When her family immigrated to the United States, Jasmin Chavez Cruz ’19 was just 3 years old. Born in El Salvador, she and her family had a long road ahead of them. “I became a permanent resident when I was 7 or so, and then a U.S. citizen through my dad,” she says.
Since then, she has made every effort to leverage the power that comes with that designation and, once of legal age, her right to vote — and to help others find and live into their power, too. “I didn’t have that privilege to vote right away, so I don’t take it for granted today,” says Chavez Cruz, who is now a confidential assistant for the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics (“The White House Hispanic Initiative”) and the Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, appointed by the Biden-Harris administration.
“In high school, I remember having a counselor who always told me that I wasn’t going to go to college,” Chavez Cruz says. “I always had people who said ‘no.’ Our generation needs to hear more ‘yes.’ They need to hear and believe that it’s possible. They need to hear that the sky is the limit. They need to see people who look like them in roles like mine, in rooms I am honored to be in, so that they know it’s possible for them, too.”
Since joining the administration in September 2022, Chavez Cruz has been working to open doors for other young people with backgrounds like her own, with a special emphasis on fellow Latinas — including several from McDaniel College.
Though she’s only been out of college for five years, Chavez Cruz began forging her path in civic engagement and public service before she even set foot on the Hill — the one in Westminster or the one in Washington, D.C.
Her passion for lobbying began more than a decade ago: “I was in high school in 2014, and I was advocating for positive policies that impact the immigrant community in Virginia,” she says. “I realized that as a young person, it was vital for me to use my voice and share our stories with our elected officials. I was surprised that they took the time to listen to our stories. They appreciated knowing about different issues that impact our community directly.”
Once she enrolled at McDaniel, she found new ways to get involved in the community, including leading a new League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) collegiate council on campus, holding voter registration drives, hosting election debate watch parties, and more. In 2018, while still a student, Chavez Cruz was named Woman of the Year by LULAC.
She never could have predicted it at the time, but Chavez Cruz is continuing to work on projects and initiatives that she’s passionate about — and getting paid for it. “Sometimes, I have to pinch myself because I’m still just in disbelief that this is happening, that I get to be in these important spaces, meet incredible public servants, and collaborate with stakeholders who are on the ground doing the work that I have been doing since I was in high school,” she says.
It wasn’t a perfectly linear path to get there, but Chavez Cruz has always found a way to her next great opportunity with a clear vision of her passion and her goals.
After graduating in 2019, Chavez Cruz spent about a year and a half at a law firm as an immigration paralegal. Like many other people, the onset of the pandemic in 2020 made Chavez Cruz think about her priorities. She ended up leaving her job as a paralegal and going to work for AARP as a legal administrative associate.
“AARP introduced me to a new space — a space focused on advocating for the elderly,” she says. “In my portfolio specifically, I connected Latino seniors to resources at the height of the pandemic and worked with the outreach committee to collaborate on ways we could reach out to even more seniors. I had the best colleagues and best Latina boss I’ve had so far in my career.”
After a year and a half there, Chavez Cruz realized she wanted to move away from the legal side and toward public policy work instead. She ended up at what was always a dream employer for her: Dewey Square Group, which helps “businesses, nonprofits, campaigns, and causes achieve their public affairs goals — whether they be favorable legislative or policy outcomes, successful advocacy efforts, community-based consumer marketing, or high-profile awareness campaigns.”
As a technology and telecommunications policy associate, Chavez Cruz managed the multicultural portfolio for the firm’s technology clients, some of which were Fortune 500 companies.
“Honestly, it was my dream job,” Chavez Cruz says, which made leaving after only six months a little bittersweet. But when she was attending the LULAC convention in Puerto Rico in 2022, she ran into Melody Gonzales, a Latina leader she had worked with during the Biden campaign in 2020. She had an offer she simply couldn’t turn down.
“Melody had just been appointed executive director of the White House Hispanic Initiative and she approached me to ask if I’d be interested in working under her leadership,” Chavez Cruz says. “I had always wanted to work for that office, especially after interning there in college during my freshman year. I decided to go for it and was onboarded within a month. I started during Hispanic Heritage Month in September 2022.”
No day is ever the same for Chavez Cruz, but that means she’s never bored. In her role, she works to organize President’s Advisory Commission for Hispanics meetings; assists with planning and executing national events; manages the communications strategy; develops talking points for speaker memos and slide decks; serves as the speaker liaison for national events; conducts research; and leads scheduling for two directors. Additionally, she staffs her directors, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona when needed, and briefings hosted by the White House’s Office of Public Engagement.
Her role also means she staffs the Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, work that has become increasingly important since the conflict in Palestine intensified. “Staffing two such important offices is a balancing act, but it’s important work,” she says. “That’s what keeps me going.”
While she had served as Virginia state director for LULAC starting in 2020, Chavez Cruz found herself having to step down from that position this past fall as the crisis in the Middle East ramped up and her professional priorities needed to shift.
