With such accomplishments, it’s hard to believe that Cabral almost didn’t go to college or even leave her native California.

Cabral’s involvement in the community — and her awareness of the struggles it faces — stems back decades, even generations. Her grandfather, Alfred Escobedo, came to the United States as a young man and at one point participated in the bracero program, which brought millions of Mexican laborers to the country between 1942 and 1964 to aid the economy in replacing workers sent to fight in World War II.

The eldest of five children, Anna was born in San Bernadino, Calif., in 1959 into a third-generation farm-worker family. She recalls laboring as a farm worker early in her life — though only for brief periods of time. “My father really tried hard to get us out of the stream,” she says. “We worked in their fields [only] to help other family members.”

Due to her farm-worker background and her parents’ low level of education, Cabral lived all over California as a young child. “My father dropped out of school in the ninth grade, and my mother dropped out around the same time,” Cabral says.

In order for her father to work, he had to go where work was; early on he worked at the fields, and later he was able to get a job as a garbage collector. “I once tried to count the number of times I changed elementary schools,” she says. “It was well past 20, so I stopped counting.”

The trials Cabral faced instilled in her a strong sense of family responsibility. While her parents worked to make ends meet, Cabral was the primary caretaker for her younger siblings. “Sometimes people who looked at us from the outside would say that I really functioned as a contemporary to my parents instead of a child. They counted on me to do pretty much anything they needed to make everything work,” she says. “I really wasn’t a child but a co-parent.”

Cabral doesn’t recall having lavish dreams of what she wanted to become when she grew up; instead her dreams were humble and family-oriented. “My dreams as a child were to be in a position where I could make sure we all had enough to eat, had a safe place to live, and that we were together,” she says. “They didn’t really take on any kind of structure partly because my parents did not have the ability to share with me the options.”

It wasn’t until later that aspirations began to take hold. Cabral excelled at school, and by the time she was 16 she had taken enough summer classes to be able to graduate early. By then, she was already working just to help keep the family afloat. Her mother had been very ill, and her father was unable to seek better employment — due to his spinal disabilities, employers would turn him away — and was forced to earn a living by going house to house and gathering neighbors’ metal trash. The children would help their father, and Anna brought home a couple of hundred dollars a month to supplement her father’s equally meager income so there would be food on the table. With the Cabral family facing so many hardships, the high school had taken up a collection to help them out.

Cabral recalls that, at the time, her plan was to get a full-time job upon her early graduation. But life took a different course. A high school math teacher named Philip Lamm found out she was graduating early and approached her about going to college. “I hadn’t even though about it,” says Cabral. “I could never afford it. I never imagined it.”

But Lamm insisted, assuring the young Cabral that in the long run a college degree would make the greatest difference in her ability to help her family. He went so far as to fill out her applications for her and to speak with her parents to convince them that college was the best option for their daughter. He worked with Cabral to get fee waivers for college applications and tests, and to fill out scholarship applications.

All the hard work paid off. Cabral received a full scholarship to the University of California at Santa Cruz. “At that point, the whole world opened up,” Cabral says. “It was amazing. You meet people with ideas, objectives, goals and dreams … and you begin to think that maybe you can have some of your own.”

Away from home and her family for the first time, Cabral reveled in her newfound possibilities and pursued an academic track centered on public policy. “Because I was raised with such a great sense of responsibility and because in the neighborhoods where I grew up, people didn’t really have a lot of opportunities, I realized that that was a function not so much of their ability but rather their lack of exposure to those opportunities,” she says. “I started to focus in on … services that provide greater opportunity and exposure to people and decided that the focus of my life would be how I would ensure that other people learn about those opportunities regardless of their economic situation or circumstances.”

Two years into UC Santa Cruz, life took another interesting turn for Cabral. She met her soon-to-be husband, Víctor, who was attending law school at UC Davis. She credits him with instilling in her the ability to dream big and believe in herself. Shortly after they met, Cabral found herself transferring to UC Davis. “Before we knew it, I got married and starting having children.”

By the time she graduated in 1987, Cabral was the mother of four. But motherhood did not stop her educational pursuits. She applied to various graduate and law schools. Ultimately, she enrolled in a joint-degree program through Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

With children and husband in tow, Cabral headed to Harvard in Massachusetts. “It was a blast because the kids used to go to class with me. They were very young, and they would participate in the lectures,” Cabral laughs.

