a big sign - “Welcome to Mi Casa” - as you walked in.  And the place was set up very much like the, the entryway and stuff was very welcoming.  The groups were small so that you could have personal interaction.  One time - I think I told you this in the last interview - one time when we had a budget shortfall, everybody on the staff voted to take four hours off in the afternoon on Friday rather than to let someone go, which was later adopted by our mayor here, who is now our senator, Hickenlooper. 

Scarpino:         Gee!

Bordas:           Yeah, when he had a shortfall in the city budget, all the Mondays you got off, you also got off Fridays.  So that’s a way of, you know...

Scarpino:         Did he know what you’d done, or did he come up with this on his own?

Bordas:           You know, I think he came up with it on his own.  Maybe somebody knew, I don’t know, but it’s that kind of idea.  If you look at studies on why people commit to organizations, one is compensation, but the second one is that people are valued.  My work is meaningful, people know that, they value me, I’m somebody around here, people know my name, they give me opportunity, whatever.  So that’s the people-centered part of leadership.  Yeah, you can pay people, but if people really feel like you care about them, and you have a culture that really values them where people are actually looking out for them and helping them with development, it isn’t about money all the time.  It’s about:  I have value as an individual and I’m recognized and I’m doing something that’s meaningful.

Scarpino:         Many of the eight ways to practice multicultural leadership emphasize cooperation and collaboration. 

Bordas:           Right.

Scarpino:         And we went over those.  Do you ever, when you talk to people about these, and I know when we’re not having Covid you give talks all over the place.

Bordas:           Right. 

Scarpino:         Do you ever get pushback from people who see these ways of practicing multicultural leadership as inconsistent with leadership in a capitalist economy? 

Bordas:           Well, I think the biggest issue I think for me is that I’m a thought leader.  I’m trying to change the way people think.  Like my first principle, ‘know your history,’ that’s an important principle.  It’s important because if people don’t know who they are and don’t have a strong identity, then how can they?  You know, because the first thing in leadership is to know yourself.  What are your skills?  What are your abilities?  What do you need to do to grow?  What are your challenges, you know?  So, in my Latino book I talk about ‘personalisimo,’ that the leader starts with the person.  Who am I?  Where did I come from?  What are my values?  What is my vision for my future?  What do I want to contribute?  And, so, when you’re really talking about my history and who I am, that’s your foundation.  Now, I have done that kind of thing.  With, for example, the Greenleaf Center on Servant Leadership, when we were on their board, we did a timeline.  And there’s a book called Future Search, where you actually have to do a timeline.  Who are we as an organization?  Where did we come from?  But that’s so important to U.S.  citizens because how are they going to even understand why my culture is important to me, or why being black is important to a black person if they don’t even know who their grandfather was, where they came from, what their history is?  So, reclaiming your history is an important thing individually.  It’s important for our society so that we know the contributions of all the people who have built this country.  You know the whole thing about meritology.  And the reason we are having such a hard time with wealth with the black community is that black people built a lot of that wealth, but they didn’t get to participate in the bounty of it.  How do we reconcile our history and how do people really, you know, look history in the eye?  Look at Manifest Destiny, that said that people that weren’t white were inferior, and that white people had to save us and teach us because we didn’t know how to do things and they did.  They were superior.  It was imperialism.  How do you change that kind of thinking which still exists today?  Part of the problem I have is that I’m trying to change how people think.  If you ask me how to apply that in an organization, I would say, well, the way I’ve seen it done in corporations is that either you go through an exercise where people share their histories or you have every person once a month come in and talk about their history, bring pictures of their families and where they came from.  You have people really explore that and then share that, so that people know who they are, where they came from, what they value, what their vision is, where they want to go in the future.  It’s a different way of relating to people. 

Scarpino:         That history, the importance of that historical perspective, get a history lesson.  But you also note, and I think people know that history has also given rise to things like ethnocentricity and racism and segregation and so on and so forth, so is it really history that’s given rise to these things?  Or are they historical beliefs and actions of dominant groups like, you know, who in effect have not only driven the historical process but they write the history? 

Bordas:           Right, right, right.

Scarpino:         It’s their voice. 

Bordas:           That’s what we’re saying, that it’s been written from a white male perspective, leaving out women, leaving out people of color, leaving out our contributions and our values.  And so the first step in creating a multicultural society is to create a new history that’s a shared history of the people that are here.  A good example with Latinos that I think we’ve talked about is that Latinos were not only a third of the United States with the southwest, and we’re in Colorado right now, but it included Florida, Georgia, the San Juan Islands, Valdez, Alaska, parts of Georgia.  We’ve always been a multicultural nation, right?  And if you took in Louisiana, think about that, we would’ve been French, Spanish and English if those lands had stayed with the English and the Mexicans.  So we have to rewrite history that, because people go like, “Where are all these Latinos coming from?  Why do we have all these - why is the United States becoming a bilingual nation?”  Well, it’s our history.  Spanish was the first foreign language spoken in this hemisphere, or European language we would say.  It’s our history that we’ve always been part of this.  The fact of the matter is that Central and South America and the United States altogether, we’re the majority in this hemisphere, so of course there’s going to be a Latino flavor here.  But people are pushing back about these immigrants on the border, and that’s an issue, of course.  But I’m just saying, if they knew their history, they would understand that this was all one land at one point.  And that the cross - there’s been crossings back and forth, and the border has been open most of the time.  You know, if you go down to the ‘frontana,’ to the border, that’s a whole different country almost.  It’s a whole different way, where there’s a mixture of the two cultures.  And, so, it changes politically.  But the fact is, if people know their history, if they know what happened to black people, they would understand why black families are not intact.  They would understand the racist basis of the economic factors that created slavery rather than just thinking that black people aren’t good family people, or don’t have a good work ethic, or tend to be in jail because they -- it’s all got historical -- there’s historical reasons for all of that.   

Scarpino:         Again, talking about the history lesson, you argue that a person can’t just go to a seminar for a day and come out understanding why the old Eurocentric leadership models won’t work in a globalized world.  How should this understanding of a Eurocentric leadership model won’t work in a multicultural world, how does that really come about?  I mean, we can write books and so on, but that’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it?  How does this apply to corporations or universities or hospitals or...

Bordas:           Right, right.  I don’t know the exact percentage of Americans that have never been out of the United States, but it’s not a really high percentage, right?  But then you look at the younger generation and they all say they’re going to - they want to see every place on earth, right?  So, you have this whole paradigm that’s taking place now with the global world and with technology and communications where we are going to be interfacing with different cultures and ethnicities and nationalities, and we do every day, whether you’re taking an Uber ride, or you’re going to the 7-Eleven.  So that whole thing has completely changed.  It’s a matter -- and the women’s movement, this probably wasn’t that nice, but we used to say that we’re going to have to outlive the men because we live longer than men and some are not going to accept the change.  We have to admit that, particularly, perhaps, those that have the most to lose.  But the fact is, if you are at all in tune with what’s going on in the world today, we are moving towards a global society, and we are moving towards a mixed race, if you want to call it that, a mixed people.  You know, the millennial generation is 40 percent of children of color.  In 2045, we’ll no longer have a majority group.  We’re moving in that direction.  And a critical mass is about to happen, I believe, where people are going to be moving in that direction.  Yes, we have to go through some racial reckoning and some issues that we’re dealing with now which are part of the healing to become more whole as to who we are as a people.  But it is going in that direction, whether you’re looking at demographics, whether you’re looking at the continued building of wealth in black and Latino communities, which we are doing little by little, whether you’re looking at the advent of women into leadership, which we’re pretty much ready to make that shift now.  It’s going to happen and there’s a lot of reasons why it’s happening, including our economic system, which wants more diverse workers that are more educated and that have a different perspective.  But how you actually make that shift is going to be sort of like a paradigm thing, where little by little we’ll become a different society. 

Scarpino:         As you were talking, I was thinking, which I’m not sure I’m supposed to do that or not, but we both know just from watching the news or being on the internet that a number of U.S.  states have passed voter restriction laws, including my home state of Indiana.  And the number appears to be growing.  How does a trend like that fit into your understanding of leadership and multicultural leadership, and the trajectory you’d like to see the country on?

Bordas:           Yeah, well, you know, and I don’t why this is as relevant.  When you do community organizing, it’s like one out of ten.  You do really good if you get one out of ten.  It’s that kind of, asking people to do things and getting them involved and so of course I’m worried about them passing laws that restrict voting.  I mean, the alternative is to end up with some sort of a country where a few rich white people control, which we actually have in Congress kind of now, but control the society at the expense of a critical mass of people that are not part of their society.  And that’s called Apartheid.  That’s called slavery.  That’s called whatever you want to call it.  I think we need to make that choice.  I believe, because of our numbers, because of our ability to work together and to move this forward, and because of - and also because of I think there are enough people in the United States who agree that black people were mistreated, who agree that there should be something done, I mean I think the pendulum is swinging so that people will say, “No, we don’t want to live in a society where there’s 60,000 homeless in L.A,” and especially if the younger generation is given a chance to become the leaders of the society, that I think the pendulum will switch to the other side.  Can we guarantee it?  No, but that’s my life’s work.  And I think it’s the life’s work of a lot of people to keep moving this forward so that we get back to a more balanced and humane society. 

Scarpino:         I think the second rule of oral history is don’t lead the witness.  That’s not a rule, by the way, I made that up, just so if anybody’s watching this, but I’m going to do it anyhow.  What I’m thinking about here is many of the things that you’ve said and written about leadership.  We have these state legislatures who are largely white male, but the people who get elected to hold those offices are leaders.  You may not like what they stand for, but they’re leaders.  Is it possible to think of those states that are passing these voter restriction laws as a reaction of a certain type of leader and leadership that feels itself under siege as the country around it changes?

Bordas:           Yeah, that’s an interesting question, because I think, yeah, I think there are some people, particularly the white nationalists, that feel that they’re under siege.  I think it’s because they don’t understand the other system first of all, we talked about that, that it’s not about replacing them.  It’s about everybody having a place at the table and making it bigger, not smaller.  But I’m not sure that -- I forgot what you asked me, I’m sorry.

Scarpino:         No, no, it’s okay.  I mentioned all the states that have passed these voter restriction laws, and I indicated that the people who did it are state legislators who would be leaders.  Is this really a clash of leadership views, people who feel that their leadership is under siege by the changes you’ve just been talking about?

Bordas:           Right.  I just have to say I’m not so sympathetic about that, because of the 500 years of ethnocentric rule.  I mean, I have compassion for everybody, yes, but it’s a hard thing.  I mean this is really a crucial question that people are grappling with right now, because if white males are not willing to give up power, and we’ve certainly had a resurgence.  I don’t know if you remember in the ‘90s there was a really backlash to the women’s movement that I think really has set us back.  Women kind of decided they were going to be nice about their advancements instead of the way the women’s movement was pushing them forward.  But there’s always a backlash, and we’re in that backlash right now.  And I think, and I don’t want to get that political, but I think that Trump and the people that follow him, which are largely white, don’t want this change to come.  And they see it as threatening to their way of life.  But their way of life has been exclusive.  It’s included racism and discrimination.  It’s included incarceration of people.  It’s included a dichotomy in school and education and wealth.  And so continuing that type of social structure, particularly as the demographics change, is either not going to hold or we’re going to have a situation here where we have such a large underclass that they won’t be able to run their organizations and their companies.  Because people of color are still doing a lot of the work. 

Scarpino:         You mentioned the second of the eight ways is think ‘we’ not ‘I.’  How should leaders go about encouraging a culture of think ‘we’ not ‘I?’

Bordas:           Well, they have to start using the ‘we’ word.  I am working right now with a large American corporation where they changed all of their values to start with ‘we.’ And, so, that’s getting to be fairly common.  People are beginning to see that in order to get people on board and to really work together, they have to identify with and be part of and share in the system.  The way you do that, though, is by being more inclusive.  One of the things I recommended to them is to do a diversity check.  You go into a meeting and if there’s nobody there that even represents a different function in the corporation, you’ve got a problem because everybody’s going to be seeing things from the same perspective.  I was just working with a very high-up person in a university.  The vice provost restructured her department without talking to her.  This woman is looking for another job.  And when you start doing things like that, making changes, excluding people, not sharing the wealth in some meaningful way, people are going to leave, or people are going to stay but not be there, not give it their total commitment.  And, so, I think that corporations are now looking at the fact that they have – who are called knowledge workers, because they have more people that are engaged, that are educated, and those people want to be part of the decision-making process.  They want to be part of the organization and be recognized for what they contribute.  And if they don’t get that, they’re going to leave.  And people will actually find another job if they feel like they’re being disrespected, is what the word would be.  But yeah, organizations, as they move to that, need to look at how they hire, how they retain people, how they train people, what are the opportunities they give people, and not just have it be just for the people that are at the top. 

Scarpino:         You talk about flattening the leadership structure, explaining that successful work units will be those whose leaders view themselves as just some other part of the organization.  How do leaders go about flattening the leadership structure? 

