Part of what makes his SO amusing is that he kinda assumed his hispanic background early in his career.
WIkipedia:
Rivera was born at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, New York, the son of Lillian (née Lillie Friedman[4]), a waitress, and the late Cruz "Allen" Rivera (October 1, 1915 - November 1987), a restaurant worker and cab driver.[6][7] Rivera's father was Puerto Rican of Spanish ancestry and his mother is of Ashkenazi Russian Jewish descent; he was raised "mostly Jewish" and had a Bar Mitzvah.[8][9][10]He grew up in Manhattan and West Babylon, New York. He is an alumnus of University of Arizona, where he played varsity lacrosse as goalie. From September 1961 to May 1963, he attended the State University of New York Maritime College, where he was a member of the rowing team.[11][12] He received his J.D. from Brooklyn Law School in 1969, did postgraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania that same year,[13] and briefly attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism during the summer of 1970.
After a brief career in law enforcement where he served the NYPD as an investigator, he returned to law and became a lawyer for a New York Puerto Rican activist group, the Young Lords and attracted the attention of news producer Al Primo when he was interviewed about the group's occupation of a East Harlem church in 1969. Primo offered Rivera a job as a reporter but was unhappy with the first name "Gerald" (he wanted something more identifiably Latin) so they agreed to go with the pronunciation used by the Puerto Rican side of Rivera's family: Geraldo
Thank you for the Exellent Bio on “ Geraldo “, and it’s interesting that we clearly know so much more about his records than we do of Obama’s records.