Rosa Luz Alegría

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Rosa Luz Alegría Escamilla (born 1949) is a Mexican physicist who was the first woman to serve in the Mexican Executive Cabinet.

Alegría studied physics in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). During her time at the University she got involved with UNAM's Consejo General de Huelga ("General Strike Council", CGH) and with the now-defunct Mexican Communist Party (PCM).

During Luis Echeverría's presidency she started to work in the public service. President José López Portillo appointed her under-secretary of planning and budget (Subsecretaria de Programación y Presupuesto) and later, on August 13, 1980, she was appointed Secretary of Tourism, becoming the first female Secretary of State in Mexico.

Alegria's appointment as Secretary of State occurred in an administration famous for nepotism. The President bought a $2 million mansion for her as his mistress.^[1]^[2]

Despite this, Alegría created a positive role model for Mexican women. Trained in mathematics and physics, she was a pioneer in the early studies of applied cybernetics, having studied the subject in Paris, France in the late 1960s. Studies in cybernetics were to become the parent science of today's computer software engineering. In the difficult role of first woman appointed to head a cabinet ministry, she contributed enormously to the involvement of other women in government, as she gathered around her the support of a number of professional peers, including writer, diplomat, and politician Amalia González Caballero de Castillo Ledón, her advisor, who became the first woman to occupy an under-secretariat in Mexico.

Alegría debunked the myth of Hispanic women playing secondary roles or being highlighted simply as wives and mistresses, a role nonetheless attributed to her as she was married to a president’s son, whose fame she exceeded, and was involved romantically with another head of state. Her works remain unquestionably valuable, as Alegría created, from scratch, the education enhancement system called Centro para el Estudio de Medios y Procedimientos Avanzados para la Educacion ("Center for the Study of Advanced Media and Procedures for Education", CEMPAE), an innovative forerunner of today's computerized distance and online education. CEMPAE broke ground in revising the Libro de Texto, the textbook freely distributed in Mexico’s public schools that had not been changed since the end of the Mexican Revolution.

Alegría was also responsible for the first network of evaluation (matrices de evaluación), overlooking all units of the executive branch and providing each one of them with an analytic tool to survey governmental expenditure and completion of programs.

In the Ministry of Tourism, she redirected the focus of traditional practices, and stimulated social and ecotourism as an alternative to the more traditional, beach-destined form of tourism. She initiated several development programs that included domestic travel as a benefit attached to other work benefits. Her name is often linked to the first woman who came close to running for the presidency of Mexico in 1981. Her political career ended as neoliberalism became the dominant force on the Mexican political scene.

[edit] Sources and notes

^ Riding, Alan. Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, Vintage (reprinted 1989), ISBN 0679724419 - p.128
^ José López Portillo (obituary), The Economist, March 4, 2004 accessed at [1] March 27, 2007