ECHAVESTE WITHDRAWS FROM MEXICO AMBASSADORSHIP

Dallas Morning News 
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s choice to be U.S. ambassador to Mexico has withdrawn from consideration.

The White House says Maria Echaveste cites a prolonged confirmation process as well as her family’s best interests.Obama nominated Echaveste last September. She had yet to receive a confirmation hearing in the Senate.
A graduate of Stanford University and Berkeley Law School, Echaveste was deputy chief of staff and a presidential assistant during the Clinton administration. When Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state, she appointed Echaveste a special representative to Bolivia.
Echaveste is a partner in the consulting firm Nueva Vista Group in San Francisco. A native of Texas who grew up in California, Echaveste would have been the first American woman to be ambassador to Mexico.
Her withdrawal was first reported by Politico.
Echaveste, the oldest of her family’s seven children, was born May 31, 1954, in Harlingen, Texas, where her parents lived as part of the bracero program that brought Mexicans to the United States to work in the fields. They moved to Clovis in California’s San Joaquin Valley when Echeveste was an infant and to Oxnard in Southern California when she was 12.
According to AllGov.com, "Beginning when she was eight years old, with her parents and her siblings, she harvested cotton, grapes, figs, peaches, tomatoes, strawberries and carrots.
Of this period she recalled telling her mother, “It's too early, Mama, to get up, the sun's not even up. When can we take a break, Mama, I'm so tired.” She also said, “Picking tomatoes was the worst, because you smelled so bad afterwards. I know we were out there because my family needed the money. But there is something wrong about children working when they're tired and hungry and cold or hot.”
(Our thanks to one of our three readers who brought this story to our attention. Anonymous, AKA "El Coyote.")