Halfway into the program, Cabral decided to defer law school to attend to the needs of her children, the eldest of whom was 10 years old at the time. She was able to sever the degree programs and graduate with a master’s in public administration from Harvard in 1990. She deferred law school for five consecutive years but ended up not returning, choosing instead to continue her focus on her family

What brought her to the nation’s capital initially wasn’t a job offer for her but for her husband. With a post awaiting Víctor at the Department of Justice, the Cabral clan picked up and moved to Washington, D.C. It was only a matter of time before Cabral, who had managed her husband’s law firm in California, began entertaining offers from various area law firms.

But in the end Cabral found her place on Capitol Hill, netting the coveted position of executive staff director for the U.S. Senate Republican Task Force on Hispanic Affairs in 1991 — a post offered to her by Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. In this position, she was responsible for building a coalition of senators who were interested in addressing issues of concern to the Latino community, helping them to develop stronger relationships with their local Latino communities and to integrate that voice into public policy and legislation. “It was particularly important because at that point, most people had assumed that the Latino community was largely tied to Democratic circles and that maybe they were unreachable — or that a lot of Republican senators did not know how to reach out,” says Cabral.

After nine years on the Hill, Cabral left the marble halls of Congress to head up HACR. “I really wanted to get back into the grass roots to the extent that I could,” she says. “I also believe that, while government can be very helpful, a great deal of the solutions to the issues that confront the Latino community are found in the community itself and in potential partnerships between business, government and community.”

As HACR president, Cabral advanced its mission of ensuring the inclusion of Hispanics in corporate America at a level that mirrors the group’s economic power. Cabral managed a coalition of 10 national organizations, among them the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Together, coalition partners forged partnerships with Fortune 500 and 1000 companies to promote the inclusion of Latinos in four key areas: governance, procurement, employment and philanthropy.

During her four-year tenure at HACR, Cabral launched several initiatives. Among them was a partnership with Harvard Business School to increase training for Hispanic business leaders and enhance their performance on Fortune 500 boards.

In 2003, Cabral’s life took yet another unexpected turn. The Smithsonian was looking for a director to lead its Center for Latino Initiatives in building a pan-institutional effort — and they found that director in Cabral. In her new venture, Cabral was responsible for promoting an understanding and appreciation of Latino culture and arts through the institution’s numerous museums, exhibitions and departments. “Although I had no art-specific background, through my efforts at HACR I was able to build collaborative partnerships that produced improvements,” she says.

It was an important post, and Cabral knew it; she was dedicated to the Center’s mission. “The Smithsonian really defines for the world through its museums and complexes what it is be American. If Latinos are not properly represented in that picture of what it is to be American, then I think that both Latinos and the general public are not served properly. They end up with a distorted perception.”

Shortly after joining the Smithsonian, Cabral began having discussions with the White House about the position of U.S. treasurer. In July 2004, she was officially nominated. When she found out her name was in circulation, she remembers being elated and a little nervous. Her family — especially her children — was also excited. “They were more thrilled than you would have imagined,” she says. “You spend your whole life with children expecting you’re going to be very proud of them, and when they surprise you by telling you that they are very proud of you and you can see it in their eyes and in their hearts, it’s a tearjerker.”

She is humble and full of thanks for such an opportunity. “I am very grateful to the president for his confidence and trust,” Cabral says. “I am also grateful for the opportunity to honor my parents, grandparents, husband and children by adding their surnames as a lasting legacy to those few individuals whose signatures have appeared on our nation’s currency.”

More than a quarter century after she almost didn’t make it to college, Cabral is now the highest-ranking Latina in the Bush administration. In her newest role, she is tasked with offering advice to the secretary of the treasury on coinage and currency issues. She also serves as one of the department’s principal advisors and spokespersons in the areas of Social Security reform and financial education.

Cabral’s success and passion for public service has not stayed within the bounds of her own professional career; two of her children now also work for the government. In fact, one of them, Viana, works on the Senate Judiciary Committee just as her mother once did. The other, Raquel, works at the Department of Energy, and the youngest two — Catalina and Victor Christopher — are attending college.

Cabral explains that she instilled in her children the belief that they could advance through life by taking advantage of the opportunities presented to them and that they are expected to use their gifts and talents to serve others. “We had to give up a lot to live in Washington, D.C., but one of the things that you benefit from is that you are suddenly able to expose your children to the enormous opportunities that exist,” she says.

As if that were not enough, Cabral is also fulfilling a longtime dream — one that goes back a decade: In 2003, Cabral enrolled in the law school at the George Mason University in Virginia. Her mother, who returned to school to earn her diploma at 52, serves as Cabral’s inspiration.

“You don’t give up on your dreams,” Cabral says, “but sometimes they take awhile.”