Rafael Edward Cruz, an American politician and attorney, was born on December 22, 1970. Since 2013, he has represented Texas in the Senate as a junior senator. Cruz, a Republican, held the position of Texas’ solicitor general from 2003 to 2008.

What is Ted Cruz’s ethnicity?

Rafael Cruz and Eleanor Elizabeth (née Darragh) Wilson welcomed Rafael Edward Cruz into the world on December 22, 1970 at Foothills Medical Center in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Wilmington, Delaware, is where Cruz’s mother was born. She graduated from Rice University in the 1950s with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. She is three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Italian.

Rafael, Cruz’s father, was born and raised in Cuba. He was the son of a Canary Islander who had fled his own country as a young child.

Rafael Cruz was assaulted by Fulgencio Batista’s men when he was a teenager in the 1950s for criticizing the Batista government. He departed Cuba in 1957 to enroll at the University of Texas at Austin, and when his four-year student visa ran out, he applied for political asylum in the United States.  He obtained Canadian citizenship in 1973 and American citizenship through naturalization in 2005.