US Ambassador to Mexico Nominee Is First Woman, Daughter of Immigrants Steve Straehley and David Wallechinsky - AllGov.com
go to original November 3, 2014

On September 18, 2014, President Barack Obama nominated Maria Echaveste to be the next U.S. ambassador to Mexico. If confirmed, Echaveste, the daughter of immigrants from Mexico, would be the first woman in the job.

Echaveste, the oldest of her family’s seven children, was born May 31, 1954, in Harlingen, Texas, where her parents lived as part of the bracero program that brought Mexicans to the United States to work in the fields. They moved to Clovis in California’s San Joaquin Valley when Echeveste was an infant and to Oxnard in Southern California when she was 12.

Beginning when she was eight years old, with her parents and her siblings, she harvested cotton, grapes, figs, peaches, tomatoes, strawberries and carrots. Of this period she recalled telling her mother, “It's too early, Mama, to get up, the sun's not even up. When can we take a break, Mama, I'm so tired.” She also said, “Picking tomatoes was the worst, because you smelled so bad afterwards. I know we were out there because my family needed the money. But there is something wrong about children working when they're tired and hungry and cold or hot.”

Read the rest at AllGov.com

Photo: Berkeley.edu

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