Wilder in 1989. Jindal in 2007. Martinez in 2010. The firsts that once arrived decades apart now arrive together, and the country's executive map has been redrawn because of it.
For most of the twentieth century, the American governorship was the least accessible executive office in the country. Fifty states, fifty chances every four years, and for a hundred years after Reconstruction the results looked almost exactly the same.
L. Douglas Wilder broke the pattern in 1989, winning Virginia by a margin so narrow it required a recount. His victory made him the first Black American elected governor of a state, a sentence that had never been true before and would not be true again for seventeen years, until Deval Patrick won Massachusetts in 2006. Wes Moore became the third in Maryland in 2022.
The Hispanic first is older and less known. Ezequiel Cabeza De Baca was elected governor of New Mexico in 1916 and took office in 1917, the first Hispanic governor elected in the continental United States. Octaviano Larrazolo followed in the same state in 1918 before going on to the United States Senate. It took nearly a century for the rest of the country to catch up: Susana Martinez became the first Latina elected governor in 2010, and Michelle Lujan Grisham, a decade later, became the second Latina to hold New Mexico's highest office.
The Indian American story is the youngest. Bobby Jindal, elected in Louisiana in 2007, became the first Indian American governor in the nation's history. Nikki Haley of South Carolina became the second in 2010. Both were the children of immigrants, both governed in the South, and both proved that the office was not reserved for the descendants of earlier arrivals.
Set the names side by side and a pattern appears. The gaps between firsts have collapsed. It took eighty years to move from the first Reconstruction era governor to Wilder. It took two decades to move from Wilder to a country where Black, Hispanic, and Indian American governors serve at the same time.
This cycle widened the pattern. States that had never seated a Black woman as governor have now done so. Others elected their first Hispanic and Asian American statewide officials alongside her. The wave did not arrive everywhere at once, but it arrived in enough places to stop being remarkable.
That, in the end, is how a first becomes a fact: not when it is celebrated, but when it is expected.
Published in The History Issue