Bordas:           Well, it’s happening.  Where it usually happens in hierarchical organizations like corporations is it happens in the different departments, so that your marketing department is actually functioning like a separate unit in a sense.  They integrate with the others, but internally - or I remember once meeting the man who was in charge of all the property acquisition for Chevron.  And it wasn’t towards half the dinner when I got it, he worked for Chevron; I thought it was his own company the way he was talking about it.  And so you empower people to work at the level that they’re at.  That doesn’t mean you don’t have some sort of an institutionalized structure, although eventually it would be better not to have so many layers.  But that people can function personally autonomously in some way, they’re empowered in some way, that their unit is and so is their department, so that you have some sort of an ability to control the work that you’re actually doing.  There’s nothing worse than getting work from somebody who doesn’t know your department and what you’re doing.  You’re being put on a team to do something that you know isn’t really what’s needed to be done because nobody asked the people that actually do the work. 

Scarpino:         That’s right.  You talk about help people learn to work together.  How do you help people learn to work together? 

Bordas:           Well, it’s interesting because, on Saturdays we’d have to clean the house, all six of us.  In those days, cleaning the house meant washing walls and beating the mattresses and all that, the yard work and everything.  But we all chipped in, in order to keep our house clean and together, you know, and help my mother out.  So, I learned to be a ‘we,’ I say, from when I was very young.  If you look at Latinos, you go to a Latino fiesta, and they don’t necessarily get babysitters in the old days, the kids are there and they’re passed from one person to another.  That’s how they become ‘we’s,’ you know.  We kind of laugh at Anglos who keep their kids separated and put them here, whereas Latino kids are very social, they’re learning people skills, and I was 3 years old, plus I grew up in a family of eight, so that whole sense of that I’m part of the group is embedded in who I am.  And I think even in smaller Latino families, you have the extended family that they relate to.  So, you learn to become a ‘we’ from a very young age.  And you learn to, you know, if you have a popsicle and somebody else doesn’t have one, they’re going to get half of it, that’s just the way it is.  And, so, you learn to be generous in that way.  The way you do it in corporations I think, again, or, and that’s not really what I’m writing about, by the way, I took the chapter out.  When I did the second edition of Salsa, Soul and Spirit, I took out the chapter on embedding this in corporations and put one in on the millennial generation.  I believe the change is not going to come through business.  It’s going to come through people movements, through the millennials, through demographic changes. 

Scarpino:         Just for the record, you revised the book.

Bordas:           Yes, Salsa, Soul and Spirit I revised.

Scarpino:         And it’s out?

Bordas:           In the second edition, yes, the second edition came out, like, 2013 or so. 

Scarpino:         Okay, alright then, I’ve read it, yes.

Bordas:           And, in that, I took out - I had had Whole Foods and a couple of organizations that were trying to be more flattened and all that in there.  But I thought after I had worked in this for a while, I thought it’s not going to come through the business sector, I don’t believe.  Maybe they’ll make a switch.  I think it’s going to come more through the educational system.  I’ve been doing a lot of work with educational systems that want to put in more collaboration, that the teacher is going to be seen as somebody who’s creating leaders rather than the students being consumers, that the children are more engaged, more cooperative learning where they’re learning together and sharing.  I think education will start making those kinds of moves as well.  But organizations can do it by incorporating more people, by having more process, by having more people, by recognizing them, by having more time off for people when they need it and that kind of thing, by having good benefits.

Scarpino:         Are there any organizations you can think of that have done this? 

Bordas:           Any organizations that I really would hold up as a model.  I can’t think of one, no. (laughs)  I’d have to think about that. 

Scarpino:         Your fifth way to practice multicultural leadership is minimize conflict by reminding employees they’re truly a family.  And you wrote, “...  by using the right leadership techniques, you can alleviate conflict so everyone works together, for the most part at least, as one big happy family.”  What are those right leadership techniques to get people to work together?

Bordas:           (Laughs) ...  As one big happy family, I think... 

Scarpino:         (Laughing)  I don’t want to sound facetious at all, I mean, I’m really trying to get you to expand on that a little.

Bordas:           I’m not sure that people would buy into my cultural perspective, but when you come from a collective culture, relationships are lifelong.  So, yesterday I saw someone who worked for me maybe 40 years ago.  I still know her, we’re still friends.  I wanted to know if she’d been to Puerto Rico, where she has a house, and how her son is doing.  There’s a whole different way of relating to people where you know who their family is.  That’s the first thing you ask, “How’s the family?”  And, so, you begin to form relationships.  And it’s in my Latino book, I call it personalisimo, that you relate to other people as a person and that you’re respected because of who you are as a person.  I’ll give you an example, and I don’t know if this is a good one, but, Raul Yzaguirre was one of the great leaders of our Latino organizations and community in the last century.

Scarpino:         Raul Yzaguirre.

Bordas:           Yeah.  And he gives an example of when he had to mortgage his house to make payments for the staff at National Council of La Raza, which became the largest Hispanic organization in the country.  And then my mentor, Bernie Valdez, when I went to visit him, he lived in this little house in the stadium, and he was considered the Colorado statesman for Latinos in the last century.  He was head of the school board; he desegregated the public schools.  When I was on the committee to choose the 10 top leaders of the last century in gender, he was the only one there and he lived in this little house.  I was shocked when I went to pick him up. 

Scarpino:         Bernie Valdez was your mentor?

Bordas:           Bernie Valdez was one of my mentors.

Scarpino:         And how did you meet this man who lived in a little house? 

Bordas:           Well, like I said, he was this huge Colorado statesman.  He was older than me, and I was in my 30s and he was training me to be a leader.  We were working with the Latino agenda at that time, and I ended up being vice president and he showed me how to do this.  So, I go to pick him up.  And the way he taught me was, we would have lunch and he would talk to me about different things and show me different things.  But the point I wanted to make was, here when I was going to go get him, I thought, oh, my goodness, I’m going to go get Bernie Valdez, and I drive up to this little house.  My friend Anna Jo Garcia lives three blocks from here, she’s in the same house she’s always been in.  I’ve been in this house for 42 years.  Could I afford a bigger house?  Yes, I could, but that’s not my values because I want people - and I tell people that one of the reasons you start with your history and where you came from is you want people to identify with you so they feel they can be leaders, too.  And if I’m living in some big house, and they don’t know that I’m an immigrant, and they don’t know that I worked my way through college, and I worked my way through high school, and all the things that I’ve done in order to be who I am, and that I went back in the Peace Corps to integrate my culture and history, they can’t identify who I am now.  So, there’s that whole idea of when you build an organization that’s built like family, you know these things about people.  When their kid graduates from high school, you write a check.  When they’re going to college, you help.  You know, I just bought a pair of boots for my friend who’s going to leave Albuquerque.  It’s a young girl that’s in high school that I’ve known since she was born.  I just bought her a pair of boots because she’s going to Boston, and she needed a nice pair of boots.  It’s that kind of commitment that you make as a Latino leader in your community.  The American Indians do it, and blacks do it because it’s a personal relationship that you have with people.  And, in business a lot of times, they don’t do that.  A Latina that works at a corporation was saying that she walked in on a Monday morning, and her boss walked right up to her and gave her an assignment.  And she said, “I was shocked.  He didn’t even say, ‘How was your weekend?’”  And, you know, it’s not that you’ve got to do those things, but it’s good leadership.  It’s good practices. 

Scarpino:         It’s good human relations. 

Bordas:           Well, people will do, and cover for you, and give you that extra mile, and help you when you need it, if you’ve done it for them.  It’s all about that.  You build a family by having those kinds of personal relationships.  And, of course taking time to allow people to get to know each other, whether it’s team-building exercises, or each person sharing something at a meeting.

Scarpino:         You talk about fostering a culture that is accepting of spirituality.  How does a leader do that?  I’m going to back up and ask another question first.  What do you mean by spirituality?  And then how does a leader do that?

Bordas:           I put the word spirituality in because I’m not talking about a faith tradition.  I think I’m talking more about, like two of the Latino values that I didn’t talk about earlier are respect, to respect every individual, and honesty, to always be truthful and keep your word.  That, to me, is a spiritual mandate.  But the biggest spiritual mandate that I feel I have is my social responsibility, my responsibility for others, to serve others.  Which is an old, old spiritual tradition, the idea that – and that’s what Jesus preached, that you’re here to help your brother and your sister. 

Scarpino:         By spirituality, you mean the obligation and the commitment to be helpful with others.

Bordas:           Social responsibility.

Scarpino:         Ok. 

Bordas:           Yes, that you’re responsible.  Like, if you come from a collective culture, then your spiritual responsibility is to help others, is to make sure other people have what they need in order to survive. 

Scarpino:         The reason I probed that a little bit is that, you know, a good part of the Latino culture, or population in the United States, Central America, South America, is or was Roman Catholic.  That is definitely not an institution that lives up to the leadership values that you’ve been describing.  You’re not talking about organized religion here when you’re talking about spirituality.

Bordas:           No, I’m talking about respect for the individual as a spiritual person, or as a person that has life, and has efficacy.  That you respect that, and you understand that -- there’s a really good quote that I have in my book about this.  All of the leaders that I have interviewed talk about their spiritual foundation as the emphasis that gives them the strength to keep going on, the inspiration. 

Scarpino:         The sense of right and wrong and morality and...

Bordas:           Yes, but it really is that whole sense of having not only that, but in leadership having a calling, believing that you’re here to contribute in some way, not to take, but to contribute.  And, so to me, even though Latinos are Catholic in the sense of that was the imposed church on the indigenous people that were here, that was part of the conquest, the church is very different.  If you look at the idea of Our Lady Guadalupe, or the female aspects, which she spoke of compassion, of caring for others.  She spoke of inclusion.  She said all the people that are going to come to this land, have been born in this land.  She also was both Spanish and Indian, which represents the merger of cultures, so she was the first woman of color in the hemisphere, if you want to say that.  That’s a different spirituality than just the Catholic Church, even though the Catholic Church incorporates the female aspect.  It does, it has Mary and the female saints, but it doesn’t incorporate the female aspects of compassion and care and some of the -- and nurturing and... 

Scarpino:         Well, I mean, I don’t want to go too far down this path, but I mean Catholic -- it’s been a while since I’ve been in church, but the Catholic Church I remember certainly didn’t treat women as equal human beings.

Bordas:           No, and that’s why I left.

Scarpino:         In fact, when I lived in Texas, I went to a Catholic church for a while, and I was one of the few men at mass.  And, so, they used to ask me to do things, and I said, “Those people are here every Sunday, those women, ask them.”  “No, no, we can’t do it, we need a man.”

Bordas:           Well, that’s so interesting that you say that because I left -- I told Father Marshall, the priest at Our Lady of Guadalupe, he wanted to know when I was coming back.  I said, “Well, call me when they ordain a woman and I’ll…” (laughs)  So, yeah, I’m not talking about organized religion.  I’m talking about acknowledging that every human being has a spirit, is worthwhile, should be respected, and should be treated, you know, as a brother or sister, or as an honored person. 

Scarpino:         You also talk about focus employees on a departmental or institutional vision.  I assume you’re talking about a shared vision and not an imposed one, how do you do that?   

Bordas:           Well, the Latino Policy Forum when they wanted to do a shared vision brought 500 people together.  And you break them up into groups.  I once did a similar thing for Rockville, Rockville, is it Rockville, in Illinois? 

Scarpino:         Rockford.

Bordas:           Rockford, Illinois.  They had a visioning thing that I worked with them on through the League of Cities.  So, you can do it with large groups of people, but you can also do it in small groups.  But what you’re talking about is people having a shared vision for the future.  I think what’s real important right now about the work I’m trying to do is to create a shared vision for the multicultural society that’s going to be so intriguing that people are going to want to go there. 

Scarpino:         Do you think that one of the qualities of an effective leader is the ability to encourage the followers to develop this shared vision?

Bordas:           Yeah, I do.

Scarpino:         Just have a point on the horizon to which we’re all marching?

Bordas:           Right, right, right.  No, and you have to have some input into that.  I still think there’s a role for the leader as spokesperson, the charismatic person that takes that vision forward.  But if it’s just the leader’s vision then people are not going to be committed to it.  It has to be a shared vision, then from that shared vision the values that the vision supports.  So, if you are going to be a ‘we’ culture, then you’re going to have to shift the way – I mean, you can’t be saying that we believe in our people and then exclude them and not make them part of the decision making, or not make them part of the process of doing work. 

Scarpino:         I keep thinking that you’re talking about a line from a famous document that says:  We the people in order to form a more perfect union...

Bordas:           Right.

Scarpino:         Well, people wrote those words, they held slaves and all sorts of things.  Do you think words like that have any meaning in the present? 

