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221 q E q ECHAVESTE, MARÍA (1954– ) In 1992, when presidential candidate Bill Clinton named a political unknown to head his Latino outreach effort, Hispanic political veterans were skeptical. Who was María Echaveste, this Stanford-educated, Mexican American Jewish woman from New York, and how would she connect to the increasingly powerful Hispanic political community? By all accounts she was smart, organized, methodical, and inclusive, and, as she has acknowledged, she had the good sense to pick a winning candidate. By the end of the Clinton presidency in 2001, María Echaveste was well known in political circles. She had helped lead the Latino community in a second Clinton presidential election and had risen to the highest White House position of any Hispanic woman in history. Refugio and María Echaveste, María’s parents, came to the United States from Mexico with their seven children . They worked as migrant farmworkers in Texas during María’s early years and then moved to California , where they earned a living in the central and coastal valleys picking cotton, strawberries, grapes, tomatoes, and carrots. Echaveste was a bright student who loved to read. She worked hard and earned a scholarship to Stanford University, where she majored in anthropology. After a brief stint in the nation’s capital, she earned a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley. From there she went to New York City, became a corporate attorney, and married Stanley Schlein, a Jewish attorney from the Bronx. She also served for several years on the New York City Board of Elections. Although she was raised Catholic, Echaveste had fallen away from the religion. She converted to Judaism, which she says she found more “life-affirming.” The marriage to Schlein ended during her White House tenure. After Clinton’s election in 1992 Echaveste went to work on the presidential transition. Her first appointment (1993–1997) in the new administration was as wage and hour administrator at the U.S. Department of Labor. Echaveste was a strong defender of workers’ rights and took on critical responsibilities that included overseeing minimum-wage laws, child labor laws, and the Family and Medical Leave Act. In 1996 her antisweatshop campaign titled “No Sweat” received an Innovations in Government Award from Harvard University ’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Ford Foundation. In 1997, at the start of President Clinton’s second term, Echaveste moved to the White House and became assistant to the president and director of public liaison. In this high-profile and very public position Echaveste assumed charge of conducting outreach to politically significant constituency groups, including women, minorities, and issue groups. As one of her many projects, she led the presidential initiative on race relations. In 1998 Echaveste was promoted to assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff, becoming what some have called the most influential Latina in the administration . She was a strong, practical, and serious deputy chief of staff. In this new position she had, and used, the opportunity to influence much of the president ’s agenda. She chaired the White House Interagency Immigration Working Group, tackling an issue about which she felt strongly. At a March 2000 conference on migration she noted, “Whether it’s the flow of legal or illegal migrants, or the issue of the treatment of migrants once they’ve arrived, or the importance of the remittances that are sent from migrants to their home countries, these are issues that are no longer relegated to the lower levels of government . . . they are at the very top of the list.” Continuing, she said, “The thing that most excites me about the issue . . . is that in so many ways it represents the best of the human spirit—that desire to try to do better, to go someplace else, to provide a better future.” Echaveste, the daughter of migrants, eldest of seven, was provided a better future. She earned a B.A. from Stanford University in 1976 and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. An attorney , she has worked for law firms in Los Angeles and New York. She is married to Christopher Edley, the dean of the School of Law (Boalt Hall) at the University of California, Berkeley, and they have one son. Since Education 222 q leaving the Clinton administration, Echaveste is the co-founder of a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. called Nueva Vista and appears with regularity on the PBS...
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