Tony Cárdenas casts himself as man to lead DCCC through fire – By Rafael Bernal (The Hill) / Nov 17 2020
Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.) stayed in politics because of his father and his father’s legacy.
The older Cárdenas, a Mexican immigrant farmworker named Andrés, drove a tractor through a burning field near Los Angeles in the early 1950s to rescue a fellow worker who’d been entrapped by the flames.
Andres Cárdenas didn’t share the story with his family, and the California lawmaker only heard it for the first time nearly 50 years later, when he was an electrical engineer from Pacoima, Calif., running an uphill battle for a California Assembly seat.
The man saved by Andrés Cárdenas in that field turned out to be the father of the accountant who ran Tony Cárdenas’s campaign finances. He shared the story with the Cárdenas family in 1996.