Bordas:           Well, so you have the vision, and you have reality.  And the tension between the two is called leadership.  Right?  In between the two, you have the vision, here’s where we’re going.  I said I’ve been doing a lot of work with educators.  And, so, the first thing I say to them is “As a leader, you’re not educating those kids for today.  The 10-year-old that walks into your classroom today is going to be 25 when we make this shift to the multicultural world.  So, you’re preparing this young person to live in 2045.  You’re not preparing them for today, you’re preparing them for the future.  You have to think of yourself as a leader, not working in what we’re doing today, but how do I prepare people to go into that more compelling vision that we have?”  So, if you have a compelling vision of an organization or a society where everybody contributes, they’ve got to have a good education so they’ll have the skills they need to be able to contribute.  So, you put things in place that can make reality -- that vision become a reality.  But if you’re a real leader, like I said, especially if when you’re talking civil rights or movement leadership, you’re asking people to contribute to something that may not happen in their lifetime.  And I am perfectly - remember the old law of the Iroquois Indians, that everything you do is for this generation, the next generation, and the seventh generation?  They believed a leader was focused on that future, and bringing people to that.  Maybe I’ll never see it.  I know I won’t see it.  I won’t see the multicultural world.  But I can contribute, and I can have that vision, and I can help make it a reality.  But, yeah, that is the conundrum of leadership.  You have a vision, you have reality, you have people here, how do you get them there?

Scarpino:         Alright.  And then you added an eighth, practice generosity not greed, and I think we’ve talked about that. 

Bordas:           The only thing that you might want to - you know, greed is a capital sin.  And in our society, when I say you’re respected for how you contribute, who you are as a person and your generosity, that’s 380 degrees different than respecting somebody because they’re rich and they live in a certain house and they have a country club, and they’re at Mar-A-Lago and you respect them because they’re rich and not because of your character.  And that’s a totally different way of looking at who a leader is. 

Scarpino:         We’ve talked about these eight points, and I did it with the following in mind: What do you see as the end goal of successfully implementing this model of multicultural leadership of these eight principles or eight goals?

Bordas            Well, first of all, becoming multicultural, which I am and a lot of people already are.  If you look at millennials, it’s the fastest growing identity.  You know my grandson is black and Irish and Latino and Indian and all this other stuff.  So, it’s the fastest growing identity.  And I believe that because I was able to access the Anglo educational system, and even the way I talk now and structure things comes out of the Anglo mentality because the Anglo mentality and the Anglo culture is a left-brain culture.  And I learned that.  And I always kid people that work with Latinos, I say, “No, we don’t know strategic planning or contingency planning.  There is no contingency.  We just had to make do with what we had.”   There is no assertiveness training, because we didn’t really assert ourselves.  In fact, our culture is indirect, we’re trying to be nice.  Latinos are too nice.  We’re too congenial.  We don’t speak up.  We don’t do that.  So anyway, but I can do both theoretically because I’m a multicultural person, you know?  And there’s no downside to learning about other cultures, because you can choose.  It’s conscious choice.  I love Latinos because they’re so people-oriented and they have so much fun.  I’m going to learn that, right?  I’m going to become more like that.  I’m going to participate in that.  I really love the American Indian culture because they’re so spiritually focused and they’re so connected to nature, and that’s one of the things that’s tearing our world apart.  Young people consider the earth and taking care of the earth the number one priority.  I’m going to start moving in that direction.  African-Americans, the way they have spirituality as their core, that the church has brought them forward, and that they saw their spiritual responsibility to be a good citizen and create good for other people, and I’m going to try and learn some of that.  All you’re doing is expanding your consciousness, and you get to choose which part of the multicultural society.  For me, I have a lot of difficulty with people that are my age, because I don’t believe you get old like that.  And so I have a lot of friends, most of my friends are young.  I said to one of my friends, I said, “You know, my goal...” she’s a young person, she’s 30...  I said, “My goal is to be a hip old person, how am I doing?”  She says, “You’re killing it.”  She says, “You’re killing it.”  Because I want to be able to relate to the younger generation.  I believe they’re the ones who are going to make this shift, right?  So, I don’t want to be seen by them as irrelevant, or not energetic, or dedicated to them, because I’m totally dedicated to helping that generation become what they can be.  So, there’s no downside to becoming multicultural.  If people can understand, for example the United States becoming a bilingual country, there’s no downside to that.  Twenty-six countries speak Spanish.  You’re only going to expand your brain.  You’re only going to learn more.  And by the way, you’re going to get another personality. 

Scarpino:         That’s true. 

Bordas            Because learning another language allows you -- I have a friend who learned Spanish and she said, “Oh my God, I’m so much fun in Spanish,” you know (laughs).  I think you have to have this vision of a world where people can, I like to say enjoy the cultural cornucopia that awaits us.  Participate in the jewels of all the different cultures that are here.  Men, there’s been a tremendous switch in men being able to be more connected to their families and children.  I mean they’ve changed tremendously through the female culture, by incorporating more... 

Scarpino:         So those Hispanic men who didn’t go to church when I was going 30 or 40 years ago, their sons are now going?  (laughs)

Bordas            No, I don’t know about the church part, but I bet their sons treat women a bit different, maybe, than they did, or listen to them more.  I always say to the young men, “I was born too early,” because even the vibration to me of a young man today is different than it was in my generation.  So, men have benefitted, whether it’s the fact that they can now -- you don’t have to wear a suit and tie and look like the IBM guy. 

Scarpino:         That’s right. 

Bordas:           Men can wear different colors.  Even how they dress now, right?  And their ability to share their feelings, it’s all accepted.  And that’s been good for their health.  Women are not doing so well, by the way (laughs), their health is getting worse as they become more masculine (laughs).  But I’m just saying, you know, I don’t see a downside, other than we’ve got to go through some sort of redistribution.  I don’t know what that’s going to look like, that’s the thing that we’re all struggling with is how... 

Scarpino:         Well, and that’s why I asked you about this.

Bordas            ...  how is institutionalized racism, institutionalized capitalism?  Because capitalism is an economic system.  It’s not a social construct of how you, you know, of the kind of culture you want to have.

Scarpino:         Although we... 

Bordas            We’ve made it that way.

Scarpino:         ...  we have organized our society in such a way. 

Bordas            Right, yeah, capitalism has taken over. 

Scarpino:         Okay.  I’m going to ask you some questions about yourself here, and we’ve kind of been doing that, but you were born in Nicaragua but you came to the United States as quite a young child, 3 years old, I think.

Bordas            Three-and-a-half. 

Scarpino:         Three-and-a-half.

Bordas            Or four.

Scarpino:         Small, a small person, with one language, I assume, that you were learning.

Bordas:           Yes. 

Scarpino:         Although, I will say that, I always liked to talk to small children when I was in Colombia because my Spanish matched up with theirs very well (laughs). 

Bordas            Of course.

Scarpino:         When I got to an adult, I started running out of words.  As you were growing up, a young woman in high school, college, did you think of yourself as a leader? 

Bordas            As I look back, I can see that I was.  But I don’t think that I had the concept of that.  What I thought was that I was just trying really, really hard, and that I could not disappoint my family because they had sacrificed so much.  So, I know I was trying really hard.  I’ll tell you, maybe I shared this with you, but when I was 13, my mother took me across town to get a scholarship to this academy, which I didn’t even know it was an academy, it was just a fancy school.  Then she got me a job working in the Catholic church as a babysitter during the masses.  So, we would get up at 5:00 in the morning, walk eight blocks to the church - we didn’t have a car – and I would watch the kids till 2:00 and I would get paid $15 a month which I gave the Mother Superior to get this really stellar education.  That’s why I’m talking to you today.  That was leadership, but I didn’t know it.  I was doing what my mother told me to do.  But I had a goal, I had a vision, I worked for it, I did well in that school. 

Scarpino:         I know this question about whether leaders are born or made is one that we could run around in circles on forever and get nowhere, but it does seem to me as though as quite a young person, you had qualities and traits that made you stand out a bit as a leader. 

Bordas            Well, you know, Latinos believe in destino. 

Scarpino:         But not every Latino woman was doing what you were doing. 

Bordas            No, I’m a cultural, what do you call it, right on the front line, it’s a cultural, not adaptive – cultural, just like a set breaker or whatever.  No, but you have to understand that I’m the youngest daughter, that I already told you my two sisters – one of them made my clothes, they did braces, they helped me, you know, grow up.  My mother was working and they were there.  I also had four brothers, so I had two brothers that were older than me, two brothers that were younger than me.  The studies show that in my generation, not Latinas but just women, had to either be tomboys, or go to an all-girls school.  So, of course I was a tomboy.  I had two brothers on either side.  I had to stand up for myself.  And I also went to an all-girls school.  And, so, in the Latino perspective, it’s called destino. Your destiny is pointing you in a certain direction, and certain doors are opening.  Now, it’s not prescribed, you don’t have to go through that door, you can say no.  But you are offered certain opportunities, particularly if you put your life at service at some point.  Now, what I did was I knew that my parents had sacrificed everything to bring me to this country and for me to get an education.  So come hell or high water, I was going to become an educated person.  And I like to tell the story that when I went to the University of Florida, this is 1960, never met another Latino.  I shared with you, I think, that I helped integrate the school...

Scarpino:         You did. 

Bordas            ...  when I was a junior.  So we’re sitting there at orientation and this white guy comes up with his khaki shorts and his madras shirt and loafers, and he’s up there and he’s the orientation person.  And he says, “Look to your right, look to your left, only one of you will graduate.”

Scarpino:         (Laughs) I’m laughing because when I started forestry school at the University of Montana, the guy who oriented us said, “Look to your left and look to your right, you know, and in one year one of those people isn’t going to be here.”

Bordas:           Yeah, alright (laughing), and that’s also the competitive system.  And they graded on a bell-shaped curve, right? 

Scarpino:         Oh yes.

Bordas            So, the joke that I say is, I looked to my right, I looked to my left and I said, “voy acitos,” “it’s going to be me.”  I’m the first one in my ancestry to sit in this chair.  My parents sacrificed their entire life for me to be here.  So, I’m really sorry, it’s going to be me.

Scarpino:         Those two guys, those are the two poor guys who aren’t going to make it? 

Bordas            (Laughing) In my opinion.  All I knew was I was going to graduate.  I don’t know if that’s leadership, per se, or whether my position in my family, being an immigrant, which is already can do, I’ve got to do it, risk-taking, new place, walking into a school when I was six and not knowing the language.  So, all those things were like a preparation for leadership, but I still had to say yes.  Then making a decision to join the Peace Corps when I finished college, I wanted to reintegrate my culture to learn my language because I was illiterate in my own language.   I said yes to those things.  I think that people have leadership qualities and may even be born with them, but you have to decide at a certain point what kind of leader am I going to be, what am I going to do with my life? 

Scarpino:         As you look at your career and self-assess it, what do you consider your strengths as a leader?  What are you really good at?

Bordas            Well, I’m really good at vision.  Obviously, my idea of the multicultural society, and I’m a conceptual person.  That’s why when you ask me about nuts and bolts stuff that it gets a little harder for me.  I can do it, but it gets a little harder because I live in the world of ideas, and that’s my contribution to make because not everybody does that.  I was just sharing with you that a lot of times Latinos are not strategic in this country, and there’s certain reasons for that.  One is, 70 percent are working class, working with all of these issues.  Forty percent of our community is immigrants.  We are so busy caught in the crossfire of all the things we need to deal with, we don’t get to the next level, which is what do we do about all these issues and how did they get here?  How do we resolve them?  How do we build something different?  I think I’m really good at that.  In the ‘70s when I envisioned an organization called Mi Casa, I stayed 10 years and built it.  So, it wasn’t just that I was a visionary for it, but I brought seven women together and we became the founders, and then I was still the one that was doing the implementation.  But so I had that idea of a vision.  The same thing with the National Hispano Leadership Institute, a vision of Latinas becoming leaders at a higher level.  I think my gift as a leader, now I’m president of Lideramos, which is trying to start leadership programs across the country for Latinos.  That’s my non-profit work right now.  But that’s a vision.  My vision is, if we get enough Latinos with 65 million of us in this country, if we get enough Latinos trained in civic contribution, community leadership, culturally based, the kind of leadership that I’m talking about that’s going to help people, we’ll be able to help move this paradigm where we’ll become a different kind of society that will incorporate some of the values that we’re bringing into the mainstream.  I think my biggest contribution is that I can envision the future that way.  And then, that I have the stamina, or the continuity, the capacity to stay long enough to try to get that vision into some sort of a reality. 

Scarpino:         Do you think that people, Hispanics, people who are not white Anglo-Saxon protestants can integrate into the mainstream and still retain who they are in a meaningful way?  Can they integrate themselves into the mainstream and at the same time retain who they are in a meaningful way without losing the essence of being Hispanic, and all the things that we’ve been talking about for the last hour-plus?

Bordas            I think that’s part of the tension.  There’s an admonition, I guess you want to call it, in communities of color, it’s:  Never forget where you came from.  Never forget where you came from.  Because we know that if you forget where you came from, like Raul Segarra again, he says what good is it going to do you to gain all these material things and then to lose your soul, or to lose your culture, or to lose who you are?  We have words for that: Uncle Tom, Oreo cookie, banana, coconut, that all means brown or black or yellow on the outside, but white on the inside. 

Scarpino:         There’s also a word called ‘melting pot,’ which means that all these people with different cultures sort of came together and became some amalgam of exactly the things you’ve been talking against.

