Wedding Gown

For Anna Escobedo Cabral, United States Treasurer, that one person was her high school math teacher, Mr. Philip Lamm. Born and raised in California, Anna Cabral’s family, and the generations before them, had worked in the fields of the Santa Clara Valley. She was the oldest of 5 kids. Her father struggled to support her family after becoming disabled.

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At 16 years of age, Cabral decided to graduate high school early; she was a very good student. Her math teacher, Mr. Philip Lamm, told her that she should go to college. “He hand wrote the application. He told me that this was a better plan and found scholarship money for me to go to college.”

“When I got to college, suddenly everything changed for me. I realized that there is so much that you can do with your life. I grew up in a lot of neighborhoods that were poor. When I would go home, the people in my neighborhood were still doing the same things they were doing before I left for school. Some died early from drugs, alcohol or violence. It is a tragedy to let these things happen by accident. Young people need to be convinced that they have options, that they have a future. The dropout rate for Hispanics hovers at around 50%. The loss in human capital from this drop out rate is staggering. Nearly one in five people in the U.S. will Hispanic by the year 2025.”

Fast forward to spring, 2005. Now the U.S. Treasurer, Escobedo Cabral has a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Harvard University. She has been the Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Latino Initiatives, leading the institution’s effort to improve Latino representation in exhibits in all of its museums, research centers and the National Zoo. Prior to this position, Cabral was President and CEO of the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility (HACR), national non-profit organization which partners with Fortune 500 companies to increase Hispanic representation in corporate America.

From 1993 to 1999, Cabral she was Deputy Staff Director for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee under Chairman Orrin Hatch. She simultaneously served as Executive Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Republican Conference Task Force on Hispanic Affairs. Here, she managed a task force of 25 senators in their efforts to ensure that the needs of the Hispanic community are addressed by Congress.

Today, as she sits in her beautiful, spacious office in the Department of the Treasury, she is a spokeswoman for the Administration and for the Department of the Treasury on Presidential and department priorities. Hers is the second oldest position in the federal government. Her signature, along with that of the Secretary of the Treasury, is on many of the bills in your wallet. As U.S. Treasurer, Cabral works with the U.S. Mint on the design and introduction of new currency and the protection of currency from counterfeiting. Thanks to her collective efforts, you can look for a new $10 bill in late 2005, and new 20s and 100s in 2006.

A critical area of interest and involvement for her are her efforts to increase knowledge about financial literacy. In the aftermath of the hurricane disaster, this focus will be more important than perhaps at any time in our nation’s history. Her role and her voice in helping people understand how to rebuild their financial lives and offering the hand of the government to build a financial future is desperately needed.

As a Latina, she is extremely concerned about the need for Hispanics to become more integrated into the financial mainstream. “Nearly 40% of the Hispanic population of this country does not have bank accounts. We have to create ways for these people to develop trust, understand and participate in basic banking and financial services. We have to help people understand that they don’t have to stand in lines to buy a money order or a check. People have to know how to develop credit history, purchase a home and how they can achieve the American dream. She Adds, ‘The importance of saving, building and using credit is crucial to Hispanics, but also important to all Americans across the board.”

The difficulties of her childhood and the pain that poverty causes so many families and communities am circumstances and feelings that she knows far too well. Cabral remembers her father’s disability and her family’s struggle, “Despite his disability, there were 7 mouths to feed. He had to find other ways to earn a living. My mother worked several jobs. I remember as a little girl going with my father as he pulled metal parts and aluminum from the streets to sell. We had to move to a small house on the wrong side of the tracks.”