Maria Robles Meier: The Senate Staffer Getting More Minorities on the Pipeline to Power

*This piece is from a National Journal series on the 20 most powerful women staffers on Capitol Hill. We like to highlight stories about Latin@s who push boundaries, to make their work known to a wider audience. Maria Robles Meier is the director of the Senate Democratic Diversity Initiative in Minority Leader Harry Reid’s office. VL

By Brian Resnick, National Journal

In the early 1990s, when Maria Robles Meier first moved to Washington, she was told something she’d never forget. The words were from a fellow Latina who worked at a national Hispanic organization, and they were brutal.

“I remember her telling me that I had nothing to offer the Hill, telling me that I was being unrealistic,” says Meier, now a senior Senate adviser.

Meier was a recent Stanford University graduate navigating the Washington networking game from scratch: She couldn’t afford an unpaid Hill internship while in college, and she came to D.C. without a job. All she wanted was some career advice; she walked home from the meeting in tears.

“If I didn’t have a message when I came back calling me in for an interview [for a job in the Senate], I probably would have got on a plane and gone home,” she says.

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[Photo by Chet Susslin, courtesy of The National Journal]