Bordas            Yes, and I say in my book, maybe that was necessary when our country was first forming and people had to come here and build a new nation.  I think it’s very painful to give up your ancestors.  I think that’s one of the reasons our country doesn’t have the kind of roots it really needs in order to establish itself.  You know, Germans were the community that, we have the most people of German descent in this country from the immigration.  And that’s an incredible culture.  My sister married a German who was president of the German Club and they went to Germany.  I always say the Germans love us because we loosen them up, and we love them because they give us structure.  Again, I’m just talking about the benefits of multiculturalism.  We get more structure from the Germans, and they love tango and all this.  Again, there’s no downside in that.  But I was bringing that up for a point...  what were we just talking about?  I was talking about this thing, but you asked me a question. 

Scarpino:         I asked you if... 

Bordas:           Oh, yeah, don’t lose yourself.  So, you don’t have to lose yourself.  It’s an add-on process.  We’re only using, they say, 10 to 15 percent of our mind.  That’s been kind of discussed these days.  But we have incredible potential.  Human beings have unlimited potential that we’re not using.  So, bringing on a new culture, whether it’s me learning structure and how to do budgets and how to be sequential or having more ‘I’ so that I plan ahead about what -- you can contribute better if you have a good sense of ‘I’ actually.  The analogy is a basket, where each strand is strong and holds together and then makes a beautiful collective.  But each strand has to be strong.  Nobody is telling individuals they shouldn’t be all they can be, but in service to the collective, or as part of.  Yeah, I think it’s real important to know who you are and that this loss that took place in the United States is one of the reasons people can understand why do they want their culture, I had to give up mine.  But it’s a wound.  I think it’s a real wound, if people would really stop and think about it.  I lost my grandfather. 

Scarpino:         When you lived in Florida you went to a Catholic school, right, not a public school?

Bordas            Yes. 

Scarpino:         It was an all-girls school. 

Bordas            For high school.  When I was little it was not.

Scarpino:         I was going to ask about the public school system, but you didn’t go to it so I’m going to let that drop.

Bordas            Well, I will say this about the Catholic church.  It took me a long time to reconcile, because I am a deeply spiritual person.  But it actually was the nuns that taught me, and they were pretty oppressed nuns, if you look back.  They were pretty much slaves.  So, one of the ways I reconciled it, I said, “Oh, I’m an educated woman because of the women who gave up their lives in order to teach me.” And I was once teaching at Marquette University and the gentleman came up and he said, “I want to thank the people that prepared you.”

Scarpino:         And it was the sisters. 

Bordas            It was the sisters, it was the good sisters. 

Scarpino:         As a leader, have you ever mentored other people?

Bordas            Oh yes, I’ve mentored many, many people.  One of the things I decided after -- probably I was in my 40s, that I would set up systems for mentoring.  And, I mean I still have a lot of my students call me “Tia Juana,” and “Aunt Juana,” because that’s the connection in the Latino community to someone who you are close to who is not necessarily a relative, but it’s not hierarchical.  It’s more lateral.  But anyway, I had a program that I did for 10 years, and I considered it the gift that I was going to give Denver because I’ve lived here my adult life.  And it was called the Circle of Latino Leadership.  And the way it was structured was that the women were emerging leaders and I -- we had 165 graduates -- and I didn’t do it all myself after the first couple of years because it went for 10 years, but we found every single one of those women a mentor.  Every one of them.  And some of them were pretty high-level people, women who said, “Yes, I’ll do that.” So here you have these emerging leaders being mentored by these advanced career women, and then those young women had to make a commitment to mentor two youth.  And then we had a thing called “The Madrinas,” which I would consider myself that now, which is a godmother of the community.  So, we had the godmothers, which were the older elders that would come in and talk about their times.  I see my mentoring now more like that, in creating systems.  Because, yeah, I could mentor a few people, but I helped put together a program where 165 women got matched with mentors that could help them grow, and some of them really benefited from those relations.  Yes, I still do mentor people, but I also believe that my role now is to try to create systems where people -- and I don’t like the word ‘mentor,’ by the way, because it implies hierarchy, and that’s why I said I would rather use Tia Juana as my nombre with my students is I’m the aunt.

Scarpino:         When you were engaged in this activity that I’m calling ‘mentoring’ and you’re calling ‘Tia Juana’ ...

Bordas            Well, it’s allyship now, they call it ‘allies.’

Scarpino:         Ok, alright.  Did you still recognize that you were, in effect -- let me ask it a different way.  Does mentoring always have to be hierarchical?  Can you mentor somebody without... 

Bordas            Well, I’m just saying the old concept of mentoring is one up/one down, and it was also used for the transmission of power, money and authority. 

Scarpino:         Yeah, yes.

Bordas:           So, me, I would pick my mentee, and theoretically in the male system of hierarchy, they would then take care of me.  You see what I mean, as they went up.  And, so, that’s the reason that the word ‘mentor’ - I like the circular idea where everybody’s helping each other.  I’m getting helped by somebody, I’m helping somebody else, and then we have some way-showers who have, you know, gone forward.  So, yeah, I really think the concept of mentorship has to change.  And it was the LGBTQ two-s’s community that came up with allyship.  And allyship is that I’m an ally for you.  The second thing is, is that allies agree to help change the systems that create the problems that we have.  So, for example, if I’m mentoring you and you need to get an education, then perhaps I’m also involved with seeing what I do about an educational system that’s so expensive that the people I mentor can’t go to?  Do I find them scholarships?  Do I get on a board that deals with this kind of issue?  What do I do?  Because an ally, especially in a corporation, an ally is supposed to help change the systems that create the needs for people, particularly of color, to have mentors to show them the way.   

Scarpino:         I told you when we visited the first time, and it’s been a while, that I had talked to some of your colleagues whose names you gave me, and one of them was Roger Sublett.  He said that – I’m going to say mentored again, but he said – because these are his words – he said that, “Among the things that you’ve done,” and he said, “she mentored some Caucasian males.” Did you do that, and why?

Bordas:           I may have done that, but I don’t know if I was as successful as I wanted to be (laughs).  Yes, here’s what I did.  I was the first Latina faculty member hired at the Center for Creative Leadership and I was 50 years old.  And I had never worked outside of the Latino community.  I had worked for health and hospitals but in Latino clinics.  So, I had worked for a dominant culture, and of course you know I grew up in the public sector and in the non-profit sector and not the corporate sector.  And, so, when I went to the Center for Creative Leadership, believe it or not, I would be teaching classes of 24, where 15 at least, maybe 20, were white males.  Yes, and so I figure that’s where I really learned leadership in the sense of, if I’m only leading Latinos, I have an edge there, right, and I also have a certain credibility.  But to try to lead white males, being who I am, I had to know my stuff, right?  And, so, I considered teaching there the thing that really gave me my credentials in being able to teach and apply leadership.  It also showed me the lack of material on how people of color lead, particular how Latinos lead, because all the books were written by white males and they weren’t dealing with this different kind of leadership.

Scarpino:         When were you there? 

Bordas:           Well, I was 50 years old, so it was 1992. 

Scarpino:         There wasn’t a lot in the leadership literature then on people who were not white, no.      

Bordas:           No, and that’s...

Scarpino:         I was trying to think of something while you were talking and I can’t.

Bordas:           Right, and so I must say that I always give credit to Robert Greenleaf.  For those that listen to this and don’t know who he was, he not only coined servant leadership, but he was the head of training for AT&T before divestiture.  And they offered him to be a vice president, and he said, “No, I can do much more good in the corporation by training people and being in touch with people here.”  Well, when I saw The Servant as Leader, and what I write is that he brought a very old form of leadership into a modern context.  And as soon as I saw servant leadership, I said, “That’s what I do.”  But we didn’t have words because -- and it’s not true in South America -- we have intellectuals in South America -- but in the United States, Latinos are just getting to the point where we have this intellectual capital.  We’re just getting to the point like, for me, I’m the pinnacle of education in my family, but I now have a legion of nephews and nieces and my three daughters have advanced degrees.  Once you open that door, you know, then other people can come in.  But there was no literature.  But when I read Robert Greenleaf and then when I read James MacGregor Burns’ work on transformational leadership, I had found the two leadership forms that related to people of color.  But at the same time, I was working with Roger Sublett and Lorraine Matuszak with the Kellogg Scholars, and so there were all these white males.  And when I would argue with them, they said, “Juana, you’ve got to write, because from our perspective, in our community, if it’s not written about, if it’s not a model, if it’s not research, it doesn’t exist.”

Scarpino:         That’s right. 

Bordas:           Again, that’s me learning from the while male how to do things.  And I’m hoping they learned from me how to do things.  When I was vice president of the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, one of my contributions was that Larry Spears always used to like to have everything in Indianapolis, and I would beat my drum and say, “Rule number one for diversity is access.  Access.  If we can’t get to the table, if you can’t put it where we can participate, you ain’t gonna have it.  It’s access, first, right?”  And, so, then they moved the conference.  We’d go to different places, and we ended up in Dallas where we had more participation of different communities. 

Scarpino:         Just for people who will listen to this, you mentioned in Indianapolis, the person you were working with there was... 

Bordas:           Larry Spears.

Scarpino:         And who is Larry Spears?

Bordas:           Larry Spears, here’s another one, this is why I’m so into that being multicultural is a conscious choice and it’s a matter of consciousness.  Do I really believe that all of God’s children are equal?  Do I really believe that everybody has potential?  Do I really believe in the character of the person that I can develop and not the skin, etc.?  So, Larry Spears, when I was on the Servant Leader board, I told him I wanted to begin to write, and he was the first one who offered me to put a chapter in the book Reflections on Leadership on servant leadership, and I wrote a piece on finding your personal purpose.  And I used the Native American vision quest as an analogy, because in the Native American community you’re sent out as a very young child.  Latinos believe in destino.  American Indians say, “Okay, you’re going to be an adult now, you go out there and sit out there in the wilderness till you know why you’re here, what you’re going to do with your life, and what your name is.  How are you going to contribute to the tribe?”  See, every adolescent should be given that opportunity.  And it changes, it’s organic.  Every time I take a step forward, you know, something different comes.  I never knew I would be a writer.  But it was white males that encouraged me to write.  So that’s why I say, when you get people that are enlightened, that care about humanity, it doesn’t matter what their color is. 

Scarpino:         I asked you about your strengths as a leader.  And now I’m going to ask you, as you self-assess your career, are there any aspects of your leadership that you feel didn’t come up to your own expectations? 

Bordas:           Yeah, I would say for example, with Lideramos, I have been doing, we call it low bono, but it’s pretty pro bono work for five and a half years.

Scarpino:         (Laughing) Sorry, I’m going to steal that term.

Bordas:           Really low bono, we’re talking $30,000 a year for almost a full-time position.  But anyway, about two years in, the board looked at me and said, “We’ve never done a startup.”  And one of my gifts as a leader, because I’m Latina, because I’m an immigrant, because we have the highest, the highest, we’re the fastest-growing small-business sector in America.  And Latina women are even faster than the men.  So, I have an entrepreneurial spirit.  My sister started a, you know she sewed and then got a little sewing shop.  My mother opened up a nursery in our home and took care of kids so she could have her own little business.  It runs in my blood.  And it runs in the Latino blood.  So, all of a sudden they’re saying to me, “We don’t know how to do a startup.”  Well, I mean I knew I was a social entrepreneur.  I knew that Mi Casa, I stayed there for 10 years and helped build, quote, it’s a business but it’s a non-profit business.  But I sometimes don’t feel like I have the -- I get out of synch with my followers because I assume that they’re ready to move in that direction.  And you know what I tell leaders?  It’s easy to tell it, hard to live it.  “Leaders have intrinsic motivation, that’s why you’re a leader.  Your job is to help other people get intrinsic motivation.  That’s your job.”  You kind of light their fire.  I think one of my drawbacks has been that I think I expect too much from people and don’t really understand, you know, have the patience to understand that development takes more time than I would like it to.  I think that has hindered me sometimes because people, you know, feel like I’m pushing them too hard.

Scarpino:         Do you think intrinsic motivation is a quality of successful leaders, or is a quality that distinguishes successful leaders? 

Bordas:           I think you have to develop intrinsic motivation.  Because if you don’t have that, then, when the challenges come, when the barriers come, when it takes 10 years - like I say, you know, I was only 35, 36 years old, and if somebody would’ve said, “Sweetheart, you’re going to be here 10 years,” I probably would’ve walked out the door because that would’ve been a third of my life almost.  You see what I mean?  So, you have to have that intrinsic motivation.  We were talking about Frances, well I think Frances Hesselbein, but for sure Federico Pena said this.  When he was mayor, they kept asking him what else he wanted to do.  He said, “I’m just going to be the best mayor of Denver I can be every day until I leave this office.”  So, it’s that kind of idea.  I’m going to be the best director of Mi Casa every day, and it’s a day-by-day commitment for that leadership.  But I don’t think I knew that at the time.  I look back and I say, it’s that intrinsic motivation, that determination that you’re going to reach that goal that defines you as a leader really. 

