Born: 20 March 1925, United States
Died: 15 January 2018
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Romana Acosta, Romana Torres
This entry is reprinted in full with permission from the National Women’s History Museum (United States of America). All rights reserved.
In 1970, seeking to repay the work of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly in his election, President Richard Nixon picked Romana Acosta Bañuelos to the post of U.S. Treasurer. Bañuelos was born in Miami, Arizona, in 1925 to Mexican immigrants. After her family was deported in 1933 during the Great Depression, Bañuelos returned to the U.S. in 1943 and started her own tortilla factory in downtown Los Angeles. The rapid success of her tortilla factory led to creation of Ramona’s Mexican Products and in 1963, she founded the Pan-American National Bank in East Los Angeles to help struggling Latinos in the region.
Bañuelos was confirmed as the nation’s 34th treasurer, the first Latina in the position in U.S. history, on December 17th, 1971. Through her appointment, she became the highest-ranking Mexican-American in the government. She would lead the way for other Latinas, such as Katherine Ortega and Catalina Vásquez Villalpando, and more recently Rosie Rios, to assume the same position as treasurers of the United States.