By – LATimes.com – Photo: Associated Press.

Photo: Then U.S. Treasurer Romama Acosta Bañuelos, right, is flanked by security guards and friends who escort her away from demonstrators protesting what they claim was the Nixon administration’s attempt to destroy the farm worker’s union movement in 1972.

Treasury Secretary John Connally asked Romama Acosta Bañuelos after the meeting how she figured out so quickly what it took an economist with a machine to calculate. “In Mexico, we learned to do numbers in our head,” she replied. She had attended school only up to sixth grade.  It was that self-sufficient, entrepreneurial mentality Acosta Bañuelos learned as a young girl in rural Mexico that led President Nixon to appoint her as U.S. treasurer in 1971, the first Latina to hold that position and the highest ranking Mexican American appointee in the Nixon administration.

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