Scarpino:         Can anybody be a leader?

Bordas:           Anybody can do leadership.  And I stress this a lot, like the schools I’m working with now, I say, “The person that cleans your school and makes it beautiful for when people walk in they feel like they’re working in a beautiful place and a good place, those people are leaders.”  My mother taught me that an immigrant woman that cleaned floors was the greatest leader I’d ever meet because she had that vision for her children and what we would become.  And she was willing to sacrifice her life every single day so that we could get there.  So, she was a leader.  You know, my sister that sewed clothes, she would say, “Oh a woman comes in here and I look at her, and then another one comes in and this one who’s actually heavier, but she carries herself with pride, looks better than the heavier [SIC] one.” So, my job is to get women to walk with pride, to really understand that if they believe in themselves, they’re going to look better.  It’s not always the clothes.  And she would say things like that.  My other sister went down to Central America and helped Indians learn how to build furniture and make pottery and all that.  She was a leader.  They were all leaders, but in their own way.  The person that cleans the building, the person that interfaces first with the customer or the student, what an important role, right?  The teacher in the classroom.  The salesperson that makes sure that there’s enough volume that people are going to get paid.  All of us have something to contribute.  And if you value that person and honor that person and let them know that what they’re doing is important, then I think that leadership quality can come out.  There’s a big difference in someone who cleans because they want the place to be beautiful for the students, and people who are just doing it because they have to.

Scarpino:         I was thinking as you were talking, I normally don’t do this but, my son-in-law is a busy guy, and he has a maid come into his house and she speaks Spanish.  And, nobody ever talks to her because they don’t speak Spanish.  So I said, “Hello,” and I said, “my wife and I...” (speaks Spanish).  And this lady, because I spoke to her – that’s half my Spanish vocabulary -- she was just so happy that somebody would at least try.  I didn’t know what she was saying, she was talking too fast.

Bordas:           It’s very painful to me when I think about how my mother was treated because that woman is a leader.  She’s cleaning that house so her kids can get an education.

Scarpino:         Exactly. 

Bordas:           She left her home and everything that she had so that her children could have a better life.  And that’s leadership, you know.  And, so, I feel like if we can only do that, to begin to see that everybody contributes in some way, that we’ll have a better society.  Because it doesn’t matter if it’s the gardener.  It doesn’t matter if it’s the guy picking up your garbage.  What the hell are you going to do with all the garbage if that person doesn’t come?  And, so, that person should probably make more money than the god-durn CEO that’s sitting in the air-conditioned office.  Why aren’t we paying people for how hard the job is, right?  (laughs).

Scarpino:         I was going to say, if you could make that happen...  Alright, so, one of the other people that I talked to in 2019 was a friend of yours and a colleague, Alicia Cuaron.

Bordas:           Cuaron, yeah, yeah.

Scarpino:         And she told me about some of the qualities that she thinks makes you stand out as a leader.  Now, I’m paraphrasing here, but I think I did it pretty accurately.  She said that when you interact with others, you possess a talent for bolstering confidence, empowering and inspiring, and she said you have the ability to persuade others to look at themselves and move beyond themselves.  And then, in this context, she used the Spanish phrase that she felt best described you and your ability to inspire others as a leader – ‘si se puede,’ and yes it can be done, or yes we can.  Now, I’m going to, for the sake of full disclosure, anybody using this interview this phrase, si se puede, is important in the history of working-class struggle among Latino peoples.  It was certainly the rallying cry of the United Farm Workers, adopted by co-founders Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez.  So, here’s the first question:  Is your friend right?  Does ‘si se puede’ accurately describe you as a motivator and a leader?

Bordas:           I think going back to my - and I think it’s just a very deep spiritual belief for me, is I believe that every human being has a soul and I just have the utmost respect for people, particularly if they’re willing to come help and work and do good for others.  So, when I see them, yes, I see potential, I see goodness, I see someone who can contribute.  I see beauty and energy.  So, I think, because I can see that in people, it brings that out of them. 

Scarpino:         If this phrase accurately describes you as a leader, how do you do it?  I mean, as you think about yourself as a motivator of other human beings, how do you get them to see this, si se puede?

Bordas:           Si se puede, you have to understand means, ‘yes we can,’ not just ‘I can.’ So, it’s back to the collective.  And it’s also an important phrase, it’s one of the principles of leadership I use in my Latino book, because it really symbolizes the fact that our leadership has to be change-oriented, because we’re marginalized because of position we have in society.  So, we want society to change.  So, that’s the first thing, that Latinos are involved in social change if they’re leaders of their community.  Because you can Latino and a leader, but not a Latino leader.  A Latino leader is somebody who’s recognized as a leader by their community and works in order to advance the community.  Do you see the difference?

Scarpino:         I do.

Bordas:           I could be the president of a corporation and be Latino, but not be a Latino leader if not recognized by my own people.  So, I think that the way - I try to - when a person tells me something that they’ve done, for example, Maria was telling me that – no, it wasn’t Maria, it was Linda Olson telling me that when she first became mayor of Englewood that she made it a point, and she said, “I was almost going to lose the election I thought,” because she had just become mayor, “I wasn’t sure that this was a good thing to do,” but she closed the street between these two hospitals where people go that have had injuries, it’s Craig, it’s a real important hospital to help people with, what do you call that when...

Scarpino:         Rehabilitate?

Bordas:           Yes, but it’s physical therapy.

Scarpino:         Physical therapy.

Bordas:           She went back last week because it was disability month and they were signing all these new bills for the disabled, and they did it at the Craig Center because it’s pretty well known nationally.  And she said she looked in there and she could see that now it was this beautiful parkway where people were going back and forth and were able to do their therapy and walk, and I said, “That’s why you’re the great leader that you are.  Not only did you take a risk and do something that might not be popular, but you did it with the right intention to help people.  And see, you were blessed to be able to go back and see what a contribution that was.”  So, me telling her that, she probably never even put it together that she had done this great courageous thing, but she had, right?  So, when people tell me or share something with me, like I have one of my young leaders from the Circle of Latina Leadership who is now the first person of color and the first Latina to be a part of the administration of the Denver public libraries, that’s huge, right?  And for me to say to her, “I always knew that.  I met you when you were still in college.  I always knew you were going there.”  And I did.  And when she was in college, I told her she was going there, you see what I mean?  So, being able to see people’s potential and then verbalize it for them, because a lot of times they don’t know.  And then you also have this thing, both for women and people of color, that were humble, that we’re not thinking about oh, I did this, I did that.  And with other people pointing that out to you, I think it elevates your own sense of self as a leader.

Scarpino:         You’ve done a great deal of work with Hispanic women.  Are there any unique or special challenges or opportunities associated with encouraging that group of individuals to think in terms of si se puede?           

Bordas:           Yeah, and you know si se puede means that we’ve been going at this for 500 years, and that little by little -- poco a poco is another leadership trait, little by little by little we’re going to get there.  Again, that’s why I think history is so important.  I have a historical timeline where I walk Latinos through the last century and how we got to where we are.  And, so, I just did that for the Young Hispanic Corporate Achievers, and I did it online so I didn’t know how it was going to work.  You know that challenge with Covid.  So, I was listening to their graduation online, and the young man who was chosen to speak said that when he went through that timeline and he realized what his parents have had to go through, and what our community had had to go through to become who we are, right, all of the challenges of being discriminated against, about not having organizations, about not having people in positions of influence and all that, he said, “When I saw that, I realized, I realized what I could do and how far we’ve come.”  So, the message has to be:  We can do this because look where we came from. 

Scarpino:         That’s back to your first principle; know your history. 

Bordas:           Yeah, it is, but also know your history so that you can know how far you’ve come and how far you can go.

Scarpino:         Right. 

Bordas:           The other thing is that change happens faster.  As we know, as you build this momentum, we’re reaching critical mass.  It’s going to go really fast.  But what good does it do if you don’t know your values, you don’t know your history, you don’t who you are, you don’t know how you got here, and you don’t know what your contribution to make is in the future, because there’s a reason for all this happening.  And, so, young people need to be able to understand their own personal history, because that’s how they connect to the history of the people of their own society and their own community.

Scarpino:         One more question based on talking to your friend Alicia Quaron.

Bordas            Quaron.

Scarpino:         Quaron.  She told me, at least according to the notes that I took, that pride in your culture is one of the things that distinguishes you as a leader and a person.  So, she suggested that I ask you the following question, so I’m giving her credit for this.  The question she wanted me to ask you is:  How does someone integrate into the larger cultural and political system in the United States without giving up what they value in their own culture?  Which, in your case, includes a bilingual lifestyle. 

Bordas:           Well, again, we’ve talked about how in my world view and my perspective, I’m value-added (laughs).   

Scarpino:         (Laughing) Talk about borrowing something from the dominant culture. 

Bordas:           I mean I obviously, you know, have been educated in the university structured through the white Anglo-Saxon system.  I know that system.  I’ve mastered it, I think, because of where I am in my society, in my career.  But I’m going to add value as a Latina.  I’m going to, let me see, I’ll tell you, I have to think of one that would actually work.  (Pause)  I don’t know if this is a good -- I have to think of how I add value that people might recognize right off the...  (Pause)  This is not a good example, but I’ll give you this one because it’s coming to me.  So, when I was in my middle or late 40s, I got asked by the state chamber of commerce to be part of their strategic planning group.  And there was only myself and another woman, and one black man who was basically...

Scarpino:         That’s the state of Colorado?

Bordas:           State of Colorado, yeah.  And so it was a big deal because it was all these businessmen.  And what would happen, it was called CACI, the Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry, they would do this plan, and then they had three or four lobbyists that would actually lobby for the plan, which I always thought would be a great idea for Latinos.  Have a plan and then have a lobbyist that represents us, right?  And, so, everybody had to make a contribution.  And of course one of the guys was Peter Coors.  Of course, Peter Coors can make a much bigger contribution than me. 

Scarpino:         Coors Brewery. 

Bordas:           Coors Brewery.  And so I made this contribution and I quoted the Bible.  And I was talking about the time when Jesus really said that the widower who gave what she could was actually giving more than anybody else.  And these white men loved it!  They said, “You know, Juana, we’d never quite thought of it that way, that everybody can make a little contribution and that their contribution, because, you know they don’t have as much perhaps” -- I don’t think they put it that way – “but that their contribution, because it comes from their heart and because it comes from -- it’s the same amount as we’re making, it’s just a different value.”  And I thought that was really interesting because I was a little embarrassed that I couldn’t give more.  But I thought that they need to know that I’m giving what I can.  I don’t know if that’s a good example, but I think it really changed the way they looked at me because they thought, you know, she’s pretty smart if she can tell us she’s not going to give very much money and have us go, like wow, that was really far out (laughs). 

Scarpino:         Well, I can sympathize with that.  I’ve been in positions where I’ve had to say I’ll serve on your board, but this is as much as I can give.  So, we have some standard questions that we ask people at the Tobias Center, and I don’t want you to think that this is coming out of left field.

Bordas:           I have to tell you a couple of other things that goes with that one.  I think that one of my hallmarks of leadership is celebration and using music.  I was the first one to use music at the Center for Creative Leadership.  Of course, this was 35 years ago, but I was the first one to use music and movement as part of my teaching because that’s part of my culture.  Latinos are kinetic learners.  I remember one time I had a group of men, mainly white men, and I was having them move to the right and then move to the left and then move to the right.  And one of the guys said, “Oh my God, she’s got us dancing!”  That may not seem like an important breakthrough, but it’s a very big breakthrough in the multicultural world. 

Scarpino:         With this white guy, it would’ve been an important breakthrough (laughs).

Bordas:           Exactly.  But I mean the idea of music and celebration.  And then another time I was in a class with mainly white men and, yeah it was all white men, there might have been another woman, and it was Cinco de Mayo, and I went out and bought guacamole and chips and all this stuff and had a celebration ready for them when they came back from class.  And I was actually a student at that time in the class.  I think doing those kinds of things, it emphasizes that I’m value-added.  I’m going to give more.  Yes, I’m going to participate.  Yes, I know your system.  But guess what, I love people, I love celebration, I’m an innovator and I’m creative because I have that si se puede spirit.  I’m an immigrant.  So, all I keep saying is that I am adding to rather than not being able to keep up anymore.  Now, it took a long time to get there, but I can keep up now.

Scarpino:         Here’s the question that I want to ask you.  It’s two parts.  One, do you think leaders should read?  And number two, what do you read?

Bordas:           Yeah, that is a hard question for me since I got on the computer and I’ve become a writer because my eyes are so tired.

Scarpino:         Well, but you have a past, you know. 

Bordas:           Yes.  I must say that -- do you want me to put the air-conditioning on?

Scarpino:         No, no, I’m okay.  If you want to put it on, go ahead.

