by Jackie Guzmán
(Sixth in a series profiling leaders of major national Hispanic organizations).
SKETCHBOX: In 1977, five Congress members comprised the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The very next year they held a small dinner to benefit Latino youth.
The event foreshadowed a vision shared by its members to form a separate, nonpartisan educational organization to encourage young people to enter the public-policy arena. Today, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute is the nation’s premier Hispanic policy leadership development group, providing scholarships, internships and fellowships to college-age students, graduates and young professionals.
Each fall since 1980, it hosts a series of events — a public policy conference, annual gala, comedy night — considered in Washington as the kick-off to National Hispanic Heritage Month. I sat down with Esther Aguilera, CHCI’s president and chief executive officer, at a conference table at its headquarters. Paintings of the early chairmen of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute lined the room’s walls. The responsibility for their legacy now converges on this one person.
PROFILE: To Esther Aguilera, meeting challenges in the public-policy arena is about anticipating them and staying ahead of the curve.
She came to this understanding the long way. Born in Jalisco, Mexico, she migrated to the United States in 1972 at age 4 with her mother, Aurora, and five siblings. They came to reunite with her father, Adolfo, who was working as a landscape laborer. He began filing petitions to legalize their stay, a process that would take 15 years.
They rented a two-bedroom house in San Fernando, Calif. Mother Aurora found a job as a garment worker. “My parents struggled to put food on the table,” Aguilera recalls.
She remembers herself entering college in a competitive, white world trapped by low self-esteem “something I had to conquer.”
At Occidental College in Los Angeles, she studied public policy and began her involvement, finding an internship with the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. “I met a lot of people in policy-making positions who didn’t know the Latino experience. I wanted to make sure a voice of working-poor Latinos was part of what they heard.”
In 1990 she obtained her first Washington, D.C., job as a public-policy analyst with the National Council of La Raza, now the nation’s largest Hispanic advocacy body.
In 1993, she became the executive director of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Her responsibilities included building relationships with Congress, the White House and the community constituents it served.
“There and working with the private sector I honed a lot of skills and ideas on how we could progress as a community,” she says.
In 1998, Aguilera was appointed senior advisor to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and executive director of the Department of Energy’s small business office. Under Richardson, she developed senior policy recommendations leading to implementation of a national Hispanic outreach program and launched DOE’s first small business conference, now an annual event.
In 2004, she became CHCI’s president. After the CHCI board selected the soft-spoken, modest Aguilera from a deep, rich pool of candidates, she quickly proved she was meant for the job.
She brought with her the decision-making experience from other sectors where she had worked. With invisible wisdom, she applies that understanding to her executive responsibilities and to teaching the leadership skills that the CHCI experience imbues in the hundreds of interns it brings regularly to Washington’s inner circles.
Overseeing the organization and its growing budget — over $6 million — is satisfying, she admits. She views it as a measure on how CHCI impacts the lives of tomorrow’s leaders who will build their own legacies.
Aguilera has become a featured speaker at numerous Latino and other national conferences and forums, including Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
SOAPBOX: Aguilera confides that she has achieved more than her wildest dreams ever conjured.
She sidesteps political debates, states her view unambiguously that while leaders must always stay ahead of the curve, they need to maintain a balance between social drive and a personal life. Early in her career she was a workaholic and now her precious hours include “quality time” with her husband and two children. “When I come home, I focus on them, not work or other distractions,” she tells me.
That balance may be the antithesis of what formal education and early careerists drum into each other, especially when starting out. Women, often professional ones, understand the multiple expectations they have of themselves and believe are expected of them.
Yet, there’s another connecting element, Esther Aguilera is telling us: character building is not an on-the-job preparation. Her inventory includes home values such as maintaining a memory about where she came from.
She talks with great admiration of her mother, Aurora, who encouraged her and her five siblings to seek higher education. Aguilera illustrates this, remembering the first time her mother, attended a CHCI gala last year. “She was astounded. She had never attended such an elegant event.”
Or is it the other way around? A family’s pathfinder children seek a way though the obstacles and at the most elegant event you are introducing your family to your place beyond those hurdles.
A SPECIAL INFLUENCE: “My elder sister Victoria and my mother are my inspirations. I am so proud of my mother’s courage and how far she has come, having experienced so much struggle. Victoria blazed a path that I followed.”
As the daughter of parents with humble stations in life but grand visions for their children, Aguilera comments that she has achieved far more than the American Dream. She expresses great pride that her five siblings have professional careers; one a doctor, three engineers and one a math/computer teacher.
“After we all went to college, my oldest brother and sister bought the family house and we all chipped in,” she says. For the Aguileras, “family” doesn’t end with childhood.
(Jackie Guzmán is a reporter with Hispanic Link News Service in Washington, D.C.) ©2008
