Maria Echaveste, nominee for ambassador.NBC NEWS
The daughter of Mexican immigrant farm workers has been nominated the next American ambassador to Mexico.
Maria Echaveste, 60, is President Barack Obama’s choice to replace Anthony Wayne, who leaves the post this month after three years.
An anthropologist and lawyer, Echaveste would be the first woman to hold the post, White House spokeswoman Cecilia Muñoz said in a tweet.
Echaveste is the policy and program development director at the Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California’s Berkely Law School. She served as assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton from 1998 till 2001 and was also administrator of the wage and hour division of the Department of Labor.
She graduated from Stanford in 1976 and earned a law degree at Berkely in 1980.
Echaveste spent part of her childhood in Texas where her parents were farm workers. Later, she and her six siblings moved with their parents to California where she began her university studies.
Having spent time in her youth helping the family pick strawberries, tomatoes and cotton, her arrival at the Clinton White House was seen as a great achievement by the Hispanic community in the United States.
The White House said today that although Echaveste has been actively involved in immigration reform efforts, “she understands the relationship between the United States and Mexico goes well beyond issues of immigration reform, including critical trade and commerce alliances.”
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