Bordas:           No, I’m fine, it’s just that I like my house hotter than most people like it.  Yes, I think, in all honesty, I did a voracious amount of reading when I first got into leadership.  I also have all the books right now because I’m writing on the multicultural transformation, so I have the How to Be an Anti-Racist.  I have the book Bias.  You know, I’m looking at all the literature on racism and how you make that change in leadership.  So, I think, and I don’t know if this is true or not, but they say that children that learn to read in school always see reading as educational and not for pleasure.  So, I don’t read much for pleasure, I basically read a lot of books -- and I’m trying to think if I’m doing a leadership book right now that would be -- well, like right now I’m reading a book called, I think it’s called “In My Turn” and it’s about the first Dominican - you know we have a lot of Dominicans coming in from the Dominican Republic now.  The first Dominican, she’s an anchor on Univision.  And when she interviewed the Ku Klux Klan, and what her life was like, because I want to know more about Afro-Latinos.  So that’s the kind of reading I do.  I figure out what it is that I want to write about as well and try to figure out what people have written. 

Scarpino:         I read about a lot of history for pleasure.

Bordas:           And what I do, by the way now, is I watch like the History Channel, and I try to watch as much as I can of things that are on YouTube and so forth and on TED Talks so I don’t have to use my eyes as much for reading. 

Scarpino:         I’m going to ask you some questions about growing up, but I’m going to, again, because most of the people who are going to look at this are going to be, you know, Americans.  You were born in a small mining town in Nicaragua in 1942.  One of seven children raised by your parents.          

Bordas:           I’m one of eight children.

Scarpino:         Eight children, I’m sorry (laughs), bad research.  Because I would imagine some of the people who are going to look at this might not be sure where Nicaragua is, so I’m going to say that Nicaragua was ruled by Anastasio Somoza Garcia from the late 1930s till his assassination in September 1956.  He was supported by the United States.  Several US companies benefited from access to Nicaraguan resources.  A lot of poverty, concentration of wealth in the hands of relatively few families.  When the last Somoza was deposed by the Sandinistas in 1979, the family’s estimated worth was somewhere between $500 million and $1.5 billion.  In 1972, an earthquake destroyed nearly 90 percent of Managua.  And you are from Nicaragua.

Bordas:           Yes.

Scarpino:         So, what is the name of the Nicaraguan village where your family lived before migrating to the United States? 

Bordas:           Bonanza.

Scarpino:         Really?  It was a mining town.

Bordas:           Bonanza, Nicaragua.

Scarpino:         Was that an English word that they just Hispanicized?

Bordas:           I actually think Bonanza is a Spanish word that the English.

Scarpino:         Well, I guess that’s a fitting name for a mining town.  So, your family was the first to move to the U.S., followed by your mother and your siblings.  Do you happen to know when your mom moved to the U.S., what year? 

Bordas:           Yeah, I’m thinking it was probably 1946, because I was born in ’42, but my birthday is in August so I think it was that year. 

Scarpino:         I just did a lecture on oral history and told my students never to ask somebody for a date because they won’t remember, so I just violated my own rule.             

Bordas:           No, a date is good because like with the Center for Creative Leadership, I introduced music, but that was in, let’s see, because the dates are important, that was in 1982.  I’m sure they use it now, but like, as a frontrunner, I was trying to incorporate a different way of learning. 

Scarpino:         What were your parents’ names?

Bordas:           Maria and John. 

Scarpino:         What did your father do in Nicaragua?

Bordas:           I am actually French-Nicaraguan, just to make the story more interesting.  My father’s father, Albert, came from Nicaragua.  At that time, which is difficult even to even think about, but the Gulf of Mexico was this incredible trade area where people were going in boats from Tampa, from New Orleans, and taking wood and gold and different things out of the jungle and out of Nicaragua and Mexico and the Central American and South American countries.  In the tradition, you know, they say average woman had eight or nine children till the ‘20s, and birth control is one of the reasons we have the women’s movement.  So, they had these large families, and I understand the tradition was that each son would be given a little money to go out and seek his fortune, and my grandfather went to Nicaragua and married a woman there and had my father.  So, my father was actually born in Cabo Gracias a Dios, but he was of French descent with Nicaraguan. 

Scarpino:         I’m going to ask you to say that slowly because somebody’s going to try to transcribe this who doesn’t speak Spanish.  So, your father was born where?

Bordas:           It’s called The Cape, Thanks Be To God.

Scarpino:         Okay, but say it in Spanish.

Bordas:           Cabo Gracias a Dios.

Scarpino:         Cabo Gracias a Dios, alright. 

Bordas:           So, he was born there, and my mother was from that area.  Her mother’s name was Margarita, and my mother was one of her first children.  We don’t know who my mother’s father was, because in the tradition of Central American Indians, my grandmother was an Indian, many times the young girls were abused. 

Scarpino:         What were you parents’ last name, I mean, I should give them all, you gave their first names. 

Bordas:           Oh, well, I actually carry my mother’s maiden name, Bordas, because my grandmother didn’t change her name since she didn’t have a husband.  And then, my great-grandmother, Dolita, or Dolores, was named Bordas.  So, she married a guy, Manuel Bordas, and that name comes down, so I have a fourth-generation female name.  My father’s name was Spagol de Garconniere (spelling???), the whole French name, but the last name was Spagol (spelling???).

Scarpino:         What did your father do?

Bordas:           Oh, so my father has an interesting story as well.  So, he’s on the coast of Nicaragua and the Capuchin fathers were there.  And the Capuchin fathers would, well they were probably looking for converts, is what I think.  So, they saw my father as this bright young man, and they actually sent him to Germany to study with the Capuchins when he was a young man.  And he came back, and in the tradition of Nicaragua and the Latino culture, he was always called Fritz after that because he had been to Germany, and they never knew anybody who had been to German (laughs), so he was Fritz.  My father was a bookkeeper, he learned how to keep books.  And hat happened to my family was, there was a tsunami about 1940, maybe 1939, before I was born, that wiped out Cabo Gracias a Dios and my father went to the hills to Bonanza, and he ran the commissary there.  He actually kept track of all the things people bought and sold.  Saved enough money to bring himself and my two sisters to the United States, my older sisters.  Then they worked and sent for the other six of us. 

Scarpino:         It’s what people call chain migration. 

Bordas:           Well, that’s how it happens actually.  Usually, it’s the father that comes, and sends...

Scarpino:         That’s what happened to my family many, many years ago.           

Bordas:           Really, yeah, yeah.

Scarpino:         What did your mother do in Nicaragua?

Bordas:           I don’t think my mother worked in Nicaragua. 

Scarpino:         She had all those babies, that was enough work. 

Bordas:           Yeah, one after the other.  Well, when she came to this country, she had a three-year-old, a two-year-old and a one-year-old. 

Scarpino:         Oh lordy.        

Bordas:           Yeah.

Scarpino:         Do you know why your family, your father decided to leave?          

Bordas:           Well, because the tsunami wiped out the Gracias a Dios, it had never been rebuilt.

Scarpino:         Okay.

Bordas:           So, I think, at that time I believe he had put a little business together with keeping track of the things that were taken out of the coast and stuff like that.  But he lost everything.  The whole, it’s never been rebuilt.  I think he said, “basta.”

Scarpino:         Enough?

Bordas:           (laughing) Enough, enough already.  And, you know because his family had come, one generation back had immigrated from New Orleans, I’m sure, you know, he wanted to go back and he knew that the life for his children would be so much better if we could leave.  Like, there were no high schools or anything. 

Scarpino:         You moved to Miami?

Bordas:           No, we moved to Tampa, because the boats would go from Puerto Cabezas to Tampa, and take bananas and coconuts from the jungle.  And that’s what we came over in, a banana boat, in the hull of a banana boat. 

Scarpino:         Tampa, and did you live there for a while? 

Bordas:           I lived in Tampa until I went to the University of Florida when I was 21, or 20, 18, and then I stayed there.  Yes, I grew up in Tampa.

Scarpino:         What did your parents do in Tampa?

Bordas:           Well, when we first migrated, or immigrated, we lived in West Tampa, which was the Spanish part of town.  And at the time, it was before Castro and all that.  There were Cubans and different people, and it’s still now kind of like the French Quarter, but the Spanish Quarter of Tampa.  So then, like I said, my sister took her GI bill and bought this little house in the sticks.  So that’s why I walked into a school where there were no Latinos, because I had gone to kindergarten at St.  Joseph.

Scarpino:         Outside of Tampa, where is in the sticks?

Bordas:           Well, now it’s the middle of Tampa, but it used to be...

Scarpino:         You moved out on the edge of town?           

Bordas:           Yeah, where these little houses were being built.  The house cost $10,000, we could afford a house.  Working class people could afford a house then.  This is 1950, ‘49, ‘50.  So, then my mother went to the priest at the Catholic church, and she said to him in Spanish, “puedo cocinar, limpiar, peudo quedar nino” – “I can cook, I can clean, I can take care of children.” And then she gave him her story and said, “I’ve come here so my children can get an education.  I’ve come here so they can have a better life.  Give me a job so I can help my children.”  She just sealed that deal.  (laughs) You know, my mother was really good at what she did.  So, she worked in the lunchroom cooking and cleaning, and getting us partial scholarships to the Catholic church so we’d get a good education.  She took care of all the children on Sundays, so she worked six days a week at the church, you know, for all the Masses.  And then my father was a bookkeeper.  Now, my father had a drinking problem, and so he struggled with it.  I think in those days you didn’t know alcoholism was a disease, right?  So, it was very difficult.  But I can remember as a child, my father going to treatment centers and coming home and trying really hard.  I learned a lot of compassion through that.  It was hard to grow up with it.  But as I look back and I realize how hard he struggled and how much wanted to not have that disease, I realize, you know.  He was also a very, I think I get my love of politics, and he was really interested in politics and society, and had a bigger vision than my mother because he had been educated a little bit more than her.  But my mother is the one who showed me, this is how you do it.  This is how you become a leader.  This is how you do it. 

Scarpino:         When you lived in the Tampa area, do you remember what your neighborhood was like?

Bordas:           Yeah, after we left from West Tampa, so when we talk about destino, there has to be a reason why I had to assimilate when I was seven (laughs).  So, we moved to a part of town which was white.  So, I know that I grew with this inferiority complex because not -- you have to look at it that I was poor, that I was brown, that brown people are usually smaller in stature, which is good for you by the way in the long run, it’s good for your health.  Your heart doesn’t have to work so hard.  I was a girl growing up in the ‘40s and ‘50s.  So, I had all these, I guess, disabilities if you want to call them that.  And, so, it was hard growing up there, but I made up my mind pretty early that I was going to be successful.  So, one of the reasons I’m good at writing about assimilation and acculturation and how you can go back and forth on this continuum, and how you can reclaim roots if you lose them is because I had to do that.  I became very white.  I really struggled.  I didn’t have any friends that were Latinos because there were none over in this part of town.  And I saw how hard my mother had to struggle with her accent in that area.  So, I think part of the reason that I became successful is that I was able to assimilate at a very young age.  Then, by the time I got to this high school, I had the skills, the good nuns had taught me enough that I was able to be successful at an academy. 

Scarpino:         What was the name of the academy?

Bordas:           The Academy of the Holy Names.  And the funny story is when I came home as a senior and told my parents I wanted to go to college, they were like, ”Where did this idea come from?”  Well, it came from all the girls at the school that were going to college.  And my parents were like, “Well, we thought high school education.”  So, I think there was a reason for me to be able to become educated and to be able to cross over.  I don’t even know how I did it.  A Latino by herself at the University of Florida?  I remember sitting in the basketball court where they would have you sign up for courses, and it was a time when you’d have to go around and if you didn’t get one course, you’d have to redo everything.  I can remember being in the middle and crying, because I couldn’t figure the system out.  And I can remember being in the dorms and nobody looking like me, and realizing that I had to borrow clothes from some of the kids.  It was also my social skills that saved me, because I was very popular.  I ended up being prom queen at the high school (laughs). 

Scarpino:         Well.

Bordas:           (laughing) I was very popular.

Scarpino:         I can admit that would come to my surprise.  I mean, I don’t mean that in any mean-spirited way.

Bordas:           And my mother was so smart.  She said, “You’re not going to stay home, and you’re not going to be washing dishes and helping.  You’re going to go to school, and you’re going to do the best you can at that school.”  So, I wrote on the school paper.  I lettered in three sports.

Scarpino:         What sports did you play?

Bordas:           Well, of course this was girl’s high school so it wasn’t a big deal, but it was basketball, volleyball, and baseball. 

Scarpino:         Good for you. 

Bordas:           Yeah. 

Scarpino:         Have you ever been back to Nicaragua?

Bordas:           Yes, I’ve been back to Nicaragua twice; once on kind of a root -- going back to my roots, which was completely humbling to me to go back to Bonanza which is, still, you have to come in on a cargo plane, dirt runway.  Actually, I’ve been to Nicaragua three times, I’m sorry, but the first time was with my friend Theron, who is my ex-husband, and I was really young.  That’s when I got to visit my husband and go down the Rio Coco, you have to go 11 miles into the jungle, and he had cleared land there and started a ranch, and my grandmother is buried there, and I was able to see...  I mean, it probably doesn’t exist anymore because this was, like, 55 years ago.  But I was able to connect with my people, who are all passed now.  And then, when I get back to discover my roots in Bonanza, to come in on a cargo plane on a dirt runway and to be in a place that has two streets and just, you know, the humbling experience to realize I was born there and then where I am now, which helps me believe in the providence of God and strengthens my faith. 

