The Pro-Familia Candidate

He hopes to find a way to rise to the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates. In the first Democratic debate he never looked comfortable and got kind of lost in the shuffle. He's reputed to be a first-class retail politician ("You know, I hold the world's handshaking record"), but confesses that he's still getting the hang of being a candidate: "I admit I don't have my shtick down yet."

That may include being somewhat unsure when and how to talk about his background, about growing up in Coyoacan, and playing baseball with the poor kids in los barrios bajos, the tough neighborhoods. He addresses it most directly in his memoir, "Between Worlds," when he writes that America is becoming increasingly multicultural:

"I am representative of that multicultural future: When I first got involved in New Mexico's elective politics, the joke was that I was the perfect political candidate for the state: I have an Anglo surname, I speak fluent Spanish, and I look like a Native American."

To this day, he and his mother speak only in Spanish -- she still lives in Mexico City, and he phones her every Sunday.

"When I was growing up, I didn't know whether I was more Mexican or American. Because I hung around with very poor Mexican kids in my neighborhood and played baseball with them . . . but I was also hanging out with some of the kids of my father's friends, who were American. So I was navigating between both of those worlds."

His father, William Blaine Richardson, had been dispatched to Mexico City as a branch manager for the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank). At the age of 46 he married his 22-year-old secretary, Maria Luisa Lopez-Collada. As a father he was, according to his son, cold and demanding. He constantly pushed his son to do better. After young Bill finished seventh grade, the elder Richardson vowed to send him to America to be educated. The boy didn't want to go; his mother didn't want him to go either. The father's word was law, and Bill Richardson left home for Concord, Mass., and the elite boarding school Middlesex.

Result: culture shock, misery, alienation.

"When I came to Middlesex it was BOOM, you're an American. And you've got to assimilate. And, you know, they'd call me Pancho, and I was a little darker, and I was shy. And I had difficulty adjusting right away to the academics. Because all of a sudden it was all in English."

He thought in Spanish. He dreamed in Spanish. Gradually he evolved into thinking in English. But in the meantime, he evolved into a big man on campus, because he was an outstanding baseball player, a virtually unhittable pitcher who could also clobber the ball at the plate.

"It was baseball that was the bridge, for me, to be accepted as an American, because I made the varsity team that first eighth-grade year."

The Constitution limits the presidency to people born in the United States. Richardson meets that provision only because his father sent his mother by train to California just before she went into labor. He was born in Pasadena, Calif. Then his mother took him promptly back to Mexico City.

"My father had a complex about not having been born in the United States," Richardson said. His father, son of a biologist who collected museum specimens, had been born on a boat heading to Nicaragua. "If my father didn't have this complex, I wouldn't be able to run for president. I wish I'd thanked him. One of the regrets I always have is that I never thanked him."