Katie Couric may have become the first woman to anchor a national evening news broadcast in 2006, but Univision’s Maria Elena Salinas has been co-anchoring one since 1987.

“Noticiero Univision,” the broadcast Salinas co-anchors with Jorge Ramos, had its best season ever in 2008-2009, averaging 2.4 million viewers each weeknight. And it continues to grow.

TVNewser recently caught up with Salinas for a very interesting mediabistro.com interview. In it, she told us the story of her career, which is also the story of Spanish-language news in the United States. Here’s an excerpt:

At the beginning, people saw Channel 34 and the few affiliates that we had at the time as, you know, these little low-power stations with low quality that only undocumented immigrants watched. It was very difficult to cover, for example a presidential election, because we’d always have to be explaining who we were: “Channel 30-what?” You know, people just had absolutely no idea who we were. People who came into the industry always saw Channel 34 and Spanish-language media as a stepping-stone to bigger and better things. [Latinos] figured this is where we might learn a little bit about the profession and then move on to, you know, real TV: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN then was beginning to make a dent or to be heard. And what happened is little by little Spanish-language media has grown so much that now it’s the other way around.

Read the rest here.