ESTHER AGUILERA MEASURES HER SUCCESS WITH A FAMILY YARDSTICK

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, ...