As my family story shows, Latinos have been a blessing for USA for many generations. The future of America depends in part on the success of the Latino community, and this opportunity is just one more signifier of that.

My grandmother didn't live to see us begin our lives in public service. But she probably would have thought it extraordinary that just two generations after she arrived in San Antonio, one grandson would be the mayor and the other would be on his way - the good people of San Antonio willing- to the United States Congress.

For my daughter, it's going to mean something special that Hillary Clinton accepts the nomination, and I wanted to make sure that she sees that.

A couple of years ago, my wife, Erica, and I were getting our daughter ready for school and an image of President [Barack] Obama was on one of the morning shows. And I said, oh, look, Carina, there's the president. You can be president one day. And she said, right away, that's for boys. And so right away I said, oh, no, you can be a doctor. You can be a lawyer. You can be anything you want. You can be president.

My grandmother's generation and generations before always saw beyond the horizons of their own lives and their own circumstances. They believed that opportunity created today would lead to prosperity tomorrow.

Mitt Romney has undergone an extreme makeover, and it ain’t pretty.

Now, in Texas, we believe in the rugged individual. Texas may be the one place where people actually still have bootstraps, and we expect folks to pull themselves up by them. But we also recognize there are some things we can't do alone. We have to come together and invest in opportunity today for prosperity tomorrow.