Scarpino:         What did it cause you to think about the whole process of immigration, why people immigrate, why they would leave Nicaragua and come to the United States, being an immigrant?  I mean you went back and look at that?

Bordas:           It’s really hard, because like I didn’t know until maybe, or it didn’t hit me that I was a refugee, right?  I mean, when you have to leave because a tsunami has wiped out your homeland, that’s where my father was born and my mother was born, my five older brothers and sisters were born there. 

Scarpino:         And there’s still nothing there?

Bordas:           Well, I guess there’s something.

Scarpino:         I mean, it was never rebuilt.

Bordas:           No.  So, I realized, because one of my nieces said that my mother always thanked the Red Cross because they had helped us when we -- and thought, oh my God, I’m a refugee?  (laughs) So, I don’t think people leave their homelands and their people and the place where their ancestors are buries unless there’s a reason.  I do know that people have that spirit of wanting to explore and all that.  But immigration today, and the number of people that are migrants and that don’t have homes that are in camps and so forth, it’s because of either natural disasters, or economic, or war.  So, I think the immigration experience, as enlightening as it is, is also very painful because you have to leave your ancestry and you have to leave the people who know you.  And you come to a land where not only you do not speak the language, but people don’t know who you are and don’t respect you.  And you have to start at the bottom like my family did.  So, I think it’s a difficult thing.  But I also think that the people who leave, as the United States is living proof of that, that the people that are immigrants that came here that leave are people that are seeking better lives and have a vision for a better future.  So, it’s a double-edged sword to be an immigrant, particularly if you had to be one, and most people that come are economic immigrants. 

Scarpino:         They leave for a reason.

Bordas:           Yeah. 

Scarpino:         As you look back on your childhood and your young adulthood, how did your mother’s example and her expectations of her own children influence the adult that you became?

Bordas:           Yeah, I guess I always, and I think I alluded to this, is that you have to let people know who you are for them to be able to even get the lessons of your life.  I think when I look back on my high school experience and so forth, and when I talk to young kids, I say, “I was 13 years old when I joined the National Forensic League and I speak for a living now.”  But I don’t say it like that, I go like, “And one of the reasons was I wanted to get out of the house and I came from a Latino family and I couldn’t go nowhere unless it was school sponsored, so I was in a lot of clubs.  But guess what?  You’ve got to be in a lot of clubs.  You’ve got to decide what your interests are.  And sometimes it’s just like, oh, I want to be in the National Forensic League because, guess what, someday you’re going to need those verbal skills.”  So, I think it’s important when you look back on your life that you give people the lessons that you learned.  I learned that at 13 years old I could work, and I could work for my education.  Of course, my mother had me there, there was no place I was going, (laughs).  I was going to obey my mother.  But, I did it.  And, so, as a young person, don’t waste your life because you don’t know this, but you’re putting in the building blocks of what you’re going to be in the future.  So, take this time seriously.  It’s an important time in your life.  You also get to choose your friends.  And when I say became very popular, I did.  I made it a point to get to know people.  Because, particularly since I was insecure and felt inferior, what’s the best thing to do?  Well, reach out to people.  Find out who they are, make connections.  I still get more out of people usually than they get out of me when I meet them because I want to know about them.  That’s an incredible skill.  Leadership is a people business.  Any job you do you’re going to need those skills.  So, I think it’s important also when you talk about your life to talk about why those are important decisions, or important things that happened to you.  Playing sports for women at that particular time was absolutely key because we didn’t know how to work on teams.  We didn’t know how to set goals.  We didn’t know how to be competitive and aggressive.  And, so, here I was playing sports in high school, and that taught me some things I needed.

Scarpino:         The academy was an all-girls’ school?

Bordas:           Yes.

Scarpino:         How did that influence you as you moved on with the rest of your life, having spent four years in an all-girls’ academy?

Bordas:           Well, remember I had three sisters and my mother, so I grew up -- and our culture is matriarchal, which comes out of the indigenous tradition, the Indian tradition is matriarchal cultures.  And so, not only did I do that, but when I went to college I was in a sorority.  And then when I went into the Peace Corps, I did micro-enterprise work with women.  So, like I said, I didn’t work with men until I was 50 (laughs). 

Scarpino:         Until you were 50 (laughs). 

Bordas:           I was working at Mi Casa, and I mean I had jobs where men could have come, but as a social worker and as somebody who worked in social services, it was mainly women that I was dealing with.  So, that has been an important part of my life.  And then I went and did a women’s leadership institute for Latinas and the Circle of Latina Leadership, so I’ve sent a lot of time working with women.  But I think that was important because of my age.  I was part of the early women’s movement in the 1960s.

Scarpino:         Did you think of yourself as part of the women’s movement?

Bordas:           Yes.  I thought of myself -- I became a feminist. 

Scarpino:         I want to ask you the same question about your father.  As you look back on your father’s example and his expectations for his children, how did that shape the adult you became?

Bordas:           This is kind of an interesting story, I think, is that my father, to make extra money since he was a bookkeeper, he would do people’s taxes.  And I was his assistant.

Scarpino:         Oh my.  (laughs)

Bordas:           So, I would be adding up things or doing little things together.  And, again, in the Latino family everybody chips in.  It wasn’t a question of whether I wanted to or not, I had to help my papi.  So, it was really funny, when I went to Mi Casa and I became an executive director, I’m in my middle 30s and I walk in and I’m going to do budgets.  And I said -- my father had probably been passed on 10 years or whatever.  And I said, ok, you taught me about accounting.  You taught me about math.  This is not going to be a problem.  And I have no problem with budgets and money or finances.  I can figure it all out.  And here I was as a young child just doing and subtracting, but he was sort of teaching me about figures, which a lot of girls didn’t learn.  And it was very simple.  And I was just helping him.  But that’s how I kind of got okay with money.  And, like I said, my father used to get Time Magazine and read about politics.  And his biggest thing was, he was very funny, he would say, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.  No matter what happens, you’ve got to keep fighting, you’ve got to keep moving forward, don’t let them get you down.”  Because he would read the politics and talk about how -- and maybe that’s how I got some of my political views, that I believe in equality, I believe that people should be taken care of because my father really believed that.  He could see that people weren’t getting a fair shake.  And he’d say, “Don’t let them get you down, you’ve got to keep fighting.” My father was also a dancer, and I remember dancing in his arms before I could walk probably.  He was the one, like remember he liked to drink and have a good time, so he was the one who would bring a lot of celebration into our house because my mother, frankly, was so God-darned tired, she could hardly move.  So, I got a lot of my happy nature from my father, if you want to call it that, that celebration of life.  But not the drinking.  He was also a gardener.  And, this year I went out to my garden and one of my roses had turned purple.  And my father helped me once, I helped him plant a purple rose, so I knew my father was looking after me.  So, I like gardening because of him, and flowers.  He had a very sensitive part, my father, he liked to sing, he liked to tell jokes, things like that.  So, people skills I get from my dad. 

Scarpino:         I’m going to pull this together because I promised you I wouldn’t go longer than two-and-a-half hours.  We talked about high school and stuff.  Why did you decide to go to the University of Florida at Gainesville?

Bordas:           Oh, because it was the only university I could go to.  It was 120 miles from my house, so we could drive.  And, luckily for me, one of my sisters had been there, her husband had gone to school there, and so I had been there to visit her.  When I graduated from high school, she actually got me a job at the University of Florida in the Athletic Department.  Look what blessing that was.  I mean, I wasn’t afraid to go there.  She was already gone, but I knew it in the sense that I had been there.

Scarpino:         It wasn’t strange.

Bordas:           Yeah, and that’s what keeps a lot of Latino kids, particularly the immigrant kids, out of school.  I laugh now because I probably couldn’t get in the University of Florida today, it’s such a prestigious school in a sense.  One of the honors of my life was that about eight years ago I was asked to come and be the keynote for all the incoming freshmen that were Hispanic at the University of Florida, and it was about 1,600 kids.  And I got to get up there and tell them I was the only one, and that when I was there, the story about only one person is going to survive, one of you will not, you know, only one of you will graduate.  And when I told them that story, they started cheering.  And I said, “And I know all of you are going to graduate, and I know that we’ve made it because we went from one to this many.”  It was an amazing experience for me and them. 

Scarpino:         I read somewhere that when you were an undergraduate student that John Kennedy spoke on your campus.

Bordas:           Yes, he did.

Scarpino:         And, talked about, as he often did, giving back to your country.  Did that have an influence on you?

Bordas:           Oh yeah.  I think, you know we were called the Kennedy kids, our generation.  And, yes, like I told you, my father was very political because he thought that the working-class man was not getting a good deal.  So, when I saw Kennedy and he issued that call to public service, and then he died when I was a junior in college, and he started the Peace Corps, and that’s what inspired me.  It was all an integration with my values and what I had been taught.  But certainly a young immigrant girl isn’t going to think about going to South America to work unless he had opened up that door through the Peace Corps, and through that ability to go back and work. 

Scarpino:         You went to Santiago?

Bordas:           I went to Santiago. 

Scarpino:         At the time that you went, could you speak Spanish fluently?

Bordas:           Not very well, no.  I had studied it in high school and then through the Peace Corps immersion.  And I became bilingual and actually taught in Spanish when I was in South America. 

Scarpino:         In a sense, that experience helped you recapture a part of your own heritage.

Bordas:           Yeah, no, that’s actually what I write about, is that I assimilated because I was born in the ‘40s, I entered school, and then I went -- when we bought this little house, I went to the white part of town when I was very young.  Then, when I went to the Peace Corps, and I went to the Peace Corps because when I met my grandmother, I couldn’t speak to her and didn’t understand, that’s when I knew that something was wrong.  How could that happen?  At the same time, I was being pulled to be more and more American so I could be successful.  So, I knew I had lost a part of my soul, and I wanted to go back.  So, I, a lot of times, tell people I’m like a convert, because I had to lose my culture in order to find my culture. 

Scarpino:         Do you think people who convert embrace that which they convert to more vigorously than people who were born into it?

Bordas:           Um...

Scarpino:         I mean, I think of, for example, people who convert to Catholicism or convert to Judaism, or whatever.

Bordas:           That’s what they say, because if you’re born into it, you theoretically don’t have a choice.  I believe you do, but theoretically you don’t have a choice if you’re born Catholic.  But if you choose it, then you’re making a conscious choice for certain reasons.  And I could’ve stayed assimilated, right?  I could’ve just gone into the white culture, you know, I’m not that dark.  I could speak without an accent, which was my mother’s goal.  She didn’t want her younger children to have an accent and suffer like she did because she couldn’t speak English correctly.  So, I could’ve assimilated.  But why would I do that when I come from such an incredible cultural tradition that has such values and that deep-rooted spirituality and faith and family and fiesta.  Why would you want to give something like that up?  Especially when you don’t have to, you can continue.

Scarpino:         What did you take away from that Peace Corps influenced the rest of your life and career?

Bordas:           I think that, you know, the fact...  you know, and it’s hard when you look back as an elder to figure how you got the chutzpah, or the balls or the cojones to do some of these things.  

Scarpino:         They mean the same thing by the way.

Bordas:           Yeah, they all mean the same thing.  So, how did I get that, you know?  I don’t even know.  I think it just was that sense of faith that I had to go back and I had to do this.  Because I remember sitting there crying and going, “I’m going far away.”  I’m going to the other side of the world, right?  But if you look at the Peace Corps experience, it was the whole idea that a young person could contribute something.  And I have to tell you that when I went in the Peace Corps, they trained me to work in credit co-ops.  And when I got to Chile, the inflation rate was 40 percent.  And I already knew from going to college, from being in my family, because my family was very good at managing their pennies, their money, their pesos, and I already knew that wasn’t a good idea.  So, I actually found a church that had been working with women in the población of the barrios with sewing and knitting groups.  And I took the sewing and knitting groups and turned them into co-ops and showed them how to make more and how to buy stuff at discount rates, and make things.  And we would sell half to the church and they would put them into their store, and half to their community, so at the same time we were serving.  Then I started a baking group because I saw that women could cook.  So, we had a baking group, a knitting group and a sewing group, and they were making money to help their children.  This is called micro-enterprise work now, and it became a huge thing in the future because it’s a way to take people in underdeveloped counties and teach them not only the skills, but to give them economic well-being.  I said when I went to the Casa that I was actually doing the same thing.  I was doing entrepreneurial work with Latina women.  Mi Casa ended up starting a business center that I had put on the map when I was there, and helping women start small businesses.  We helped women start cleaning services.  It was actually the same thing.  I was just doing here in a different scope. 

Scarpino:         You basically learned those things as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Bordas:           Yeah, and also just to be able, again, to be multicultural, to become - I say I have a Chilean heart because I lived among the people for two years and I was accepted by them as part of their family.  So, all of those things, I think, prepared me to be a person.

