Congressional Meet and Greet with Representative Maria Elvira Salazar (FL-27-R)

Maria Elvira Salazar was elected in November 2020 election to represent Florida’s 27th Congressional District, which includes all or parts of Miami, Miami Beach, Coral Gables, and Kendall. 

Representative Salazar was born in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood in 1961 shortly after her parents, Hector Salazar and Marta Bermudo, fled communist Cuba. She spent much of her childhood in Puerto Rico, where her father was a sports announcer in San Juan. The family returned to southern Florida when she was a teen. Seeking to follow in her father’s footsteps, Salazar earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Miami, and in 1995 earned a master’s degree in public administration at Harvard University. 

In 1984, Representative Salzar got her first job as a reporter for WLTV-Channel 23—the same Miami station where her father worked. Within a year, she was working full-time as a reporter for the Spanish International Network (SIN), the precursor of Univision. In 1988, Representative Salazar was tapped to co-anchor Noticiero Telemundo-CNN, a Spanish-speaking news program co-produced by Turner Broadcasting. She left after two years to become a correspondent with Univision in its Washington Bureau and three years later was working out of El Salvador as Telemundo’s senior correspondent in Central America. 

Representative Salazar resides in Miami with her two college-aged daughters and her husband. She is currently a regular guest on various local and national news programs.