 "Photo: Kyohei Yoshioka")
The road from a Californian immigrant worker family to Harvard Law School and then to Washington, D.C., was not a journey that Anna Escobedo Cabral had imagined when she was young.
Cabral spoke to more than 250 students in the auditorium at Jester Center Friday about the richness of Latino culture and encouraged students to serve as leaders to better their community. She was the keynote speaker at the third annual Latino Leadership Summit held at the University during the weekend.
The event was sponsored by the Latino Leadership Council, a student organization that invited leaders from college and high school campuses around the country to hear Cabral and other keynote speakers Friday and Saturday.
Early Friday, Cabral met with business leaders in Austin to promote President Bush's initiative to reform the Social Security system through privatized accounts. She said that young people bare the burden of the old system, which costs the country more than $750 million each year and is in dire need of reform.
Many students said they felt motivated by listening to Cabral relate her life experiences and the paths she took before being appointed by Bush as treasurer in 2004.
"Not only is she a Mexican-American, but she is a woman in a very high position in our U.S. government," said business junior Sara Meza, co-chair of the summit. "She has a very inspirational story because she started out like a lot of us."
For years, Cabral had worked in public administration to improve Latino representation in corporate employment, governance and other areas of mainstream American life.
She told students that one of the greatest challenges facing their generation is the low rate of Latino representation in colleges, which she said hovers around 2 percent while Latinos make up 14 percent of the population.
Her mother and father received no higher than an eighth-grade education but were determined to better the lot of her and her four siblings, she said.
"They had to find jobs that they could do with their hands and their backs - a lot of physical labor," Cabral said.
Cabral said that a high school math teacher made sure she went to college by talking to her father about the opportunities and helping her to receive the financial aid she needed to go.
"A lot of young people and teenagers that I was growing up with didn't live past those teenage years. They died of gangs, drugs, alcohol. And if they did [live] they ended up repeating their parents' example, having children too young, having no opportunity, maybe getting on welfare."
Ernesto Nieto, president of the National Hispanic Institute, spoke of generational challenges facing the Latino community. Nieto said his parents' generation reflected the earliest Latino immigrants, while his subscribed to an activist community that demanded equal rights.
This generation, he said, has more opportunity and power than ever.
Carlos Guerra, a well-known civil rights activist and San-Antonio Express News columnist, spoke to students on Saturday about his efforts to extend voting rights and work rights to Latinos.
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