“At the center, we work to combat antisemitism and islamophobia in K-12 and higher education, so we’re really taking the lead on that issue right now,” Chavez Cruz says. “My partner, Eli Jaffe ’19, is Jewish, and I know that someday when we have our Jewish-Latino kids, I’m going to be telling them about the work I did in this office during this critical time.”
“The White House Hispanic Initiative is a very public-facing office, and we really focus on our public engagement strategy,” Chavez Cruz says. “Along with our directors going into the community, I also get to go into the community and speak.”
So far in her role, she’s served as a keynote speaker for graduations, the Virginia Latino Higher Education Network, the College Advising Corps, the Hispanic Leadership Alliance, and the Virginia College Access Network, among others. Chavez Cruz is such a compelling speaker that her bosses often joke with her about one of her speaking engagements a few months into her role. “It was for the Virginia Latino Higher Education Network, and they always say, ‘We came and we staffed Jasmin, the daughter of Virginia. She had a whole line of students who wanted to talk to her and take pictures with her after her address,’” Chavez Cruz says.
“My boss loves sending me out into the field because she says that there’s no one else that really connects with the students more than a young person, someone who has the same background and has been in their shoes fairly recently,” she says.
After all, Chavez Cruz knows what it is like to have to assist your parents in a variety of ways when you grow up in an immigrant household.
“I know that if I use my voice, I’m not just representing myself but I’m representing a whole community of people and immigrants whose voices are typically not heard,” Chavez Cruz says. “I don’t want to see my community suffer anymore. I don’t want to see any more pain.”
Having been told “no” so often while growing up about what opportunities were available to her, Chavez Cruz knows that she wants to serve as a mentor to other young Latinas to show them that they can be a part of history, too.
The White House’s Office of Public Engagement hosted a first-generation student event. They brought in “First Gen” author Alejandra Campoverdi as well as a panel of first-gen speakers. Several White House Initiatives were represented on the panel, including the Hispanic Initiative, the Black Americans Initiative, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Initiative, and the Asian American, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders Initiative.
Bringing in current college students was an opportunity to provide empowerment and share more about what the administration is doing to support students. When Chavez Cruz was asked to help identify five students from Maryland to attend the November event, she knew immediately that she wanted the names on that list to be McDaniel students.
For about a year prior, she had been serving as a mentor to Alondra Labastida Campos, a junior Political Science and Spanish major at McDaniel — the same course of study Chavez Cruz completed on the Hill.
“Being a first-generation student, it is very difficult to find spaces in which I feel welcomed and included, as well as finding a good fit for a mentor that will also be able to connect with me on a deeper level,” Labastida Campos says. “Jasmin has stepped up as a mentor not only for me but also the growing Latinx community on our campus by making sure to open doors to experiences that will benefit us in the long run. The Hispano-Latinx community is grateful to be guided by such an amazing and trailblazing mentor like her.”
Labastida Campos helped Chavez Cruz identify others to invite to the event and the McDaniel contingent showed up strong, represented by senior Estefania Garcia-Torres, junior Cindy Gabriela Rivera, and senior Anna Elizabeth Durda.
“The students left really inspired. I never had that experience. I was never invited to a White House briefing as a student,” Chavez Cruz says. “More students should have these opportunities. I would’ve put all the first-gen students from McDaniel in that room if I could have. If students can envision themselves in certain spaces, they start to believe they can get there, too.”
While she can’t predict where she will be after this year’s presidential election, Chavez Cruz knows one thing: “I am eternally grateful to have been part of this administration that has been so diverse and so focused on equity, and with the faith-based work, I’m always going to remember the role I played in supporting our students in K-12 and higher ed institutions. A lot of history has been made in the time that I’ve been here.”
Whether it’s due to an administration change in January or in another four years, Chavez Cruz is pretty sure her next move is getting her master’s degree in public policy. “Even though I’m not a fan of economics, we’re going to make it happen. We’re going to do it.”
The ultimate goal? Running for public office someday.
Time will tell if Chavez Cruz ends up in public office or even back in the White House down the line, but she has one very supportive fellow Green Terror by her side to cheer her on along the way: “My boyfriend, Eli, always says to me, ‘If you ever want to remember how powerful you are, just look at yourself in that red suit next to Vice President Kamala Harris.’
“I’m really happy because I just feel like my life has purpose every day,” she says. “I’m doing exactly what I’ve always wanted to do.”
In 2023, Chavez Cruz was named the recipient of the McDaniel College Alumni Association’s Young Alumni Award, an honor she calls “a full-circle moment.”
“The awards dinner was one of the best days of my life because it was a night that recognized me for doing what I do best, what I love to do, and for doing it in service of my community,” says Chavez Cruz, a member of the Alumni Association’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee.
“I’m so grateful that I had such a good network at McDaniel that was so supportive from the beginning,” Chavez Cruz says. “If I didn’t have that network, I don’t know where I would be today. I attribute a lot of my leadership and professional development and success to faculty and staff members who have supported me since day one and never stopped believing in me.”