Teresa Ruiz is the first Latina to serve in the New Jersey State Senate.

Washington -- Latina women slowly but surely are making their presence known on the American political scene thanks in part to programs that encourage them to do so.

This year the Elección Latina program attracted about 40 Hispanic women to Rutgers University in New Jersey to learn more about how to campaign for political office or position themselves for a political appointment.

Elección Latina was added five years ago to Ready to Run: Campaign Training for Women, a nonpartisan program offered each year by the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers.

According to Ready to Run program coordinators, minority women who are successful in politics are the greatest inspiration to other minority women considering such an endeavor.

Hispanics now account for nearly 13 percent of the total U.S. population. According to CAWP, of the 86 women serving in the 110th Congress, seven are Latina; of the 1,741 women state legislators nationwide, 75 are Latina.

INSPIRING WOMEN

“I have never run for political office and I never will. It doesn’t suit my personality,” Zulima Farber told America.gov at the 2008 Elección Latina session held March 14. “But I do want to encourage other women to do that.”

Farber has not been elected to office, but she has been appointed to political posts -- another goal of Elección Latina.

Farber, of Cuban descent, is the former attorney general of New Jersey and the first Latina to serve as acting governor of New Jersey, having been appointed to that position in 2006 by New Jersey Governor John Corzine when he and some other state officials were out of the state.

Now an attorney with the law firm Lowenstein Sandler in New Jersey, Farber said the success of programs like Elección Latina cannot be measured from year to year.

“This is incremental change,” Farber told America.gov. “I think having our first Hispanic woman [Teresa Ruiz] in the New Jersey Senate is a tremendous milestone. … So we are very happy with the success so far, but we recognize that more needs to be done.”

Gloria Soto (left) and Zulima Farber champion greater political participation for Latinas.

Gloria E. Soto, who works as the executive director of government affairs at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, is the current chair and one of the founders of Latinas United for Political Empowerment (LUPE), one of the Hispanic activist groups that partnered with CAWP to host Elección Latina.

“We Latinas come from all different countries,” she told America.gov. “But whether you come from Puerto Rico or Cuba or Panama or Colombia, I think the issues to women are similar: health care, education, employment opportunities.”

Born in Puerto Rico, Soto said women of her generation had to subordinate their personal ambitions and defer to the men in their families. “That changed over a period of time,” she said. “We have women who are second generation; it’s not as much an issue to them.”

Soto says she measures success of programs like Elección Latina by how many women participate, how many are first-time participants, how many chose to run for political office and how many win.

SOME THINGS ARE GETTING EASIER FOR WOMEN

It is becoming easier for women with children to combine family life with a political career, according to Gloria Montealegre, who works as the deputy press secretary for Corzine.

“I think women now can negotiate better hours and better salary for themselves and we’ve come a long way in just these 30 years,” she told America.gov. Her message to women: “You don’t have to choose one or the other now; you can do both.”

Montealegre calls here current job “wonderful,” but things were not as wonderful when she started her career in the early 1980s as the first Latina on-air television reporter for Channel 47, a precursor to Telemundo in New Jersey. In the beginning, she worked 16 hours a day for nearly five years, she says.

“It was a huge responsibility, but one that I loved,” Montealegre told America.gov. But at that time, she said, “being a woman in television was really hard. Producers didn’t understand that you had a family and so they didn’t care.”

Montealegre quit her television job to raise her two children, but later landed her job in the governor’s office.

“I’m enjoying this to no end,” she said of her duties, which entail dealing with local and international ethnic media for the governor. “I love doing what I’m doing.”