Scarpino:         As a Peace Corps volunteer you lived with a family there?

Bordas:           Yeah, part of the time, and then I lived with another volunteer.  But I’m just saying I became part of that whole, you know, all the women and everything.  We had groups.  We had meetings.  I had dinner with them.  We became family.  And so that taught me how to do that in the future. 

Scarpino:         I was actually headed to where you went.  You moved to Denver in 1971, and you started in 1977 the Mi Casa Resource Center.  You served as executive director until 1986.  Why did you move to Denver?  And then I’ll ask you about Mi Casa.

Bordas:           Yeah, um…

Scarpino:         Of all the places you could’ve picked...

Bordas:           I married a man from the Peace Corps and he was Irish, which is to me ethnic (laughs).

Scarpino:         Well it is, isn’t it?

Bordas:           It is, as close as you can get.  You know, the Irish and the Latinos are very close.  There’s the Black Irish, I have a whole lecture on why the Irish -- and we’re Catholics, and we like to drink and have a good time.  There’s a lot of reasons.  We’re very family-oriented, big families.  So, anyway, he was from Wisconsin and he went back to Wisconsin and I went with him.  I think I told you the story of how I got my master’s degree.

Scarpino:         You went to the University of Wisconsin and got the master’s degree, but I don’t think you told me how.

Bordas:           Well, this is a good story if you really want to believe in destino.  So, here I am, I’m a 23-year-old Latina girl who has just come from South America.  And I actually had kind of a portfolio because, for example, the women that made all these cookies and baked all this stuff, well, through the church connections, we actually had a picture in the Santiago newspaper of my women serving dulces and candies and sweets to all the congress people in Chile (laughs).  And I knew the minister of education, I’ve always believed you work at all levels, right?  You try to get as high as you can, but you also work with the people.

Scarpino:         You knew the minister of education of Chile?

Bordas:           The minister of economics of Chile.

Scarpino:         The minister of economics.

Bordas:           So, anyway, I had a portfolio.  And my ex-husband, my friend Theron, I think you know, he was going to go to law school and I was going to be the good Hispanic girl, woman, wife, and I was going to work.  So, I march into the social services department of the University of Wisconsin and I get this interview with this guy.  His name was Mike, that’s all I remember.  And I am just laying it down about all this stuff I did in the Peace Corps (laughs), and how I wanted to do social work in the United States and all this stuff.  And he stops me in the middle of it.  I have all these papers I’m showing him and stuff, and he says, “You know I can see how talented you are, and how motivated you are,” he said, “but we don’t hire people unless they have a master’s in social work.” I couldn’t believe that.  I mean I’m the first literate one in my family.  I have a college degree, right?  Nobody’s ever told me I could have -- and I picked up all my papers and I put them down like this and I looked at him and I said, “You don’t understand.  I was born to be a social worker.”  And this guy turns around to me and he says, “Look,” this is like August, “if you can down to the University of Wisconsin and get in the social work school, we’ll give you a stipend if you’ll come back and work for us.”  I didn’t even have a clue about getting a master’s degree, it was not my idea. 

Scarpino:         So, you did it.

Bordas:           I did it with distinction, and for a Latina to have a master’s degree and international credentials in 1968, I was really ready to do leadership for my people.

Scarpino:         Alright.  I’m going to ask a wrap-up question or two, and I don’t know how much more time we’ve got.  We’ve been talking for a little over two-and-a-half hours, so I think we’re both going to run out of gas.  But so let’s do this.  April 17, 2018, you spoke to Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in the Quad Cities.

Bordas:           Oh yes.

Scarpino:         In Bettendorf, Iowa.  And I dug out your speech, and one of the things you said was, “If you’re a leader, you’re thinking 20 years from now.  What’s the legacy you want to leave?  What’s the next step for the coming generations?”  I want to ask you the same question you asked them: What is the legacy you want to leave for the coming generations?

Bordas:           Yeah, for the coming generations.  Well, I really believe that the coming generations -- I can see it in my grandchildren -- are going to be multicultural, and they’re going to be global.  They want to visit -- the Z’s want to visit every country.  They’re talking about how they want to become multicultural people.  And I think, you know, we know that the environment is their number one issue, because they understand that there’s not going to be sustainability in the future.  So, one of the things I want to leave for the coming generations, and my new book is going to be about the vision of the multicultural society and how we can get there.  Now, I’ve already talked about multicultural leadership, I’ve already talked about Latino leadership, but how do I integrate that into a real vision for the younger generation to say, “We’re going to do this.”  It may take a lot of hard work.  It may mean a revisiting a type of society where a lot of people get engaged and there’s a lot more movement.  But I would hope that all of the students that I’ve taught, because I’ve been teaching this for a long time, that leadership is about civic responsibility, leadership is about giving back, leadership is about responsibility for others, leadership is about building the compassionate and good society.  You know, leadership is about leaving for the next generation the world better than it was when you came in.  So, I hope that my legacy, through all the teaching that I’ve done and in my future writing, that my legacy will be, what we like to call in the Latino community, “la raza cosmica,” the cosmic race, the new race that’s coming that represents all the colors of humanity.  And I hope that I’m able to put forth a vision about that that’s so compelling that people will want to work towards it. 

Scarpino:         When do you expect your book to be published?

Bordas:           Well, that’s a hard question.

Scarpino:         I know, people ask me the same thing.

Bordas:           I’m hoping that I’m going to be able to streamline it to be published in 2022, but it will probably be 2023 because 2022 is the 100^th year anniversary of the writings of Jose Vasconcelos, the Mexican diplomat, president of the University of Mexico, ran for president, writer, thinker, philosopher who wrote La Raza Cosmica, who predicted that we would eventually merge all the races, and that our job was to take the very best of each race into the future. 

Scarpino:         As you look back on your career, and I’m going to say some of it in leadership studies, but as a leader, writing about leadership, speaking about leadership, how do you think the field of leadership studies has changed in the years you’ve been involved in it?  Or has it changed?

Bordas:           Well, I certainly think, particularly now in this particular -- you now with all the racial equity and inclusion and racial reckoning that’s happening, I think we are, and this is going to actually bolster the work that I’m doing because I think there are a lot of people coming to a realization of what institutional racism is and how it hinders our society.  Just the incarceration rate alone is enough to make a huge difference.  I think that when I speak to different colleges and different groups, particularly in universities with young people, they’re beginning to see multicultural inclusion, equity, a different kind of world as part of what we need to do.  And I think that base is really growing now. 

Scarpino:         Same question with a little...

Bordas:           So, it’s changing, I think leadership education is now including diversity and inclusion as a core, as a needed principle that you cannot do leadership without it. 

Scarpino:         Again, as you look back at the field and your participation in it, what discourages you?

Bordas:           Well, I don’t think we have an answer for the economic discrepancies.  I was just reading that two-thirds of the college acceptance in 2020 into the Ivy League schools came from the upper 20 percent, and the majority of them come from private schools, and that the grades, because a lot of minority people don’t go to those type of schools, the grade averages are all pretty much the same.  But then, the SAT scores, because they were able to get tutors and so forth.  So, the inequities continue.  Like I said, Latinos have one-eighth the wealth of white people and home ownership and all that.  That’s what I think the biggest challenge is.  I think people, yeah, they say, “Oh we’d love to live in a society that’s inclusive.  We’d love our kids to have friends from different cultures and stuff,” but I think this economic thing, what are we going to do about the disparages in wealth?  How are we going to change the school system so people --  because this meritology idea, where I made it on my own and… No, you went to private school.  No, you went to an Ivy League school.  No, your parents...  I mean, even my daughters were so much more privileged than I was.  And, so, what do you do about these inequities and what are people willing to do?  Now, I’m leaving 80 percent of my wealth to immigrants and refugees to be able to help them, and the majority of it going to public policy change so that we can try to do something to solve the problems that we have.  And, so, getting people to really think about that kind of thing, how can I - because my kids all have houses, they are educated, and so are yours, because we’re living longer.  So, how do we solve the economic issue I think is the biggest challenge in the future.

Scarpino:         As you consider your own career, what are you proudest of?

Bordas:           What am I proudest of?

Scarpino:         Or what gives you the greatest sense of accomplishment?

Bordas:           I think the fact that I was able to put institutions or organizations together that served others, that as an individual leader or even leading one organization, I would never have had the impact that an organization has.  But the biggest surprise in my career, I’m at 50,000 books now, but I’m going to sell a lot more the next book, but I never thought I would have that kind of influence intellectually.  I never considered myself an intellectual to begin with.  Little by little I became one, you know, going to graduate school and so forth.  And, so, that’s the biggest surprise, that I could do social activism through writing, that if you change how people think about things, the society will change eventually, if you can get that shift, that paradigm shift in the way they think about things.

Scarpino:         Do you feel like you’ve done that?

Bordas:           I feel like I have made an incredible contribution to the field of multicultural leadership, that my first book was the first book on that topic and then on Latino leadership.  So, I think people are beginning to see there’s more than one way to lead, and that it’s not just that these books are needed, but that they actually expand the way people can lead and give them an opportunity to be effective leaders when they’re leading in a diverse society. 

Scarpino:         When you wrote your first book, did you realize that that was what you were doing?

Bordas:           I didn’t really want to write my first book.  I wanted to go right into the Latino book, but I couldn’t because there was no context. 

Scarpino:         Right.

Bordas:           So, now that I look back on it, I remember when I first wrote it and I really am, you know, also the way I got my publisher I believe was destino.  Berrett-Koehler is the best.  But, you know, when I first wrote it, I had it in sections, and Steve Piersanti said, “Oh, no, you have to integrate this all together as a model, because you need to do the work.”  And that’s important to know as a writer.  You need to do the work for your reader.  And, so, I think one of the things I’ve been most fortunate about in my life is having -- Steve Piersanti is a white male too -- having these kinds of people invest in me. 

Scarpino:         Okay, so remind our listeners who Steve Piersanti is.

Bordas:           Steve Piersanti is an incredible, he’s the head, he was the head, just stepped down of Berrett-Koehler publishers.  He started a publishing company where the authors are considered partners and part of the publishing company, but also that has a motto to “create a world that works for all.” 

Scarpino:         Professionally, who do you look up to?

Bordas:           Well, Steve’s one of them.

Scarpino:         I got that one, anybody else on that list?

Bordas:           Well, I love Roger Sublett.  Lorraine Matuszak was not just my mentor, but my fairy godmother.  She came down from heaven and I was...

Scarpino:         She’d make a good fairy godmother.

Bordas:           Oh, she’s a great fairy godmother.  She came down from heaven and I was running the Hispana Institute, but it had been started by the Coors Company and they didn’t want to keep funding it.  They thought it was a good idea until they saw how hard it was going to be.  And she funded it for three years for me.  She’s the one who got me to be a Kellogg Scholar, and then later I became a Kellogg advisor.  So, yeah, she was my fairy godmother.  Bernie Valdez, the Colorado statesman who took me aside and showed me how to build and organization and how to have more influence across the state and across with people.  Lena Archuleta, who was the first Latina principal in the city of Denver, who died in her 90s maybe 10 years ago, who showed me that a woman could have just as much impact being elegant as she could -- because she was always every hair in place, the nicest, the sweetest voice, but the woman got it done, right?  But she had that - she was able to merge being a woman being graceful with being an advocate.  So, people like that, who each one of you teaches you a little bit more about what you can do to become a leader that you can be. 

Scarpino:         Same two questions I ask everybody at the end.  The first one is:  Is there anything that I should have asked you but I didn’t?

Bordas:           I think I get really caught up in the fact that my faith and my journey and understanding, like, in the Hispanic culture they have a saying, estamos a los manos y dios, which they say in English too, we’re in the hands of God.

Scarpino:         We’re in the hands of God.

Bordas:           Yeah, but I really believe that.  And I believe it more, or learned it more as I looked back on my life and could see the providence of God opening these doors for me.  And, like I say, you have to say yes, you have to go through.  But I just have such humility about it because I couldn’t have made this happen.  I engaged in the process.  I think leaders certainly have to say yes.  But it’s a deep abiding faith that if you put your life in service, and that’s what Greenleaf said, he said, “Ask the question, how can I best serve?”

Scarpino:         Is there anything that you wanted to say that I haven’t given you a chance to say?

Bordas:           Just about my faith I think, that I have a faith in...

Scarpino:         Keeping in mind there was like a two-year gap between these, but I did go back and listen the first one.

Bordas:           Well, good for you, because I can’t remember a thing (laughs).

Scarpino:         Well, listen, while these recorders are still running, I want to thank you very much for sitting for this interview and the previous one we did in 2019, and for allowing me to come to your home and interview you here.

Bordas:           Well, this is very Latino, I have to tell you that the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership Board has been here, the International Leadership Association has been here, I’ve done dinners for all these people in my home.  The Kellogg Fellows.  The Mi Casa board.  So, part of the Latino thing is your home, you invite people in, so I’m very happy to have you in my home. 

Scarpino:         Thank you very much.  Let’s turn these things off so we don’t have live mics.